The Architecture of Absence: Memorial Architecture in Romania from the Archaic Cross to the Mărășești Mausoleum and Brâncuși's Way of the Heroes

Abstract

This article examines the origins and the interwar consolidation of memorial architecture in Romania and argues that the Romanian memorial has never lost a latent sacred function inherited from Orthodox ritual. It first distinguishes the monument from the memorial, the former descended from ancient sculpture and oriented toward the heroic, the latter descended from the necropolis and oriented toward trauma. It then traces the earliest Romanian forms of public remembrance: the premodern stone crosses of Brașov, Bucharest, Gorj, and Vrancea, whose Cyrillic inscriptions record battles and plagues and which functioned as the first collective memorials in the visible space of the town. Two interwar case studies follow. The Mărășești Mausoleum (1919 to 1938) is read as a deliberate fusion of the Tropaeum Traiani model with a Neo-Byzantine pictorial and sculptural program, a solution that, in comparison with Greece, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Soviet Russia, appears to be a Romanian particularity; the late communist museum added beside it is analyzed as an ideological palimpsest. Brâncuși's Way of the Heroes at Târgu Jiu (1935 to 1938) is then interpreted as the first Romanian memorial conceived as a route in space and time, one that makes the visitor's walk the mechanism of remembrance and absorbs the whole town into the memorial. The conclusion sets out implications for heritage policy in Eastern Europe. Working paper (preprint). English version of a text first written in Romanian by the author; translated and edited for this deposit, with corrected references. Not yet peer reviewed. Comments and citations welcome; a journal version may follow.