Considering the fact that you have personally met the teenagers from our college, what can you tell us about their involvement in the cultural life?
The „Bucovina” Institute of the Romanian Academy and The Philological Sciences Society of Romania – the branch from Rădăuţi – gladly welcomes the teenagers’ involvement in strategies of training and self training. In this generous environment, the „Plead for Health” project, promoted by the group of young people from the „Eudoxiu Hurmuzachi” National College, Rădăuţi, belongs to a venerable tradition in Bucovina covering four centuries of culture and civilization of the writing and reading.
This old and rich tradition illustrates, at the same time, ages of the writing and stages of the modern man’s emancipation. Over the time, entire generations have been concerned with the continuous worldwide communication and mutual understanding, promoting projects with educational purposes: finding one’s self in the “concert” of multiculturalism, cultivating the taste for knowledge through reading, creating an atmosphere of study and continuous education with implications in the process of forming characters, adjusting to the never-resting rhythms of time. According to the model of the Occident, a modern human type, with another sensibility and vision, is being born, a man who travels carrying with him books and ideas, experiences, models and suggestions for his own constructions.
Young people from Rădăuţi and from Bucovina, in generally, are often fascinated not only by the knowledge contained by the values of the “biological encyclopedic complex” from the traditional bookcase, but also by the mirage of the new, original experiences, like the “bud generation” of the inter-war period of the twentieth century proves. In Bucovina’s literary history, almost all the well-known writers here are “messengers of an art, of an upsurge of spring in poetry”, aiming at placing the traditions from Bucovina (“northern atmosphere”, “northern gothic”) as a model of Romanian spiritual union. Their and the former generations’ writing represents, so to quote the project’s subject, a marvelous plead for the health of traditional culture, rediscovering unforeseen energies, opening new perspectives of understanding and expression, and enriching our Europeanism through the creation of original values.
Through this perspective, the project “Plead for Health”, promoted by a new generation of young teenagers, means continuity and new beginnings, valuing “the moment that has been quick given to us”, as Mihai Eminescu once wrote in his poem “The Stars in The Sky” (“ Stelele-n cer”) dating from 1880-1882. This is why we also trustfully support them in this way.
Prof. Vasile I. Schipor, President of The Philological Sciences Society of Romania – the branch from Rădăuţi, Science Secretary of The „Bucovina” Institute of the Romanian Academy, Editorial Secretary of the periodic magazine “Bucovina’s Chronicles” („Analele Bucovinei”)
Per aspera ad astra! ("Through hardships to the stars")