Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu

Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu was a Romanian writer and philologist, who mastered in many
branches of Romanian philology and history. Hasdeu is considered to have been able to
understand 26 languages many of which he could also chat in.
He was born in Cristinetii Hotinului, northern Basarabia. His father was the writer Alexandru
Hasdeu, a descendent of the Hjdu family of Moldavian boyars. After studying law at the
University of Kharkiv, he fought in the Crimean War. In 1858 he settled in Iai as a high
school teacher and librarian. In 1865, Hasdeu published a monograph on Ioan Vod the
Terrible, renaming him for the first time cel Viteaz. The portrayal of this violent, short rule
as a glorious moment and of Ioan himself as a reformer drew criticism from the Junimea
society, a conflict which has followed Hasdeu for the rest of his life.
His Etymologicum magnum Romaniae written1886 was the beginning of an encyclopaedic
dictionary of the Romanian language, though he never covered letters after B, at the word
barbat.
After the death of his only child, the beloved Julia, in 1888, he became a spiritualist and a
firm adept of the spiritism. He retreated to Cmpina, where he built a castle, and arranged it as
a temple to his newly found beliefs and to his daughter. One day, he was writing something, a
letter, and suddenly he started to write with his daughters calligraphy. In the end, he signed
the letter as Julia Hasdeu. He realised in that moment that his daughter was trying to
communicate with him, and thats why he got involved in spiritism. There are certain legends
about the Cmpina castle in which both his dead daughter and Hasdeu are involved. Many
people used to hear at night Julia playing the piano, or used to see her silhouette at the
balcony. Hasdeu died there and was buried in Bellu cemetery, Bucharest.
His works include two dramas, Rsvan i Vidra romanticizing the actions of an obscure
1590s Moldavian Voivode, tefan Rzvan, and Domnia Ruxandra. In 1891, he wrote Sic
Cogito, a theoretical work of spiritism as a philosophy, in which he speaks about his
experience with Julias ghost and how he built the castle at her advice.The critic and writer
Mircea Eliade described him as a "genius of an amazing vastness".