Saecularia.ro online project, dedicated to promoting events of 2018, kicks off

The Saecularia.ro online project dedicated to promoting the events of 2018 on the 100th anniversary of the Romanians' Unification has been launched on Monday evening in an event at Sutu Palace - Bucharest City Museum. 

The online platform is intended to be a landmark in the virtual space meant to reflect the events connected to Romania's Centennial, to promote books, movies and other initiatives related to this moment. 

'We have three main directions meant to develop the activity of Saecularia.ro. A first would be to aggregate as many genuine images from the archives and index them as well as possible in the search engines, somehow to fill the Internet with photos from 1916 - 1920 that are unknown otherwise and thus give a face to those events through those images. In parallel, we also wish to identify as many films as possible - we know that the Romanian Army had a cinema service that filmed quite a lot. Unfortunately, the Internet has few footage of those times. We also want to try to identify these films and make them public, through the Internet,' George Damian, coordinator of the Saecularia.ro project said. 

A second target of the project is to keep a chronicle, as much as possible, of the events and books that are published in connection with the year 1918, and another objective would be a collaborative approach involving as many Internet surfers as possible in what a commemoration of 1918 means. 

'For instance, we'd like to draw up an interactive map challenging as many people to take photos and place on this map monuments dedicated to the First World War, to the year 1918. The villages of Romania are full of such monuments and we'd like to carry out a mini-census of those,' he added. 

The project started from the finding of a lack of interest in 1918, the organisers wishing to involve as many people as possible in 'recalling the WW I events and the year 1918.' 

'One of the ideas of this commemorative project would be to try to recover family images with WW I participants, that we can place on the Internet. The archives are a first source - Romania's National Archives, the military archives, the personal funds of the WW I generals which comprise several unknown photographic archives. In parallel, there are the archives of the states that have participated in the WW I in Romania, from where we might recover quite a lot of images. There are such images in Bulgaria, Hungary, Austria, Germany, Russia and we'll try to bring them into the public circuit,' George Damian added. 

The event was attended by Florentina Nitu, dean of the Faculty of History with the University of Bucharest, Gabriel Moisa, vice-dean of the Faculty of History with the University of Oradea, and Aurel Stefanachi, director of Tipo Moldova, Iasi.