MEMORIES ABOUT PROFESSOR VICTOR TUFESCU Ion NICOLAE


University of Bucharest


This spring there are eight years since the professor V. Tufescu left us suddenly. In the age of Romanian geography patriarchs the professor – his birth will be commemorated this autumn for 100 years – was in that beginning of March 2000 worried for the bad health of his wife who was recovering after a hard obstacle. I was in the apartment from Bd. Nicolae Titulescu together with my wife to bring Mrs. Tufescu a bouquet of flowers and the traditional “martisor”, herald of spring. The same warm, welcoming atmosphere the pro- fessor practiced, the same joy not altered by the passing of years. Nothing showed that this meeting would be the last from a long row that began in 1969 when he – for the great honor and probity of our University – integrated in the collective of human geography (economic by then) of the Faculty of Ge- ography and I, a fresh graduate, was beginning my academic carrier within the department of general geography whose leader the professor had just been named.


Now, at almost 40 years distance, I try to remember some sequences of


the years I spent near the great professor, a man among men, the writer’s saying. My emotion, in that beginning of February 1969 was greater then when after a short while, I found my work place in the office of the depart- ment’s chief, in the 3rd floor of the faculty. The young man of not even 25 years old – that was me – was having the unhoped privilege to be each day near one of the greatest geographers of the country! I had known since the years of study a great part of the large (by then) work of the professor, read in the lecture room of the faculty’s library. As the university manuals were few, the basis of our preparation was represented – besides the courses – the bib- liography recommended by the course teachers or the seminar hours. At- tracted by the clear, beautiful style, far from the somehow cold, arid manner of many of the human geography texts of the era, I started to read other works/ studies of the professor as well, besides the recommended ones. I discovered a real writer (not only geographer) in whom the esthetic part of the scientific text was very priced. Then, there had recently been removed from index many works and publications appeared in the pre-communist period so I read wondered and pleasant the text regarding the cities of Iasi and Botosani, then the fairs of Moldavia, but also the ones regarding Romania’s (political) geog- raphy around and in the time of the last world war. Another geography was


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