Description

In 1974, a retired village schoolteacher in southern Romania sat down to record everything he had witnessed in eighty years of life. The result is this remarkable memoir — an unvarnished, first-person account of rural Wallachia across the most turbulent century in the country's history.

Chiriță M. Bărbulescu was born on 16 December 1900 in the commune of Martalogi, Teleorman County. From his childhood memories of ploughing with wooden harrows and attending midnight Easter services by candlelight, through the German occupation of 1916–18, his years at the prestigious "Carol I" Teachers' Training College, two world wars, and the sweeping changes of the communist era, Bărbulescu chronicles six decades of village life with warmth, precision, and quiet dignity.

This is not a literary memoir polished for effect. It is the authentic voice of an ordinary man who spent his entire career educating peasant children in a single commune — and who witnessed extraordinary times. He writes about customs and beliefs that have since vanished, about school cooperatives and local elections, about military service and the slow modernisation of the Romanian countryside, preserving a world that would otherwise be lost to time.

Rich in historical detail and alive with the rhythms of rural life, Memories from the Life of a Teacher belongs to the tradition of Flora Thompson's Lark Rise to Candleford and Ion Creangă's Memories of My Boyhood — a ground-level portrait of a vanished world, told by someone who lived every page of it.

One teacher. One village. One century of upheaval.