By using similar clothing and importing various customs, Wallachian and Moldavian local elite manifested its desire to belong, and in the same time, its prestige because the Ottoman objects were internalized and they introduced new social norms in their society. Moreover, they did so in an effort to belong, to become one with the Ottoman elite.
18th century local elite from Wallachia and Moldavia used various Ottoman objects: clothing, furniture, smoking paraphernalia (hookahs and Ottoman smoking pipes), jewelry, weapons, and so on. It is a well-known fact that Ottoman objects can be found in the Romanian countries starting from the 15th and 16th centuries, and this process of acculturation was intensified during the 18th century, mostly due to the Phanariot regime. Their identity combines three elements: a common confession, a common language, and mobility.Ī visit in a few Romanian museums and collections would outline the diversity and numbers of artefacts from the Near East and the Ottoman Empire present in Romania. Travelling through the Ottoman Empire and its periphery (Wallachia and Moldavia), Dumitrache always encounters Greeks, Bulgarians, and Serbs who are ready to help him.
Mobile from the point of view of the activities they pursue – merchants, artisans, nannies – the ‘Greeks’ are bound together by a distinctive sort of solidarity. The second hypothesis takes shape around the clientelary relations that connect this group, dominated by the figure of the merchant Ioan Hagi Moscu.
With the help of language, Dumitrache Merişescu constructs a ‘mobile’ identity, maintained by a certain type of behaviour and by a certain type of costume. The memoirs are the first testimony to the language and languages spoken in different social strata, and point to an active presence of ‘Greeks’ in the modelling of an education and a culture. The first hypothesis concerns the memoirs themselves, which are constructed in a different way from others in style, language, and behaviour. Two important hypotheses emerge from the analysis of this memoir, unpublished and hitherto unknown to historians. The study explores first this young man’s initiation into both amorous and commercial liaisons, and second, the manner in which he reinvents himself in the course of his journey, adopting new clothes and learning new languages. The paper is about the memoir of Dumitrache Merişescu, a young merchant/boyar born in Colentina (a suburb of Bucharest) of ‘Greek’ parents, who travelled from Bucharest to Constantinople in various guises.
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