Categories: uncategorized
Date: 05 August 2005 18:21:10
Thanks everyone for your comments - all hugs and prayers welcome :) A number of more specific responses though:
Ferijen - no, you don't understand. Procrastination is an integral part of the process!
Unordered - lol! You'd have a fit if you saw my house at the moment.
Fr. Michael - welcome to my blog! I presume you found me via my comment on Michael's Sarisburium blog - if you've not already found it, may I recommend Ian's Exploring Orthodoxy to you as well? Thank you for your kind comments - I think "the most interesting I've ever read" is quite tough to live up to - I'll probably end up with severe writer's block now and be desperately boring! I'm packing up (in answer to your question) as I'm about to leave London and full-time work and move to the other end of the country to start a PhD. Hence the maturest student thing, and the packing (and the stress!). I may not be the maturest student in the world in terms of age, but as I will be 40 when I finish the PhD I'm feeling very ancient, so have appropriated the title anyway! Glad to hear you're happily snug where God wants you (what are you studying?). Years ago, in my youthful enthusiasm, I prayed that God would keep me from being "comfortable". Now, many years on, I'm beginning to think maybe that wasn't such a great idea!
Nessa - thank you, I'll give the Eurythmics a try. Haven't listened to that CD in years! Will make sure it's very loud!
Ian - not ignorant questions at all. As with lots of eastern Europe, I can't give you a very precise answer, but basically Moldova is indeed a separate country from Romania (albeit a very small one) - you'll find it wedged between Romania on its western border and Ukraine on its northern, eastern and southern borders. It has existed as an entity with its current borders as an independent country since 1991 and has a long and complicated history, but much of present day Moldova used to be the region of Greater Romania formerly known as Bessarabia. (To complicate things further, a large region of eastern Romania is also known as Moldova, but that is separate from the Republic of Moldova. Plenty of nationalists in both countries see them as one and the same and aim for reunification, but after initial enthusiasm for that in the early 1990s it's looking unlikely that any reunification with Romania will ever happen. As another island-dweller, like you, I find it really hard to get my head round all the border changes that went on in mainland Europe over the last few centuries. No wonder there's so much angst!). Most of what is now the Republic of Moldova was briefly part of Greater Romania up to the 2nd World War (having spent much of the 19th century kind of floating between Russia and Romania in some sort of vague alliance with Russia as far as I can tell), but was then annexed by Stalin during the War as part of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact and became a Soviet republic. It became independent, along with the other former Soviet republics, in 1991. Population is (very very roughly!) 60something% Romanian-as-first-language-speakers (they would say Moldovan speakers, but it's basically the exact same language), the bulk of the rest are Russian and Ukrainian, with small pockets of Gagauz (a Turkic people), Bulgarians, Roma, and various sundry others. The eastern border, as established by Stalin, is now disputed in that the area known as Transdniester (Transnistria/Transdniestr) which is bordered on the east by Ukraine and the west by the Dniestr river which runs through the country has been trying for years to break away from Moldova and return to Sovietisation as a separate republic, either reunited with Russia or as a separate country. There was a civil war there in 1992 and things are still tense and unresolved, with the Transdniester authorities setting up an autonomous parliament which doesn't recognise the Moldovan authorities and which isn't recognised by the Moldovan authorities, and various international negotiators trying to get them to sort it out (and each party objecting to various of the international negotiators). All very complicated! (Also, yes it is probably what you think of as Moldovia/Moldavia, although neither of those spellings actually exist in reality! It's just a common corruption of the region's spelling, but there is in fact no such place as Moldavia). If I wanted to make myself sound really intellectual I would say that the best book I've ever read on the subject is The Moldovans: Romania, Russia and the Politics of Culture, but the reality is that it's the only book I've ever read on the subject, probably because I think it's pretty much the only book ever written on the subject! Maybe I will end up writing the next one (I don't know about writing to keep you clamouring for more, I know they say that everyone has at least one novel in them, personally I'm pretty sure I don't but I'm equally sure there's a dull textbook in here somewhere!).
Here ends today's geography/history lesson :)