“The Memory of the Romanian Elites” is the project I have been working at for a long time, out of the sheer desire to become acquainted with both the history of Romanian illustrious families and with the contemporary reality of these families. With the aid of an original tool, a questionnaire created by me, I started to look for the stories of the families and for fragments of history carried by the living descendants of the old Romanian elites or which can be discovered in the archives of these families.

In the interwar period, the writer Cezar Petrescu published Scrisorile unui răzeş [The Letters of a Moldavian Freeholder]. A century later, very few people know that Wallachia had, in the Middle Ages, the “moşneni”, the freeholders, free people, masters of their estates, who defended their country sword in hand, who cultivated the land and built churches and schools. Because the way I see the world is influenced by the fact that I descend from a family of freeholders and because I believe that we need to recover the freeholder’s spirit, I will, from time to time, publish my thoughts about everything that happens around us.

The book, prefaced by the Christian-Orthodox Bishop of Slobozia and Călăraşi and by the manager of the National Museum of Agriculture, is made up of two parts and is dedicated to one of the oldest localities in Ialomița county (south-east Romania), to a community of moşneni and to a historical monument that has remained unknown and unstudied until now.