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Cosmic Multicultural Bucharest in the Pandemic (5) By Andrei Dorian Gheorghe

By Andrei Dorian Gheorghe posted 11-14-2021 08:12

  
Cosmic Multicultural Bucharest in the Pandemic (5):
Another Time Tunnel
By Andrei Dorian Gheorghe (astro-photo-poem-essay) and Florin Alexandru Stancu (design)

On September 13, 2020, a solar reflection in the portal (with sculptures representing caryatids and atlantes from Ancient Greece) of the eastern entrance to the Villacrosse-Macca Passage (built in the 1890s in Central Bucharest after the project of architect Felix Xenopol) made me go inside, where I found a few statuettes with Christian angels.
Initially, this passage was “the first mall in Bucharest”, then its stores were replaced with exotic restaurants and coffee bars, but now all activities were cancelled by the pandemic.
I saw there the symbols of two closed restaurants that made me remember the Far East: a Chinese dragon and an Indian religious- philosophic name, Nirvana.
For a few moments my mind traveled to observational astronomy in Ancient China (especially to Shi Shen’s astronomy about the Sun, Gan De’s star catalogue, and the “Dunhuang” star map) and to descriptive astronomy in Ancient India (particularly to “Vedanga Jyotisha”, the “Aryabhatiya” treatise, and the “Hymn of Creation”), to their mythological constructions of the Cosmos, calendars, religions, philosophy…
And I was ashamed because those important cultural symbols are now used for commercial interests.
Then, on the western entrance of the passage, I saw a few sculpted medallions seeming to show angels living on other planets.

Finally, the Sun rose over the passage just because without him nothing would have happened…

Fight for your world, be fair
And don’t disturb the Sun with your despair.
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#poetry
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