Alex Drace-Francis
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alexdrace.bsky.social
Alex Drace-Francis
@alexdrace.bsky.social
1.8K followers 930 following 1.5K posts
Cultural historian, modern Europe @uvahumanities.bsky.social. Books: The Making of Mămăligă (CEU Press); Networks, Narratives and Nations (Amsterdam UP). Amateur gardener.
https://www.uva.nl/en/profile/d/r/a.j.drace-francis/a.j.drace-francis.html
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alexdrace.bsky.social
Punchy tourism slogan
slovakia.travel/en
Travel to Slovakia Good Idea (logo of tourism website)
November 24, 2025 at 4:51 PM
alexdrace.bsky.social
Idem, Eine Hochzeit in der Wallachei [A wedding in Wallachia], also 1840s
commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?...
Karl Lanzedelli, Eine Hochzeit in der Wallachei [A wedding in Wallachia], 1840s
November 20, 2025 at 12:32 PM
alexdrace.bsky.social
Karl Lanzedelly, Ein Jahrmarkt in der Wallachei [A Wallachian Fair], coloured lithograph, 1840s
commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Un...
Karl Lanzedelly, Ein Jahrmarkt in der Wallachei [A Wallachian Fair],
November 20, 2025 at 12:26 PM
alexdrace.bsky.social
"A Railroad through the Wild East. Ottoman Dobrudja at the Dawn of the Capitalist Era" - Constantin Ardeleanu's new book. Love the cover and as someone familiar with the project I can say the contents will be great too...
humanitas.ro/humanitas/ca...
Constantin Ardeleanu, "A Railroad through the Wild East. Ottoman Dobrudja at the Dawn of the Capitalist Era" (book cover, Romanian)
November 19, 2025 at 4:59 PM
alexdrace.bsky.social
But if brevity is the aim, surely the poor answer is the good answer?
November 14, 2025 at 5:17 PM
alexdrace.bsky.social
Elena Hartulari, “Nefericita petrecere a vieţii mele [My Life’s Unhappy Course]” the first Romanian-language women’s autobiography, now in a critical edition by the fabulous Constanţa Vintilă – a must read!
humanitas.ro/humanitas/ca...
Elena Hartulari, “Nefericita petrecere a vieţii mele [My Life’s Unhappy Course]” - book cover of new critical edition
November 13, 2025 at 6:10 PM
alexdrace.bsky.social
Letters from Bucharest to Prague, 1840s: feel the texture
November 12, 2025 at 6:14 PM
alexdrace.bsky.social
📖 Proofs! The introduction is called "A World in Motion"
O lume în mişcare [A world in motion], introduction proofs
November 6, 2025 at 12:42 PM
alexdrace.bsky.social
"We had some seriously good turnips" - good to see the real reveal in this feature on Paul McCartney
www.theguardian.com/music/2025/n...
"We put our backs into it, tilling the fields, and grew all sorts in our vegetable garden. We had some seriously good turnips." (Paul McCartney)
November 2, 2025 at 4:24 PM
alexdrace.bsky.social
J’ai faim / Am foamé
French-Romanian dialogue about asking for food. From “Annuaire de la Principauté de Valachie” (1842)
November 2, 2025 at 12:11 PM
alexdrace.bsky.social
Plan de Bucarest, 1842
Map of Bucharest, 1842 (published in Annuaire de la Principaute de Valachie)
November 2, 2025 at 10:11 AM
alexdrace.bsky.social
In Bucharest Strada Mecet commemorates the site of a former Turkish cemetery. So much for 'no Turks ever settled here'
Snippet of Bucharest (Google Maps) showing Strada Mecet (= 'cemetery' < Turkish)
November 1, 2025 at 4:19 PM
alexdrace.bsky.social
November #Saturday ##ilfautcultiver
November 1, 2025 at 9:02 AM
alexdrace.bsky.social
Controversially, Curta argues that Slavic was not an ethnic language with deep roots but a koine formed in a specific conjuncture. This involved not only beef and porridge but also lettuce (ibid.)
In other words, before contact with Romance, speakers of Thracian must have adopted the Common Slavic koiné in order to communicate with speakers of Iranian to the east and of Balto-Slavic to the north. Judging from the sound changes in the word for lettuce in modern Slavic languages (a word borrowed from Romance), contact between the koiné and Romance was established ca. 600.
October 19, 2025 at 6:16 AM
alexdrace.bsky.social
The gastronomical origins of Common Slavic (Curta 2001) Not quite sure what to make of this intriguing beef-porridge theory
www.routledge.com/Slavs-in-the...
The disposition to express oneself in particular ways accommodating other people’s behavior finds its direct and concrete expression in language as koiné, but also in practice as “intentional matrix” of cognitive, affective, and volitive values. To put it in different yet simpler terms, if the Slavic koiné came into being because of real-life communicative acts, there must have been some practices that speakers of that koiné shared or wanted to share. A number of such practices are documented archaeologically and may well signal the social transformations responsible for the linguistic convergence. For example, the sudden appearance on many sites of a specific ceramic category, the clay pans, has been linked to radical changes in food preparation which are also signaled by frequent closed cooking pots and the greater number of cattle bones indicating the consumption of beef-based stews or semi-liquid, porridge-like foods. Because of its great nutritional and organoleptic properties, the resulting “soup” may have been consumed separately, possibly with large quantities of bread, such as that baked in clay pans. Moreover, clay pans seem to be associated with special kinds of flour-based foods, the consumption of which was reserved for communal ceremonies or feasts. Flat-bread baking and the associated clay pan phenomenon started at some point during the second half of the 6th century, perhaps during its last third, and then quickly became widespread during the first half of the 7th century. The accompanying culinary changes must have involved some components of the “intentional matrix,” particularly affective (tastes and feelings) and cognitive (concepts, perhaps also beliefs) values. To speak Slavic meant perhaps to be able to explain to others how certain new things were supposed to be done.
October 19, 2025 at 5:05 AM
alexdrace.bsky.social
October Saturday ##ilfautcultiver
Raspberries Potatoes
October 18, 2025 at 7:35 AM
alexdrace.bsky.social
Proof emerged on the verso of this coin, authenticated only in 2022. Definitely corn and proof that the Dacians made it across the Atlantic!

journals.plos.org/plosone/arti...
Coin of the ‘emperor’ Sponsian (Hunterian Museum, Glasgow)
October 15, 2025 at 4:35 PM
alexdrace.bsky.social
Stories in monosyllables from 1886, for didactic purposes
(Creangă, Metoda nouă)
dspace.bcu-iasi.ro/handle/12345...
"merg în târg. mă tund pe cap. văd un om sub cort. pe sus văd un corb. nu rîd ca un tont. văd cum duc un om mort. un cal murg şi un mânz pe câmp. torn must în vas. un băţ, de corn. un ţap cu un corn rupt. când mă culc, nu dorm mult. torc in. pun fân în ţarc. de turc nu mă tem."
October 13, 2025 at 5:39 PM
alexdrace.bsky.social
New book: Tudor Dinu, "Grecia din România: Mănăstirile închinate din Ţara Românească şi Moldova, 1564–1866" [Greece in Romania: The Dedicated Monasteries of Wallachia and Moldavia, 1564-1866] humanitas.ro/humanitas/ca....
Tudor Dinu, Grecia din Romania (coperta)
October 12, 2025 at 12:34 PM
alexdrace.bsky.social
A couple of examples from the 1930s. But yes I think yr right, it didn't really enter popular speech
dspace.bcucluj.ro/jspui/simple...
Eugeniu Speranţia, ‘C. Rădulescu-Motru psiholog’ (1932) Ion Petrovici, ‘Două cuiburi istorice: Siena şi Parma’ (1937)
October 12, 2025 at 3:39 AM
alexdrace.bsky.social
Excellent resource below, but to be fair, some of the symptoms are characteristic of bad academic writing as it has been explicitly taught
Text "LLM writing often puffs up the importance of the subject matter with reminders that it represents or contributes to a broader topic. There seems to be only a small repertoire of ways that it writes these reminders, so if they are otherwise appropriate it would be best to reword them anyway."
September 28, 2025 at 6:41 PM
alexdrace.bsky.social
Only thing AI can tell me about Pliny the Elder
September 28, 2025 at 10:56 AM
alexdrace.bsky.social
Today I learnt to say Калдъръм кокона [caldaram cucoana], apparently a Plovdiv phrase for a pretty lady who manages to walk in stiletto heels on the cobblestones of the Old Town...
Cobbled street, Plovdiv
September 26, 2025 at 6:11 PM
alexdrace.bsky.social
Had never occurred to me that all these French town names are in fact plurals (as are many Romanian town names..)
- Rickard, History of the French Language, p. 5
"Remis, the home of the tribe known to the Romans as the Remi, gives rise to Reims (Rheims). This explains in many cases the -s ending of modern French towns, for example Angers, Limoges, Nantes, Poitiers, Sens, Tours and Troyes. Paris takes its name from the Parisii" (Rickard, History of French, p. 5)
September 26, 2025 at 10:20 AM
alexdrace.bsky.social
Happy Independence Day, Bulgarian friends! (even if it was in fact 5 October in the Gregorian calendar). Son has just landed in Sofia and would be very happy to be invited to any parties (related to this or otherwise..)
September 22, 2025 at 10:48 AM