Word: romania
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Brancusi was born in 1876, in a small village in Romania. He completed a long and thorough training in sculpture in Bucharest before reaching Paris, almost penniless, in 1904. He even worked briefly as a studio menial for Auguste Rodin before quitting in the realization that, as he later put it, nothing grows under great trees. Throughout his life, legends stuck to Brancusi like burrs; he was apt to be seen as a peasant sage, a Carpathian exotic (to most Parisians, Romania barely qualified as part of Europe). And he seemed even more of an original to American collectors...
...meeting attracted students from a wide range of countries. Among the 20 attendees were undergraduates from India, Russia, Greece, Slovakia, Romania, Austria and Bangladesh...
GYPSIES HAVE TRADITIONALLY been the untouchables of Europe, lowest of the low. In medieval Romania, a Gypsy could be bought and sold as chattel, often for the price of a pig. In 18th century Prussia, Gypsies over 18 could be hanged without trial solely on the ground that their itinerant life-style was illegal. The Nazis targeted Gypsies for elimination as congenitally criminal, and more than 500,000 died in Hitler's death camps...
Sadly, the ancient hatred of Gypsies for their supposed deviousness has revived since communism collapsed in Eastern Europe. In Romania and the Czech Republic, mobs have burned Gypsies' homes and beaten their occupants, sometimes to death. Police and legal authorities have generally condoned these atrocities. In desperation, thousands of East European Gypsies--500,000 in 1991 alone--have applied for asylum in the West. Rather than accept repatriation after a 1992 pact between Germany and Romania, Romanian Gypsies in German relocation camps destroyed their identity cards. They were deported anyway...
...question now is whether Olympic judges--and other teams--will make the same adjustment, favoring artistry over perkiness. The teams from Romania and the former Soviet republics, which have posed America's stiffest challenges, are also expected to field older competitors in '96. Come 1997, they will have little choice: in that year international rules will raise the minimum age of competitors from 15 to 16, a direct result of the '92 spectacle...