One blue night… don’t we all dream to be sailors?
Fishermen in Alexandria, photo by Mohamed Ebaid
During my recent stay in Romania I started reading Europolis. As time came for me to leave, I had to drop the book unfinished. Too bad for the check in, too good for the imagination. The pen name adopted by the Romanian author (1877 – 1933), Jean Bart, used to wear a 17-century naval commander’s hat. Its owner, the son of a fisherman, had grown up to be an admiral in the service of Louis XIV and an inspiration for many tales of courage on land and at sea.
Eugeniu Botez, a Romanian sailing out under a French flag, writing about the Danube and the civilization of the country of his birth.
Europolis is his posthumously published and oustandingly cosmopolitan novel which I recommend sailing out to, from the Danube port of Sulina into the waters of the Black Sea and beyond. Excerpts from Europolis here.
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