Avram Iancu in the Spring of 1848: Considerations on the Mentality of a Revolutionary

There are many outstanding biographies of Avram Iancu (1824–1872), as the revolutionary fighter holds an important place in the Romanian ‘Pantheon,’ the latest being Silviu Dragomir’s book of 1965. However, the attempts to approach his personality from the perspective of the history of mentalities have been conspicuously missing. This is precisely the approach chosen for the present study, which is based on the document collections published in the last half century (especially Documente privind Revoluția de la 1848 în Țările Române. C. Transilvania, including the fabulous volume 10, dedicated to Ancheta Kozma în Munții Apuseni, 2012). The testimonies of Iancu’s contemporaries, as well as the rich folklore, reveal an unknown facet of the hero, not only providing additional information on the events of the 1848–1849 Revolution, but also highlighting the revolutionary’s ideology, inner motivations and intimate drives.