The two-millennium history of the B\u0103ile Herculane spas begins in 153 CE, when it was first mentioned in historical records. In the modern era, the Emperor of Austria described B\u0103ile Herculane as “the most beautiful resort on the continent”, while Empress Elizabeth mentioned the spa in her diary. Wishing to keep the history of the place alive, Iacob S\u00e2rbu, a collector from B\u0103ile Herculane, gathered dozens of objects that reconstruct the former glory of the region. He exhibited them at the Romanian Travel Fair, where we caught up with him and asked him to tell us his story:<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u00a0first\u00a0started collecting\u00a0when I was\u00a0a small child,\u00a0during\u00a0my holidays\u00a0spent at\u00a0my mother’s grandfather in Re\u0219ita\u00a0and who was a keen\u00a0collector.\u00a0I learned a lot from him.\u00a0The Herculane\u00a0collection, which is my present\u00a0subject,\u00a0has been my hobby for\u00a0about 8 years,\u00a0and started at a\u00a0difficult\u00a0time\u00a0in my life.\u00a0Putting together\u00a0this collection\u00a0helped me find\u00a0my peace and channel\u00a0my energies.\u00a0While in\u00a0the beginning\u00a0I only showed\u00a0the\u00a0collection\u00a0to only a few friends, things changed when\u00a0I met two remarkable people, Ioan Traia, the president of the\u00a0association of\u00a0rural media\u00a0journalists\u00a0in Banat and Gheorghe Rancu Bodrog, a former teacher and owner of a museum in \u015eopotul Vechi, in the Almaju area,\u00a0in\u00a0Cara\u0219-Severin county.\u00a0The two them helped bring out the best in me and it is thanks to\u00a0them\u00a0that\u00a0I started showing everyone what I\u00a0have collected.\u00a0It is also thanks to them that I agreed to\u00a0take part\u00a0in many cultural events in Banat and in the Serbian Banat, and in February this year, at the invitation of the County Council, I agreed to\u00a0take part in this fair. I\u00a0want to show\u00a0parts of\u00a0my collection,\u00a0and these are in fact\u00a0fragments of local history.\u201d<\/p>\n
Like any passionate collector, Iacob S\u00e2rbu loves all of his objects in equal measure:<\/p>\n
\u201cAll the objects in my collection are important to me. It\u2019s impossible to differentiate between them. An inexpensive postcard from the interwar or communist period is just as valuable to me as a rare postcard or a lithograph that costs several hundred euros. There is no difference. However, there is one object that is very dear to me, a replica of the statue of Empress Elizabeth from Herculane. The statue did exist once, but it no longer does, no one knows where it is, whether it broke or was thrown away. A friend recreated this replica based on old photos. I insisted that he made it as close to the old one as possible, so that I can present both the replica of Sissi\u2019s statue from Caransebe\u0219, which I got from Gheorghe Rancu, and this replica from Herculane. In time, ever since I started work on this collection, I have come to know a lot of people who can help me get hold of things like books, objects, photographs, postcards, and which I can find on eBay or Delcampe.\u201d<\/p>\n
Some of the objects exhibited by our interlocutor come all the way from Argentina, in the form of postcards sent from Herculane and dating from the spa\u2019s heyday. Iacob S\u00e2rbu described to us some of the more special postcards from his collection, starting with the oldest one, dated July 7, 1894:<\/p>\n
“This postcard is vertical. In the top part of the postcard there is an image of the Ghizel Park, as it was called back then, today the Central Park, flanked by the two hotels, which at that time during the imperial period, were called Franz Joseph and Rudolph. Each postcard has a story, each has something special. For example it is printed on silk and the silk is glued to cardboard. This postcard is from 1899, if you put a light source behind it, all the windows of the buildings appear lit up. The same type of postcards can be found for other places, such as Vatra Dornei, Lipova, Buzia\u0219 and B\u0103ile Felix. This one here makes fun of how busy the resort is and this one shows a man who comes with a lot of money to Herculane and goes home bankrupt.”<\/p>\n
Vertical panoramic postcards, 54 cm long, kept in a frame by those who received them, an advertisement page from the Curierul Banatului newspaper, dated 31st<\/sup> December 1934, chromolithographs with B\u0103ile Herculane from 1840, 1842 and 1860 are also part of the collection, which will soon also be available to see online.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The two-millennium history of the B\u0103ile Herculane spas begins in 153 CE, when it was first mentioned in historical records. In the modern era, the Emperor of Austria described B\u0103ile Herculane as “the most beautiful resort on the continent”, while Empress Elizabeth mentioned the spa in her diary. Wishing to keep the history of the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":126,"featured_media":838471,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[42520],"tags":[43962,29229],"coauthors":[113240,113280],"class_list":["post-838422","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inside-romania","tag-baile-herculane","tag-tourism"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\n