Ion Heliade Rădulescu or Ion Heliade was a Wallachian, later Romanian academic, Romantic and Classicist poet, essayist, memoirist, short story writer, newspaper editor and politician. A prolific translator of foreign literature into Romanian, he was also the author of books on linguistics and history. For much of his life, Heliade Rădulescu was a teacher at Saint Sava College in Bucharest, which he helped reopen. He was a founding member and first president of the Romanian Academy.
Portrait of Rădulescu, by Mișu Popp
Site of Ion Heliade Rădulescu's birthplace in Târgoviște
The old building of the National Theatre Bucharest in 1866
Heliade in 1848, detail of a group portrait of Provisional Government members
Romanian is the official and main language of Romania and Moldova. Romanian is part of the Eastern Romance sub-branch of Romance languages, a linguistic group that evolved from several dialects of Vulgar Latin which separated from the Western Romance languages in the course of the period from the 5th to the 8th centuries. To distinguish it within the Eastern Romance languages, in comparative linguistics it is called Daco-Romanian as opposed to its closest relatives, Aromanian, Megleno-Romanian, and Istro-Romanian. It is also spoken as a minority language by stable communities in the countries surrounding Romania, and by the large Romanian diaspora. In total, it is spoken by 25 million people as a first language.
Neacșu's letter is the oldest surviving document written in Old Romanian that can be precisely dated
Lithograph of a group portrait by Constantin Daniel Rosenthal, showing Paris-based revolutionaries during the early 1840s. From left: Rosenthal (wearing a Phrygian cap), C. A. Rosetti, anonymous Wallachian
Ion Creangă
Hurmuzaki Psalter, written around 1500