TEODOR BURADA (b. October 15, 1839 - d. 1923), folklorist, ethnographer, prestigious name in the history of music, discoverer of folk lament

An unstamped pilgrim tirelessly traversed, between the years 1878-1900, all the lands in the world where the Romanian language was spoken or had been spoken in the past, that is, where the Romanians were. He did it with love, passion and dedication, as no one else has done until today, not even with his mind, as it seems.

This was Teodor T. Burada (1839-1923) from Iasi, a versatile intellectual, well-known musician, jurist, folklorist and ethnographer, no less a historian and literate, animator of the Romanian theater.

Taking his violin in his undivided hand, T. Burada started hiking each time to another province of the "kingdom of the Romanian language". Through each city he gave concerts of selected, cult music. In the villages, however, among the Romani brothers everywhere, he was by no means shy to be a choir fiddler, with his skill in popular melos. Thus, he quickly established the necessary communication with those of the same race. He communicates songs from the country, taking at the same time specific Romanian ones on the violin strings or on notation sheets. However, he did not bring only songs from where he traveled, but carried with him entire "baggage" of folklore and ethnographic treasures: ballads, wedding songs, laments: descriptions of costumes, houses, way of life; of customs practiced in different circumstances; lexicon proving the unity of the language. He also had the advantage of knowing foreign languages, including Greek and even Turkish. He did not neglect to collect raboj notches, supposed to have been the writing of the Dacians. Old folklore notations, they were in any case.

T. Burada armed himself in advance with the specialized literature in question, ensured his scientific information base and then went on the road or proceeded to write about Romanians everywhere. He had gone across the Prut in 1878, then to Transylvania and then to Dobrogea. As a result of this, the latter produced the first folklore research of a monographic type. He then inaugurated the series of more distant journeys.

In 1882 T. Burada goes to Mount Athos. From there, he undertakes a folklore research trip in Macedonia, among the Aromanians. Showing from some monks the existence of Romanians in Kherson governorate in Russia, here is T. Burada who arrived there in 1883.

In the fall of 1890, he made a trip through the villages of the Istro-Romanians, those so isolated in the extreme west of the Balkan Peninsula. A year later, he moves to the nearby island of Veglia (Krk), where he finds traces of the Romanian language and traditions. In 1892 he settled in Bithynia (Asia Minor), among the descendants of the Aromanians settled there in the distant past. For another year, T. Burada travels "to the Romans from Moravia", as he put it; in fact, but at the pronounced vestiges of everything that was once Romanian and became Slavized in the region still called Moravian Wallachia. The second layer of ancient culture, the Vlach one, as the Czech author of our time, Milan Kundera, in exile, writes. Immediately, in the summer of 1894, our traveler is on the trail of the Romanian population from the Polish Carpathians, specifically in the Szczecin region. He does not want to miss the great Slavic exhibition in Prague (1895), with a special section of the Vlachs from Moravia, which T. Burada studies and then writes extensively about it. He returned in 1897 again to the western Balkans, researching on the spot the Romanians in Croatia, the Kraina (border) of Croatia and Dalmatia.

The industrious pilgrim did not leave any of his 17 journeys in total without a detailed written account. These descriptions were not, as I mentioned, simple reports, but comprehensive studies, all together making up an inventory of Romanianism everywhere, at the respective date. These, 20 in number, were published between 1880-1915 in the magazines: Archive, Convorbiri Literare, Macedonia, (the newspaper) Romanul, the Bulletin of the Geographical Society, the Annales of the Romanian Academy, the Archeology, History and Folklore Bulletin. Six of these writings deal in particular with Macedonian-Romanians, supplemented by wider studies on Romanian schools in Macedonia, another on them in all of European Turkey (1890). Other descriptions refer to different groups of Romans whom the author did not know directly, but wanted to signal their existence, such as: Romans from Galicia, from Schlezwig-Hollstein, even from Arabia.

Like any journey, those of T. Burada especially could not be without mishaps, including arrests. Worldly T. Burada did not neglect to describe such moments.

To read all these accounts about the world of Romanians from everywhere, to get to know the treasure of the Danites and their folklore, to know their dialects often penetrated deeply into the speech of the neighboring allogeneic elements - truly as interesting as possible and at the same time instructive for all those whose sea Their homeland is the Romanian people everywhere. These writings of the great Romanian pilgrim should be republished in corpore.

Undeniably, T. Burada has done well for Romanianism. With sadness we have to say that if we, and of course any Romanian, believe this, the holders of the personnel files of all those who were hardworking on such a national field and in such a mine of the treasures of popular tradition could not think the same way. That is why I had met the daughter of the great Romanianist T. Burada, a simple book handler at a library, degraded there for "restructuring". This is only for the reason that the dance was on the list with "nomina odiosa" (for the communists), if the disposers of fate will be "swallowed" and this Latin expression. It is more certain that the Russian word "Nepodobnia" (inappropriate-enemy) will have been written on the label of the file.

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Created: Sunday, April 09, 2023; Last Updated: Monday, April 24, 2023
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