Patricia Lidia has initiated over the years a number of cultural projects, including a book club for detainees, the first of its kind in the country, as well as creative writing workshops for children. We asked her to tell us more about her latest project entitled S\u0103 ciTimi\u0219oara, <\/i>which seeks to promote the writers from Timi\u015foara and the books about this city in western Romania.<\/p>\n
\u201cThe name is a playful combination between the verb to read and Timi\u0219oara. Our intention is to promote writers from Timi\u0219oara and books about Timi\u0219oara, for we often feel that because we are at some distance away from the capital city, in another geographical region of the country, writers from Timi\u0219oara are little known outside of their own city. Four years ago we launched this initiative in the form of informal meetings rather than book launches in which we look at how the city is reflected and in which we promote the city\u2019s writers.\u201d<\/p>\n
The participants in these meetings are writers themselves, although they also have other day-to-day jobs, says our interlocutor Patricia Lidia:<\/p>\n
\u201cWe each discovered Timi\u0219oara\u2019s history during research for our own books and each realised in our own way that the city\u2019s Freedom Square, its baroque buildings, the fancy restaurants, Trajan Square and Fabric, which is now unfortunately in ruins, have a captivating history, much more so than we could have imagined or about which we didn\u2019t know because we often tend to glorify the cities we go to on holiday but forget that we live in a beautiful city ourselves, a city that attracts many tourists. We discovered the city\u2019s hidden treasures and were united in a desire to show the world that this city full of history but little known is not just a collection of Habsburg-era vestiges and bored engineers, but also a cultural destination, a place that witnessed important historical events and which are not taught in school but which should be known not only by adults and older people but also children, so as to understand in fact the context in which Timi\u0219oara developed.\u201d<\/p>\n
Patricia Lidia says the project is completely apolitical:<\/p>\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t do politics, have nothing to sell. We simply want to get together regularly, we, the writers of Timi\u0219oara with the readers of Timi\u0219oara, with people who are passionate about Timi\u0219oara, and talk without affectation, like friends, about the corners of the city that caught our attention and listen to fragments from books inspired by these places read by the very writers who discovered those wonderful places. We started out with a small group of 6 or 8 friends and at our last gathering there were 35 of us. Much to our surprise and joy, we had to borrow chairs from the neighbours, there were so many of us. We usually meet at two locations, at C\u0103rture\u0219ti Mercy in the centre and at AmPm, a bar in the Fabric area, but recently we started working with an antique book shop, Queen, which will create a special section dedicated to writers from Timi\u0219oara.\u201d<\/p>\n
We asked our interlocutor about the interesting things these readings uncovered:<\/p>\n
\u201cOne seminal work I discovered is Cristian Vicol\u2019s \u2018Short History of Timi\u0219oara until 1716\u2019, which doesn\u2019t just focus on historical data as we learn them in school, but weaves them together with captivating stories and images to provide a new perspective on the city\u2019s history and myths. I found out from this book, for example, that although we learn in school about the famous battle of Posada of 1330, when the Hungarian king Carol Robert of Anjou was defeated and driven out, we don\u2019t also learn that his residence was in Timi\u0219oara, which was at the time an integral part of the Hungarian Kingdom and that the whole operation in fact had been launched from here.\u201d<\/p>\n
Patricia Lidia is full of confidence in the future when it comes to reading and the writers of Timi\u0219oara:<\/p>\n
\u201cApart from the established, albeit amateur, writers we have here in Timi\u0219oara, we are also trying to cultivate a passion for writing and for the city among children. So we also have our little writers. I\u2019m very proud of my contribution to the publication of a book coordinated by Elena Manolache, who teaches at School no. 25 in Timi\u0219oara, where they published a book containing texts written by children, so I\u2019m confident that the future generations of writers are being forged and that we will have some wonderful surprises.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Patricia Lidia has initiated over the years a number of cultural projects, including a book club for detainees, the first of its kind in the country, as well as creative writing workshops for children. We asked her to tell us more about her latest project entitled S\u0103 ciTimi\u0219oara, which seeks to promote the writers from […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":126,"featured_media":779983,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42520],"tags":[29545,29645],"coauthors":[113240],"class_list":["post-780180","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inside-romania","tag-books","tag-timisoara"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n