81 Facts About Costache Aristia

Costache Aristia first appeared on stage at Cismeaua Rosie in Bucharest, and became a protege of Lady Rallou.

Costache Aristia is claimed to have sponsored his voyage to France, where Aristia became an imitator of Francois-Joseph Talma.

Costache Aristia fought on the Wallachian front during the Greek War of Independence, and was probably present for the defeat at Dragasani.

Costache Aristia escaped the country and moved between various European states, earning protection from the Earl of Guilford, before returning to Bucharest as a private tutor for the Ghica family.

Costache Aristia used this opportunity to teach drama and direct plays, and thus became one of the earliest contributors to Romanian theater.

Costache Aristia adapted himself to their cultural Francization, publishing textbooks for learning French, and teaching both French and Demotic Greek at Saint Sava College.

Under the Regulamentul Organic regime, Costache Aristia blended Eterist tropes and Romanian nationalism.

Costache Aristia contributed to the effort of modernizing the language, though his own proposals in this field were widely criticized and ultimately rejected.

Costache Aristia was made popular by his translation of Vittorio Alfieri's Saul, which doubled as a nationalist manifesto, and earned accolades for his rendition of the Iliad; however, he was derided for eulogizing Prince Gheorghe Bibescu.

Costache Aristia contributed to cultural life in the Kingdom of Greece, where, in 1840, he published his only work of drama.

Costache Aristia participated in the Wallachian Revolution of 1848, when, as leader of the National Guard, he arrested rival conservatives and publicly burned copies of Regulamentul Organic.

Costache Aristia returned in 1851, having reconciled with the conservative regime of Barbu Dimitrie Stirbei, and remained a citizen of the United Principalities.

Costache Aristia kept out of politics for the remainder of his life, concentrating on his work at Saint Sava, and then at the University of Bucharest, and on producing another version of the Iliad.

Costache Aristia is generally believed to have been born in Bucharest, the Wallachian capital, in 1800.

The date was pushed back to 1797 in some sources, but Costache Aristia's relatives denied that this was accurate.

In 1952, folklorist Dimitrios Economides, who conducted interviews with the Aristia family, argued that Costache was born in Istanbul, capital of the Ottoman Empire, "around the year 1800".

Costache Aristia described his relationship with Wallachia in terms of voluntary assimilation, as advised by his father: Fii grec si roman zdravan, fii recunoscator.

Costache Aristia entered Bucharest's Greek School during the reign of Prince John Caradja, a Phanariote.

At that stage, acting in Wallachia was an all-male enterprise, and Costache Aristia appeared as a female lead, in drag.

Researcher Ioan Massoff notes that Costache Aristia was never a member of Talma's acting class, but only a regular spectator to his shows, and after that his imitator.

Young Costache Aristia joined Alexander Ypsilantis's secret society, the Filiki Eteria, which slowly engineered the nationalist expedition in Moldavia and Wallachia.

Costache Aristia was ignored by the troupe, who answered more directly to a group of Eterist conspirators; they continued with provocative stagings of plays by Voltaire and Vittorio Alfieri, until May 1820, by which time local Greeks were in full preparation for the revolution.

Costache Aristia awaited the Eterists in Bucharest, which had been occupied by troops loyal to Tudor Vladimirescu, who led a parallel uprising of Romanians.

Reportedly, "the flag that was carried by Mr Costache Aristia" was later adopted by Sava Fochianos, who deserted to Ypsilantis' Sacred Band alongside the Bucharest garrison.

Costache Aristia was seriously wounded on that battlefield, before receiving sanctuary in the Austrian Empire.

Costache Aristia eventually settled in the Papal States, where he reportedly continued his education and became familiar with Italian theater.

Also at Rome, Costache Aristia met the Earl of Guilford, and later claimed to have received his quasi-parental protection.

Ghica describes his teacher as an "epic" and "fiery" character, noting in passing that Costache Aristia was promoting the modern Western fashion, including the tailcoat, having discarded all Ottoman clothing after 1822.

Also in 1825, Costache Aristia traveled to British Corfu, performing in his own Greek rendition of Voltaire's Mahomet.

Puchner mentions that Costache Aristia eventually taught classes at the academy.

Economides suggests that Costache Aristia had returned to Bucharest in 1827, joining the staff of Saint Sava College as a teacher of French; other records have him in Paris, where Costache Aristia completed an hymn celebrating the Hellenic Republic.

Costache Aristia's hymn was published as a brochure by Heliade's newspaper Curierul Romanesc, which thus hinted at Romanian national emancipation.

One account by Iosif Hodosiu suggests that Costache Aristia returned to his activities on the stage during the actual occupation, in the interval following Grigore Ghica's ouster.

Costache Aristia is thus credited as a contributor to Heliade's Romanian version of Mahomet, which appeared in 1831.

From November 1832, headmaster Petrache Poenaru employed Costache Aristia to teach French and Demotic Greek at Saint Sava.

Costache Aristia gave informal classes in drama and had a series of student productions involving Rosetti and Ion Emanuel Florescu; during these, Rosetti "revealed himself as a very gifted thespian".

Costache Aristia discovered and promoted a Bucharest-born tragedian, Ioan Tudor Curie.

Costache Aristia continued to have an influence on fashion: most students, above all Curie and Costache Mihaileanu, imitated their teacher's every mannerism.

Costache Aristia had great, solid ideas about each and everything.

Costache Aristia received encouragement from the boyar nobility, who had heard of his "performing wonders" as an educator, but from the Russian Governor-general, Pavel Kiselyov.

Kiselyov visited Costache Aristia to make sure that the gatherings were non-political in content, after which he gave his personal blessing.

Costache Aristia organized classes in acting and declamation at the Dramatic School, a branch of the Philharmonic Society.

Costache Aristia followed up with a series of French-language courses, including a phrase book and a translation of J Wilm's book of moral tales.

Costache Aristia's subsequent work was a translation of Alfieri's Saul and Virginia, initially commissioned and produced by the same Society.

Costache Aristia prepared, but never managed to print, Moliere's Forced Marriage.

In 1837, Costache Aristia published his version of Homer's Iliad, which included his short biography of the author.

The published version featured Costache Aristia's notes, outlining answers to his earliest critics, whom he called "Thersites".

Costache Aristia's pupils attempted to take up similar projects, but generally failed to build themselves actual careers.

Around that time, Costache Aristia was inhabiting a townhouse to one side of Bucharest's Lutheran Church, where he hosted the city's first state-sanctioned girls' school.

Costache Aristia's text was a critique of melodrama as favored by the foreign courtiers of King Otto, attracting their opposition to his projects; they promoted Costache Aristia's rival, Theodoros Orfanidis.

Costache Aristia and is troupe are only known to have performed a single play in Athens.

Costache Aristia did so before October 1843, and served as co-editor of Poenaru's newspaper, Invatatorul Satului.

Costache Aristia held his own column in the form of "moralizing tales", Datoriile omului, sometimes inspired by historical episodes from the times of Mircea the Elder and Matei Basarab.

Papazoglu recalls that Costache Aristia was the first Guard commander, elected by the Bucharest citizenry with an acclamation on the field of Filaret.

Heliade claims that Costache Aristia saved Solomon from a near-lynching, ordering his protective imprisonment at Cernica.

Costache Aristia remained enlisted with the Guard, helping its new commander with the reorganization.

In February 1849, "Provisional Government members and delegates of the Romanian emigration", including Heliade and Costache Aristia, signed a letter of protest addressed primarily to the Frankfurt Parliament, asking for an international opposition to Russian intrusion into Wallachian political life.

Costache Aristia took Heliade's part in his conflict with fellow exile Balcescu, accusing the latter of having squandered funds collected for the revolutionary cause.

Costache Aristia now helped establish the prototype National Theater Bucharest.

The property increased from various purchases, but Costache Aristia donated some of the plots to low-income families.

Costache Aristia returned to print in 1853 with a series of moral tales, Sateanul crestin.

Costache Aristia continued to be active during Stirbei's second reign, which began in October 1854.

Costache Aristia used the "latest Greek edition", verified against the Masoretic Text.

However, Costache Aristia rejected his own translation, and had by then produced a new one, ultimately published in 1858.

Under this new regime, Costache Aristia was again confirmed as a teacher of French and Greek at Saint Sava, though some records suggest that he only taught Greek at Gheorghe Lazar Gymnasium, from 1860 to 1865.

Also in 1859, Costache Aristia published his final original work of verse, Cantare.

Costache Aristia's status was declining: by the 1850s, his and Talma's style of acting were being purged from theaters by a more realistic school, whose leading exponents were Matei Millo and Mihail Pascaly.

In 1860, the BFBS ended its contract with Costache Aristia, who was demanding ever-increasing funds, and whose libertine lifestyle was viewed as distasteful by local missionaries.

Costache Aristia was largely inactive during the final two decades of his life.

Completely blind from 1872, Costache Aristia dictated his final poem, written in memory of philanthropist Ana Davila, accidentally poisoned in 1874.

Costache Aristia died in his Sfintii Voievozi home on April 18,1880, after an "apoplexy".

Costache Aristia's body was taken for burial at Sfanta Vineri Cemetery.

Costache Aristia was widely seen as an important figure in the early modernizing stages of Romanian literature.

Theatrologist Florin Tornea describes Costache Aristia's acting as "murky [and] romantic".

Costache Aristia produced the image of Greece as a source of civilization, a sun around which all other countries revolved as "planets".

Costache Aristia wrote during the modernization of the Romanian vernacular, but before the definition of standard literary language and Latin-based alphabet.

Costache Aristia, who declared himself interested in rendering the language particular to the "pontiffs of poetry", innovated the Romanian lexis.

At this stage, Costache Aristia focused on accuracy and precision, and refrained from adhering to Heliade's more heavily Italienized idiom; his version of the Romanian Cyrillic alphabet was simplified, with the removal of any superfluous characters.

Costache Aristia expected the book to be known and praised by his Moldavian colleagues, to whom he sent free copies.

The Costache Aristia archive was by then mostly lost, as were most copies of Biblia Sacra, but his Saul was recovered and partly published by scholar Ramiro Ortiz in 1916.

Costache Aristia received renewed interest during the Romanian communist regime, when he was occasionally celebrated as a progressive figure.