Combatant în cel de-al Doilea Război Balcanic. Memoriile inginerului Alexandru Serescu şi constituirea Fondului Arhivistic Naţional
Fighting in the Second Balkan War. The Memoirs of Engineer Alexandru Serescu and the Formation of the National Archival Fund

Summary/Abstract: This study examines how the National Archival Fund was organised at the local level within the Romanian State/ National Archives and how the memoirs of a Romanian engineer, who fought on the front during the Second Balkan War (1913), were incorporated into that archive. The unedited material in the documentary appendix at the end of the article complements the well-known image of the military conflict in summer 1913 and reinforces public perception of the disastrous state of the logistics and sanitary services of the Romanian army around the outbreak of the First World War. Furthermore, the material should be approached critically because it was written during the communist era and intended for use by the cultural institutions of that time, which were subordinate to the main repressive ministry of the Ceauşescu dictatorship. In this context, the text partly avoids specific taboo topics, such as the role of the monarchy in Romanian life at the beginning of the twentieth century. The paper also includes a brief biography of the young engineer, a combatant on the Balkan front during the Romanian-Bulgarian War of 1913.

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