ABOUT ROMANIAN STAR AND SKY LORE
By Andrei Dorian Gheorghe
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Star and sky lore
universal consciousness
steps in astronomy
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In 1907, after 12 years of work (in which he was helped by teachers, priests and peasants), the mathematics teacher Ion Otescu presented at the Romanian Academy his book “Romanian Peasants’ Beliefs in Stars and Sky “, extremely valuable for astromythology worldwide because it brings a new chapter, primarily due to the fact that, among many other old folklore visions, it identified 39 constellations in the “Romanian sky” and put into question 3 more.
A big attraction in this book is the Romanian Sky Myth, in which the army of Man fought with the army of the Devil, the fighters becoming constellations and leaving the Milky Way behind them.
90 years later, the then vice-president of the International Meteor Organization, the British Alastair McBeath and I translated this book into English, an extremely difficult work that we did through classic correspondence (exchange of letters) and printed dictionaries.
In 2009, we published this book online on the website of the Romanian Society for Meteors and Astronomy (SARM) and we launched it on the occasion of the International Year of Astronomy.
In 2023, the director of the Astromix Publishing House in Cluj-Napoca, Dan George-Uza, called us for a new, more detailed translation of this book, getting involved in an impressive way, so that in April 2024 our new translation also appeared in the printed version at this publishing house under the name “Romanian Star & Sky Lore”.
The book also includes two sections in which the translators explained the position in time of the moment of its original appearance and, continuing the work of Ion Otescu, they also demonstrated a mythical variant of the constellation Hydra.
Another section is reserved for the director of the Baia Mare Planetarium, Ovidiu Ignat, who talked about his institution's project to promote traditional Romanian constellations in Romania.
An imposing first reaction came from the excellent coordinator of a famous annual astronomical calendar (which has appeared since the 1970s with the logos of Furman University and the Astronomical League), Guy Ottewell, who dedicated a long laudatory article about this book on his blog on 21 June 2024, entitled “A goldmine of legends uncovered in the sky”, in which he considered that “the book is a treasure trail not only of stories but of little linguistic revelations”.
If you want to enrich your personal collection with this magnificent book, you can find Romanian Star & Sky Lore listed on the Amazon or by contacting “Editura Astromix” directly (www.astromix.ro and info@astromix.ro).
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The people in Terra’s revolution
tried to define the constellations
and now the galaxies’ vibrations
through telescopic oscillations
show the Universe’s evolution.
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