MonteStory #10: Ion Creangă, writer/storyteller/teacher in 19th century Romania

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If you met Romanian people, or had Romanian friends and relatives, you would have probably heard them speak about the controversial, must-read story called Childhood Memories. In this story, the life of a child in a rural context is meticulously depicted with words we can barely understand given the region and time when the book was written. Maybe you have heard of the fantasy story Harap Alb, or of the funny short story of Păcală. Or you have probably heard of the abecedary that helped the elders read and write in 1st grade. There must be a creator behind all these stories, right? So today we’re going to hear a story about the writer, schoolteacher and storyteller, Ioan Ștefănescu or Ion Creangă, as he was also known.

Ion Creangă was born in Humulești in 1837, in a village which has since been incorporated into Târgu Neamț city. He was the son of Orthodox trader Ștefan Petre Ciubotariul and his wife Smaranda of whom he wrote in Childhood Memories.

Can you imagine how important his elementary school years were for his future profession? In school, he learned how to read and write in the Cyrillic alphabet from his peer tutor, Vasile (You can check out the Cyrillic letters on the Language shelf!).

However, he left school early because he needed to earn money to support his family, since his financially struggling father was not able to do so. He made money from wool-spinning, which gave him an occupational nickname, the Spinster. In a very similar way, you weave wool and cotton in the classroom!

In his adolescent years, he adopted his mother’s maiden name, Creangă (in Romanian branch). Some say for aesthetic reasons, others say it’s because he found out that Ștefan wasn’t his real father.

Soon after his father’s death, he got married to the village priest’s daughter. In his church, Creangă is believed to have received his first schoolteacher training. After a couple of years, he moved to the city to study at the Faculty of Theology where he met a great Romanian reformer, Titu Maiorescu. Creangă became an enthusiastic promoter of Maiorescu’s ideas on education reform and modernization and in particular of the new methods of teaching reading and writing.

In this cultural context, 150 years ago, Creangă and his other five colleagues in his department wrote an abecedary for first graders that would replace Cyrillic writing with a Latin one. In this book you could find, for the first time, consonants and vowels, plural and singular nouns, sentence formation, poems and stories that would give children a moral sense of the world, as well as knowledge of natural phenomena. Basically, this was the beginning of a new language learning era for children and teachers in elementary school.

We often take our own language for granted and focus on very old linguistic studies. I wonder what other contributions have been made in this direction and how it has all changed in order to have the books and language materials that we see today.