24 YEARS IN THE SERVICE OF ROMANIAN HERITAGE AND COMMUNITIES
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March 05, 2021
Last year in October 24 children from Mihăileni and Vârfu Câmpului localities in Botoşani county, received musical instruments – blockflöte – and began lessons in the study of this instrument and in musical culture. The 600 hours of music education in 2020 took place in the yard of George Enescu’s House, when the weather was favorable, and afterwards they took place online.
The program initiated and developed by the Pro Patrimonio Foundation in partnership with the UiPath Foundation is entitled “The Children’s Academy of Music and Education”. As a music education program, complementary to the school one, dedicated to children from secondary schools around the George Enescu House in Mihăileni, it helps children develop their interest in current school activities and, in this way, to enrich their cultural knowledge. Music culture develops creativity, logical thinking, structures critical thinking and develops the artistic sensitivity of young people in training. In addition, music coagulates communities, helps preserve local identity and complements a correct perception of heritage. In an area with an instrumental and vocal tradition still present, but with a high risk of social vulnerability, such as the Botoşani – Dorohoi area, music strengthens the feeling of belonging to the community, a very important element for restoring social cohesion.
Mrs. Paula Gavriluţă is the music teacher who helps the children descipher the blockflöte scores whilst also teaching them things about a much needed musical culture. During the year dedicated to Beethoven, the emphasis was on deciphering excerpts from the Ninth Symphony, and around December they learned about Anton Pann’s patriotic song as well as about the great composer George Enescu, who sang to the wounded or organized charity concerts. With the help of interactive online games, children learn to recognize musical instruments and through musical audition they put the musical phrases in order according to their intensity and according to the instruments that appear in the orchestra.
At the beginning of 2021, the group of children in the music program received new scores and continues to develop their skills in using the instrument.
The program continues throughout 2021 in partnership with the UiPath Foundation.
The In-Herit project, initiated by the National Heritage Institute, runs place 2020 and 2021 within the RO-Culture program with the support of the SEE Grants 2014-2021. The Pro Patrimonio Foundation, project partner, is responsible for creating the online application Salva-Monument, an integral part of the general online platform.
The web application will address the owners of historic buildings, specialists and the general public so that they can be informed about the practical and constructive ways of maintaining, conserving and capitalizing on heritage. An important component of the guide will be the presentation of practical issues regarding approval, documentation, economic or funding issues that may arrise.
All these themes will be presented in a format as accessible as possible, in formulas of expression as simple as possible accompanied by suggestive graphic images. The Salva-Monument Guide will be a content aggregator for heritage.
Motivation
Romania’s built heritage has been deteriorating, especially in the past 30 years, at a much faster pace than the owners’ ability to rehabilitate, maintain and use them. Society at large is poorly educated and informed about the ways of rehabilitation and maintenance, but also about the possibilities of capitalization of buildings and heritage complexes. However, more and more citizens are looking for information and tools to help them understand how heritage can be activated and revitalized in the context of insufficient collaboration and communication with public administration.
The Pro Patrimonio Foundation aims to create an interactive online platform – the Salva-Monument Guide – which will be integrated into the comprehensive program “In-Herit: National Center for Heritage Information and Promotion” developed by the National Heritage Institute.
The guide will be a support for the owners of historic buildings, specialists, the general public by which they can find practical and constructive ways of maintaining, conserving and capitalizing on heritage – both a cultural resource and an economic resource. The digital platform will also provide a link between citizens and specialists, from various fields – architecture, legal, economic, etc.
We aim to provide active free support for as many common situations as possible in which different categories find themselves in. The foundation receives an average of 10 questions per month on how to save, intervene, finance a historic building. The demands are diverse, but are based on poor public education and an acute lack of public information. In most cases, questions and requests reach the Foundation because public institutions answer vaguely or not at all. Interested citizens do not have at their disposal a simple document from which they can understand what the steps, the response times, the competent authorities and the laws are, as well as how to complete the applications and to whom should they be addressed.
The Salva-Monument guide will address:
In order to build this Guide as representative as possible, we set out to conduct a public consultation through a survey so that we can address as wide a range of possible situations and questions as possible from the public.
The survey in Romanian language only and is open to the public until March 3, 2021
http://bit.ly/SONDAJ-SALVA-MONUMENT
The Project ”Enescu Festival – cultual-musical explorations and exercises” has started!
In order to better know the location of George Enescu’s House and its surroundings, we proposed to start to start the exercise of mapping craftsmen and local resources around the house between July 1-4, 2020. Two teams patrolled for four days within a radius of approximately 50-60 km around the architectural object to sketch the story around Mihăileni.
The route was based on maps of existing craftsmen online https://hartamesterilorconstructii.ro/ și https://www.hartamestesugarilor.ro/,valuable and rich information collected from ethnographic museums and tourist information centres in the area and clues provided by the locals themselves. The abundance of craftsmen in these places forced us to make a forced selection of field visits and to keep the research tracks open for other times.
We managed to visit 25 craftsmen and we got acquainted with the cultural differences and similarities of Bucovina and Moldova on foot through villages and cities or through museum research.
Even if the theme of this project is limited to research, our ideas for future collaborations have already started having met such skilled craftsmen and from such varied areas.
In the marathon experience of field research I met: blacksmiths, weavers, sculptors and carpenters, stonemasons, skinners, glassmakers and weavers. As in the research at Câmpulung Muscel in Argeş County, around Villa Golescu, we were impressed by both the joys and the hardships of each craft.
We hope the preservation and re-adaptation of all these traditions will someday be the object of a future Honest Goods collection from George Enescu’s House in Mihăileni and to incite as many people as possible to access the existing human and cultural resources nearby.
We would like to thank the craftsmen for lodging us and for their stories, as well as the volunteers, Ruxandra Sacaliș and Ana Luiza Simion without whom we would not have been able to find out so many things.
“The Enescu House Festival – cultural-musical explorations and exercises” is one of Pro Patrimonio’s cultural projects co-financed by AFCN. The project does not necessarily represent the position of the National Cultural Fund Administration. AFCN is not responsible for the content of the project or how the project results can be used. These are entirely the responsibility of the beneficiary of the funding.
