The epidemics in Romanian Principalities

Moldavia and Wallachia coping with the plague in the 18th century

Steliu Lambru, 28.11.2021, 14:00

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic
has been hitting the headlines for almost two years now, worldwide, in the news
program and in talk-shows. Physicians, psychologists, sociologists, educational
experts as well as other categories of specialists have presented data from the
stand point of their own branch of science, in a bid to draw relevant conclusions.
Historians have also responded to the challenges of our times, even though their
profession is closely linked to exploring the past. So, historians provided
their own account of humankind’s past experiences related to epidemics. For us,
Covid-19 has an identity of its own. And that because science in the 21st
century has succeeded to notice it and analyse its behaviour. However, in the past,
the agents of disease were not that very well known. At that time, fatality and
doomed fate were considered the causes of plagues by the vast majority of
people.

Romania’s National History
Museum and Romania’s National Archives jointly staged an exhibition themed Epidemics
in the history of Romanian Principalities. The former institution played host
to the exhibition. In 2021, Romania’s National Archives celebrate 190 years of
existence. The Archives were founded in 1831, at a time when the Organic Regulation
was issued and which was an early version of a constitution in the
principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia. By way of celebration for its 190 years
of existence, the national Archives presented visitors with relevant documents
for the plagues that hit Wallachia and Moldavia in the past: the contagions of
cholera, typhoid fever, exanthematous typhus and Spanish flu. Archivist Claudiu
Turcitu was the coordinator of the exhibition. He gave us details on the exhibition
proper and its follow-up.

Claudiu Turcitu:

In our undertaking,
we sought to make the documents visible to the lay public, under the present
circumstances. And what better documents we could make visible for them, other
than those pertaining to plagues, now that we’re celebrating The National Archives
190 years of existence. That’s how we got the idea of mounting this exhibition,
all the more so as we’re also preparing a volume, an edition of documents related
to the quarantines service.

Photocopies as well as original
documents are among the exhibits. Reproductions of documents include photographs,
maps, charts, diary pages, church official acts, official notes, personal
notes. But the oldest document the National Archives presented to the public
dates form the 17th century, it was also issued at the time of a plague,
the disease that claimed the lives of the biggest number of people until the 19th
century. On the day of March 12, 1637, Nedelco gave Gligor an acre of vineyard,
tools and money found in the house of his brother, Tudor, so that Gligor may
get in there and take out his woman and his little boys who had died of plague,
and bury them, since nobody could be found to see to their interment. From another
documents dated September 1657, we find out that a one Petre Epure had given father
Negutu and his sons some apple trees during the plague, when his wife and
children had died without taking the Communion.

Claudiu Turcitu:

We started
off from document issued in the year 1637. We grouped them according to the
main plagues that struck the Romanian principalities until 1918, being aware of
the existing space constraints. The first document dates from the time of the plague
and is a zapis, a certifying signed document, from a person, for the
burial of those who had died because of the plague. Then we go through
documents dated 1813, at the time of Caragea’s harrowing plague. We even have a
hrisov, a charter, from 1813, signed by Caragea for the Dudesti hospital
which had been previously prepared, in 1789, for those who suffered from the
plague.

While visiting the
exhibition, we also read that in 1827, Ahmed pasha in Nicopole on the river Danube’s
south bank, allowed the free circulation to the north bank of the river only in
the Teleorman river area, where the quarantine was instated. Elsewhere in the
principality of Wallachia, people still had to cope with the violent manifestations
of the plague. A document, which is relevant even for the year of 1831, is the
prayer written by a one Stan, a parish Clerk with the Coltea monastery, located
nearby the hospital with the same name in Bucharest. Those were the harrowing
years of the cholera epidemic which had terrified the entire population of
Wallachia. Another noteworthy document is the executive order issued on
February 14, 1846, by Wallachian ruler Gheorghe
Bibescu, whereby parents had to get their children vaccinated against the
chicken pox. Apart from the plague, the exhibition presents the other
epidemiological scourges that hit the Romanian society in the 19th century
and in the first decades of the 20th century.

Claudiu Turcitu:

We then
go through the cholera epidemic with documents that are part of the War
Ministry’s quarantines service collection, private documents actually. There
are letters and impressions of the personalities of that time having to do with
the symptoms of the cholera epidemic, with the treatment, with the medical recipes
used to contain the cholera epidemic, which lasted rather long. We then go through
the exanthematous typhus, then there is another epidemic that broke out towards
the end of World War One, namely the Spanish flu. We’re closing the exhibition with
Queen Marie’s notebooks. We rounded off the exhibition with original documents
issued by the interior office of the High Steward (The Interior Ministry) and
by the War Ministry, the Ion I. C. Bratianu private collection, actually a report
compiled in a bid to get the funding that was required for the exanthematous typhus.

In the past, the
epidemics struck the Romanian territory with a devastating force and people
know how to cope with the epidemics. However, in our times, in the technological world
we live in, we can easily imagine an aseptic future, yet microbiology has not
had the last word yet.

(Translated by Eugen Nasta)