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564 UN DfiBAT : LES MENTALITfiS COLLECTIYES 8

Fig. 2. Holders of publlc offices, men of business, secretaries witb yarious duties built fortlfied houses (“cule**) in Northern Oltenia by the end of thę 18th century. They stand proof to the hard condltions of life which interrupted the development of the fine architecture of the Brfin-coveanu period. Tudor Vladimirescu at Cerneti*, Ghl^ó Cutui^b, who became a captain in Vla-dlmirescu's army, or the Grecenl at Mfiftifireęti⁰ had to give up ostentatlon in order to obtain

morę security.

which was becoming ever morę unbearable as the old regime was unveiling its failures and its inability to answer new reąuests. This is what Lnpu Batcu, a copist, tells ns in a notice, commenting with disdain the exilation of an abusire Phanariot official: “when he was sent into exile he would return money to secure some honours. In spite of his return of money the honours he was awarded in his exile to Constantinople were no others than those offered to a cat which is taken away from the pot of milk of which it has licked the cream away”. A few years later, iń 1815, in a letter to Glogoveanu, Tudor Vladimirescu was setting things right when he described the inefficiency of the Phanariot authorities in barring the terrible pillage the Ottoman soldiers were making : “such an authority with such a big country was not able to stop a smali Ihing like this and has left us a prey to poverty and complete darkness !”

During the epoch of the Enlightenment, a national spirit came to the fore in many fields; intellectual actiyity diversified and book-learning witnessed a major espansion gaining control over orał tradition, dominant in previouB centuries through the system known as “to see —