One of the greatest satisfactions of a historian is working with an authentic document, unpublished, unexplored and uninterpreted by someone else until it. We can say, today, when we write these lines, that we have managed, due to the nature of the topic we have tackled, to feel this gratitude and thanks to it, to make public our work of more than ten years.
The Filipescu family from Drajna, Prahova, was one of the great boyar families of the Teleajen Valley, perhaps even the most important, as evidenced by the existing constructions which, if they had not been significant, would have disappeared, as was fate so many others. One of the descendants of the family, Dumitru Kretzulescu Warthiadi, left posterity a short history of the family of which he was an exponent, focusing mainly on the castle from Drajna and the domain on the Teleajenului Valley. The motivation of this writing will be revealed to the reader in the pages of this work.
The manuscript can be consulted at the National Heritage Institute, where it was taken after a long stay at the Library of the Romanian Academy. In the Institute's archive, the researcher can feel like in a treasure room, and reading the document in that setting was memorable. In this way, we would like to thank the custodians of the Institute, thanks to whom we were able to publish the manuscript, which we purchased in online format, so that it could be consulted more easily by other lovers of the Clio muse.
In the first part of this work, I made a presentation of the Filipescu family from Drajna, from the earliest known times, until today, referring also to the manuscript and updating the existing photos in the pages of the document, black and white, with some in color, more chosen for the exterior of the castle and for its entrance. At the same time, this chapter is part of the doctoral thesis Microhistory of the Teleajen Valley seen through the social elites, coordinated by Prof. Univ. Dr. Laurentiu Vlad, within the program of the Doctoral School of the Faculty of History, University of Bucharest. The book appeared in Ploiesti, Karta Graphic Publishing House, in 2019.
The second part is an article presented in a magazine indexed in international databases from 2015, Codrii Cosminului, in which I published the material presented in English and on which, perhaps, a future foreign traveler arriving in Drajna, you will get to know part of the history of this charming place.
The introduction of this part was not accidental, especially since the area, due to its rich history, deserves increased visibility, the work being able to constitute, without having this claim, a mini-guide of the modern history of Drajne.
This book appeared as a result of the goodwill of the mayor of Drajna commune, Mrs. Violeta Gontea. You too, taking into account the rich history of the locality, managed, through European funds, to renovate and bring back to life the water mill, built by the Filipescu family. I have included some images of the construction, as well as some technical data.
The last part is the actual manuscript. A few clarifications are required. At the recommendation of Mr. Constantin Manolache, the first reader of this work, the typescript, as it was scanned at I.N.P. it cannot be read, especially in the case of publication. In this sense, in order to still preserve the original document, I have technically redacted the 45 pages, still preserving the author's handwriting and original expression, as it was written in the 50s of the last century.
I have added to these pages an indicative bibliography, strictly on the topic at hand.
Probably many will ask, although I have justified the importance of this work above, what is the use of the appearance of yet another book on local history, or even better, on history in general?! Well, the argument is that we learn and read history to broaden our horizons, to see more perspectives on a subject and to be able to develop our own thinking system in this way.
Moreover, Marguerite Yourcenar, a French historian, wrote, at the end of the last century, about the importance of history in the life of society, the following: (we reproduce the quote in its form, to be able to observe the depth of the word and the beauty of the style) "When we mention the love for the past, we must realize that, in fact, it is about the love of life, life belongs more to the past than to the present. The present is always too short a moment, even when its fullness makes it seem eternal. When you love life, you love the past because this is the present as it survived in people's memories. Which doesn't mean that the past was a golden age: like the present, it is equally merciless, gorgeous or brutal or simply whatever." We believe that this realistic approach and deep understanding of the past should guide our steps in any historical investigation, because history is part of the human essence.