Abstract
Following World War II, Romania was forced to remove from the public conscience any reference to the territories that were taken after 1945 (Bessarabia, Northern Bukovina, Cadrilater/ Southern Dobruja), as well as to the personalities who became somehow undesirable to the new political regime. Consequently, the publications containing any reference, no matter how small, to a subject that could harm the good relations with the USSR were purged. The purge applied to: works written by the members of the royal family or related to them; the royal coat of arms and the symbols of the dynasty; the statutes of the interwar political parties; any work of specific authors (war criminals, the ones that fled the country, authors declared undesirable to the communist regime); several “tendentious” works of certain authors; text books from 1920-1948; folk calendars, almanacs, etc., from 1918-1944; any map including the territories that had belonged to the Romanian state until World War II; military literature, rules, treaties, etc., from 1916 onward, as well as laws and instructions associated to them from 1920 till 1945; history and geography works related to Bessarabia. Inevitably, the field of traditional culture was not overlooked by the prohibitive politics enforced in Romania by the Soviet occupation. In order to restore the historical truth and to recover information in the field of ethnology, one should go back to the sources of information of that time, and the specialized works which are important and valid even today should be republished. It is the only way to eliminate the hiatuses and to get the correct and complete image on the evolution of the research of Romanian traditional culture. Our scientific undertaking constitutes a cultural must and a moral obligation towards those specialists in ethnology who were wronged by history, whose activity should be known and appreciated for its real value.
Keywords: traditional culture, ethnology, ethnography, censorship, communism, purging of books, banned books.
Cuvinte-cheie: cultură populară, etnologie, etnografie, cenzură, comunism, epurarea cărţilor, cărţi interzise.