# Anthropology: how differently can everyday life be organised?

Compare coded answers about family and social life, with the unit, number of records and missing data in view.

https://mariuscomper.uk/en/anthropology/

- [The languages of Timișoara, 1869–2021: what its people told the census](https://mariuscomper.uk/limbile-timisoarei/en/): In 1910 the 6,728 Jews of Timișoara, a city in western Romania, mostly had Hungarian or German as their mother tongue: they appear only when language is set beside religion. The mother tongue, nationality and faith declared at every census from 1869 to 2021, one window for every hundred people.
- [Fishers and farmers at the Iron Gates: who grew up elsewhere?](https://mariuscomper.uk/pescari-si-agricultori/en/): As farming began, teeth indicate more people raised in a different geological area. Nine sites on the gorge’s relief map, with sample phases, DNA, diet and precise sources.
- [The old street names of Timișoara: at least 806 changes of name in a hundred years](https://mariuscomper.uk/numele-strazii-tale-timisoara/en/): Bulevardul Take Ionescu was Magyar utca, then Heroes of Stalingrad, then Leontin Sălăjan. Every recorded name of the 1,345 streets of Timișoara, a city in western Romania, from the Hungarian names of before 1919 to now, searchable by street.
- [How often it rains in London: all 24,350 days since 1960, wet or dry](https://mariuscomper.uk/london-rain/): At Heathrow it rains, 1 mm or more, on three days in ten: 109 days a year. Paris, measured at Orly, gets the same; New York gets twice the rain on fewer wet days. Every day from 1 January 1960 to 31 August 2026 is one mark on a wall of days, any date can be followed year by year, and with a year of birth the page counts the birthdays it rained on.
- [London’s pubs, counted: what they are called, how near they are, how many are left](https://mariuscomper.uk/london-pubs/): London’s commonest pub name is The Crown, ahead of the Prince of Wales and the Red Lion: 31 of the 3,155 pubs mapped by OpenStreetMap’s volunteers. Half of the city’s postcodes have a mapped pub within 286 m in a straight line, and the official count of pubs and bars fell from 4,835 in 2001 to 3,525 in 2024, with Hackney the only borough that rose. A map of London drawn only from its pubs, with a result and a picture for each of 217 postcode districts.
- [London’s blue plaques, counted: who gets one, and which districts have none](https://mariuscomper.uk/london-blue-plaques/): London’s official blue plaque scheme, run today by English Heritage, has 1,035 plaques: 166 are in W1, and 31 of the 120 London postal districts have none. 152 of the 1,010 plaques to a person honour a woman, and the median wait between death and plaque is 49 years. All 3,942 plaques on record, of every kind, on a map drawn from postcodes, with the plaque nearest any postcode and the words on it.
- [London's protected views: 13 sightlines and the rules on building heights](https://mariuscomper.uk/london-protected-views/): London's planning rules protect thirteen lines of sight to St Paul's, the Palace of Westminster and the Tower; the longest runs 15.6 km from a gap kept in a hedge in Richmond Park. All thirteen, drawn from the government's 2012 Directions, with the height limit under each, the real ground and roofs from laser survey, and a postcode look-up.
- [London postcodes: why each district has the number it has](https://mariuscomper.uk/london-postcodes/): London's postcode numbers are alphabetical: in March 1917 the Post Office gave 1 to each district's main office and numbered the other delivery offices by name, so Hackney is E8 and SE2 is 15 km from SE1. All 120 districts on a map drawn from 110,673 postcodes, each with its own sentence and picture, and the 5,655 lines of the 1917 street list to search.
- [Which people from Romania the world reads about on Wikipedia: 43 languages, 2015–2026](https://mariuscomper.uk/ce-citeste-lumea-despre-romania/en/): The most-read article about a person from Romania changes from one Wikipedia edition to the next: Sebastian Stan in English, Matthias Corvinus in Hungarian, Vlad the Impaler in Turkish, the poet Eminescu in Romanian. A wall of 43 languages shows the face at the top of each, its top ten names and the months when a name surged. In Romanian, English and Chinese.
- [Blue London, Red London: Charles Booth’s poverty map of 1898–9, one colour at a time](https://mariuscomper.uk/blue-london/): In 1898–9 Charles Booth’s investigators coloured London’s streets in seven colours, from black and blue for the poorest to yellow for the wealthy. Choose a colour to see where it was printed, or look up a street. In English and Romanian.
- [Why London’s post boxes and phone boxes are red](https://mariuscomper.uk/londra-rosie/en/): The British pillar box was red in Jersey in 1852, green from 1859 and red again from 1874, London first, and the phone box’s architect wanted it silver. This page follows four London objects, the post box, the phone box, the bus and the Underground logo, year by year from 1852 to 1946 through 18 entries from the record: what the Postal Museum, Historic England and BT Archives say at each change. On the way there is one question: what did Scott write in 1935 about red kiosks in the countryside?
- [Britain and Romania: nearly 2,000 years of links, from Hadrian’s Wall to the 2021 census](https://mariuscomper.uk/britanie-romania/en/): Twelve sourced stops on what Britain and Romania left in each other, from a hoard of nails in Scotland and Dacians on Hadrian’s Wall to jets built in Bucharest; at the end you look up how many Romania-born people live in your area of England or Wales.
- [Argentine ants accept strangers from thousands of kilometres away and fight rivals whose nests are 27 metres apart](https://mariuscomper.uk/supercolonia-furnicilor/en/): In 2000, 33 Argentine ant nests along the coast from Italy to the Atlantic were paired two at a time in a small vial. Ants of one supercolony never fought; between the two European supercolonies a worker died in 235 of 241 trials. Pick two nests on the map and see the result, then what was and was not tested.
- [“Here I rest”: how a Săpânța cross is written](https://mariuscomper.uk/sapanta/en/): 90 crosses from the Merry Cemetery, transcribed in the field in 2001–02 and read line by line: 49 of 84 verse crosses open with the same sentence and the typical line has seven or eight syllables, but spelling does not let the count prove more.
- [Did you know? One verified fact at a time from the site’s projects, linked to the paragraph that proves it](https://mariuscomper.uk/stiai/en/): A short, surprising fact by topic, with an “Another one” button and a direct link to the section that explains it. Thousands of verified facts from the site’s projects.
- [The tallest building in Bucharest, 1933 to today: the four that held the record](https://mariuscomper.uk/cel-mai-inalt-din-bucuresti/en/): The Telephone Palace, Casa Scînteii, Tower Center International and Sky Tower drawn to one scale beside a ruler in metres, plus a 250 m chimney. You climb the ruler with the text, see who held the record and for how long, and choose the floors of your own block to find which record it would have broken.
- [London church bells: 178 towers, their practice nights, and what the bells sound like](https://mariuscomper.uk/london-bells/): A night map of London's bell towers: pick a night and the towers listing a practice in Dove's Guide light up, tap one to hear its bells, synthesised at the frequencies in the ringers' database, while the order of the ropes changes row by row. Four towers, including St Mary-le-Bow, also have real openly licensed recordings.
- [London's stations keep a diary: 434 Tube, DLR, Overground and Elizabeth line stations, every day since 2019](https://mariuscomper.uk/london-station-diary/): Daily tap counts at 434 London stations, January 2019 to September 2026, wound into rings: one ring per year, one slice per day. Southfields lights up for Wimbledon, Arsenal station follows the fixture list, Ladbroke Grove has no row on Carnival days, and on Christmas Day TfL counts zero Tube journeys. Pick your station and a date of your own.
- [The old cinemas of Bucharest, 1964–2026: where the halls stood and what became of each](https://mariuscomper.uk/cinematografele-bucurestilor/en/): On 22 June 1964, Scînteia listed films in 53 Bucharest halls; today 17 cinemas run a regular programme, 11 in malls. A map of every hall, what it became, and a street search for 1964, 1986 and today.
- [The factories of Bucharest](https://mariuscomper.uk/fabricile-bucurestilor/en/): Type your street and see the big factories near you as they were and what stands there now: 63 factories, only 13 still make anything; the rest became malls, offices, flats or wait. In 1991, 463,366 manufacturing employees; in 2025, 89,063.
- [The churches of Bucharest](https://mariuscomper.uk/bisericile-bucurestilor/en/): Type your street and see the old churches around you, the oldest of them, and the nearest church pulled down or moved on rails: 88 churches on today's map, from Curtea Veche (1558–1559) to Cuibul cu Barză, pushed 16 metres in 1988.
- [The inns of Bucharest](https://mariuscomper.uk/hanurile-bucurestilor/en/): Type your street and see which inn stood near you and what stands on its site now: 42 inns of old Bucharest on today's map, from Șerban-Vodă (now the National Bank) to the three still standing.
- [The trams of Bucharest](https://mariuscomper.uk/tramvaiele-bucurestilor/en/): Type your street and see the nearest tram line in 1872, around 1910, in 1963, in 1984 and today, plus the line that disappeared near you. From the 1872 horse line to today's track under works.
- [The parks of Bucharest](https://mariuscomper.uk/parcurile-bucurestilor/en/): Type your street and see how a park came closer to your house, from 1855 to today, and what was on its ground before: drained ponds, clay pits, rubbish tips, demolished houses. 169 named parks on today's map, 20 with their history.
- [The site quiz: over 3,000 questions from the essays](https://mariuscomper.uk/quiz/en/): Ten categories, two levels, 44 titles to earn with a clean sheet. Every question comes from a verified fact on the site.
- [The markets of Bucharest](https://mariuscomper.uk/pietele-bucurestilor/en/): Type your street and see the nearest market in 1563, c. 1708, 1846, c. 1900, 1938 and today: from the bazaar by the Princely Court to today's 49 markets. Plus the Outer Fair that kept running from the city, the lost halls and Obor.
- [The Great Fire of 1847](https://mariuscomper.uk/marele-foc-1847/en/): Easter Sunday, 1847: from a house by Sf. Dumitru, fire burned a 2.1 km strip of Bucharest out to the vineyards. The April 1847 burn plan fitted to today's streets: type an address to see whether the fire reached it, in what order places burned, and what building rules followed.
- [The Romanian cities where trams still run](https://mariuscomper.uk/orase-cu-tramvai-romania/en/): Eleven Romanian cities still run trams. See every network on a map, which cities gave up their trams, and why some sources wrongly say 10 remain.
- [The plank roads of Bucharest](https://mariuscomper.uk/podurile-bucurestilor/en/): Calea Victoriei, Moșilor, Rahovei and Șerban Vodă were once "poduri": streets of oak beams, replaced every five or six years. Type your street and see which old road took you to the Princely Court, how far it was and what it was called over the years.
- [How many people are left in your commune](https://mariuscomper.uk/comunele-care-se-golesc/en/): Search your commune or county and see on 3D terrain how its population fell or rose across the 2002, 2011 and 2021 censuses. Every commune is a column: height is population, colour is change. In Romanian and English.
- [How many years of your life will your phone take?](https://mariuscomper.uk/years-in-your-phone/en/): Enter your age and daily phone hours: the page shows what your number means across a year and by age 80 — whole days, unread books, laps of the Earth on foot.
- [How much for a mile? — London hackney coaches, 1654–1832](https://mariuscomper.uk/hackney-coach/en/): Price ten fares across four dated runs — an Exchange run of 1655, a lawyer's shilling of 1662, two admeasured miles of 1715, a GPO circle of 1832 — then judge who the paper meter served, on two dated proof rails.
- [School uniforms: who’s right?](https://mariuscomper.uk/uniforma-scolara/en/): The 15 arguments from both sides of Romania's compulsory-uniform debate. Say what you think of each, then see what studies from the US, France, Kenya and England show. Plus what the Senate voted, what it would cost you and the uniform's history since 1552. In Romanian and English.
- [What you didn’t see at the party](https://mariuscomper.uk/aceeasi-petrecere/en/): One party in a flat, seen through 21 ideas from anthropology and sociology, from Mauss’s gift to Granovetter’s weak ties: what each one shows, what evidence it rests on and where it stops. Plus five famous ideas that didn’t hold up. In Romanian and English.
- [The Crystal Palace — the leaf that held a little girl and the glass house that held over six million people (London, 1851)](https://mariuscomper.uk/palatul-de-cristal/en/): In November 1849, a giant waterlily leaf at Chatsworth held an eight-year-old girl. The gardener who weighed it sketched on blotting paper, at Derby, the most extensive building in Europe — and over six million people walked through it. Load the leaf yourself, until it holds Annie. In Romanian and English.
- [The Hills Made of Houses: more than a thousand years of Gumelnița, from 406 radiocarbon dates](https://mariuscomper.uk/gumelnita/en/): Between 4900 and 3800 BC on the Lower Danube, people built their houses one on top of another until their villages became mounds. A clock drawn from 406 radiocarbon dates, the gold of Varna, four people raised elsewhere and what has actually been found under Bucharest, in Romanian and English.
- [Work the morning — London coffeehouses, 1652–1860](https://mariuscomper.uk/coffee-london/en/): Tick twelve slips across three coffeehouse tapes — brokers’ talk at Jonathan’s, ship news at Lloyd’s, the auction hammer at Garraway’s — then judge what emptied the houses, on two dated proof rails.
- [The Great Stink — the summer the Thames became a sewer (London, 1858)](https://mariuscomper.uk/marea-duhoare/en/): June 1858: the Thames sinks, the heat bakes the banks, and Parliament's curtains soak in chloride of lime. Stand at Crossness at high water and open the sluice gates: a tide's worth of London sets off downriver on the ebb. In Romanian and English.
- [Run it downhill — the Great Stink and Bazalgette's sewers, 1858–1875](https://mariuscomper.uk/sewer-bazalgette/en/): Run one drop of sewage through the 1858 city, then the interceptors: seven junctions with report-sourced refusals, two dated proof rails, and the verdict — the money, not the plan.
- [Bill the fair, bury the fair — Smithfield, 1133–1855](https://mariuscomper.uk/bartholomew-fair/en/): Bill each century's fair — 1400, 1600, 1700, 1850 — from 27 sourced acts, then judge what closed the field after the last proclamation: 722 years of fair at Smithfield on two dated proof rails.
- [Guess what a song is for: 118 recordings from 86 societies, heard by 29,357 people](https://mariuscomper.uk/ce-canta-lumea/en/): Hear melodies recorded around the world and guess whether each is for dancing, healing, love or putting a baby to sleep. Lullabies and dance songs are recognised anywhere; love songs barely above chance.
- [How rare is your birthday?](https://mariuscomper.uk/ziua-ta-de-nastere/en/): Pick a date and see where it ranks among the 365 of the year, from 6.5 million births recorded in Romania in 1995–2025. The same data show births moving away from weekends, new public holidays, the 13th and 29 February.
- [29 questions at America's gate: Romanian emigration to America (1880–1930)](https://mariuscomper.uk/cu-vaporul-spre-america/en/): 148,249 Romanians admitted between 1899 and 1924, the Fiume sailings, the Ellis Island inspection to try yourself, and nine real passengers to search by name.
- [A Little Coffee, a Cafezinho — the silent grammar of Romanian diminutives](https://mariuscomper.uk/cafeluta/en/): A Romanian diminutive leaves the object of a request untouched and absorbs, instead, the conflict around it. The phonetics of smallness, its reverse into contempt, contraband-coffee history, and an eleven-culture comparative atlas, with a word-by-word dissectable simulator.
- [The Empty House — 1 in 4 Dwellings Stands Empty](https://mariuscomper.uk/casele-goale/en/): The 2021 Census counts 2.53 million unoccupied dwellings — 25.5% of the housing stock. In Mehedinți 36.3% are empty. County map, breakdown and why the rural empty stock does not solve city rents.
- [Romania Keeps Building. But For Whom?](https://mariuscomper.uk/constru-pentru-cine/en/): Romania's national statistics office counts, every year, how many dwellings exist in every locality. Since 1992 the housing stock has grown 29,5%, even as the domiciled population fell 8,3% — and in 65,2% of 2.946 localities, housing grew exactly where people left.
- [If this bridge disappears](https://mariuscomper.uk/daca-podul-dispare/en/): Slobozia–Hârșova, two towns in south-east Romania: closing Giurgeni–Vadu Oii Bridge would add 59 minutes in the model. Close it on the map and follow the detour.
- [PISA 2025: every country's report card](https://mariuscomper.uk/lumea-digitala/en/): PISA 2025, across eight themes — performance, socio-economic equity, gender, AI and digital, engagement, climate, family, environment — for 91 countries and economies. Romania has one of the OECD's largest socio-economic gaps (122 points), despite strong family support and above-average AI-literacy teaching. Pick any country and see its own dashboard.
- [The cars that don't leave](https://mariuscomper.uk/masinile-care-nu-pleaca/en/): Eight in ten cars on Romanian roads are more than 10 years old, and for every new car sold, three more arrive second-hand from the West. Why the fleet keeps aging instead of renewing — in official Romanian statistics.
- [When the file starts telling your story](https://mariuscomper.uk/my-life-as-a-spy/): A source-grounded reading guide to Katherine Verdery's book, the 2,781-page Securitate file, and the identity surveillance built around an anthropologist in communist Romania.
- [Would you still give this name?](https://mariuscomper.uk/numele-asta-se-mai-da/en/): Maria ranked No. 1 in every year from 2002 to 2022. Type a first name and a birth year to see whether you belong to a crowd or a memory.
- [The custom of the land: how a claim to land was proved before the cadastre](https://mariuscomper.uk/obiceiul-pamantului/en/): How a boundary or an estate was proved before the cadastre and the land register: 12 oath-helpers, surveyors, letters of curse, pre-emption and the Vrancea freeholders' trial against Treasurer Ruset (1801–1814), with the source of every claim.
- [The country boot](https://mariuscomper.uk/portbagajul-de-la-tara/en/): A physical Tetris with the parcel from home: two demijohns, fifteen jars of zacuscă, a sack of potatoes, a bucket of pickles and a frozen cockerel. Then, what the ritual says about short food chains and the informal subsistence economy.
- [What we learned about the mind](https://mariuscomper.uk/psihologia-ultimului-deceniu/en/): Six lessons from psychological research over the past decade. Effects depend on context, beliefs do not always predict action, and credible findings need independent checks.
- [Not every price rise weighs the same](https://mariuscomper.uk/recontorizarea/en/): A Romanian household's basket, counted twice. Out of 1,000 dots, food is 335 by weight but drove 485 of the record 2022 inflation.
- [Sixty or Seventy](https://mariuscomper.uk/saizeci-sau-saptezeci/en/): Set Romania's retirement age to 60, and the public pension system crosses 3% of GDP by 2026. Set it to 70, and it never does through 2060. An interactive demographic engine shows why retirement age matters more than the birth rate.
- [The Anatomy of the Bribe: From Ciubuc to Parandărăt](https://mariuscomper.uk/spaga/en/): Four words, four legal regimes, one transaction: peșcheș, rusfet, ciubuc, parandărăt. Klitgaard's corruption formula and an interactive simulator of the decision to demand or pay an informal fee.
- [The Wave of '67](https://mariuscomper.uk/valul-67/en/): A 1966 decree all but banned abortion in Romania. Births jumped 93% in a single year, and that generation still dominates the country's age pyramid.
- [How Romanians are born](https://mariuscomper.uk/cum-se-nasc-romanii/en/): A thousand Romanian births, rearranged by the mother's age, show how the most common age group shifted from 20–24 to 30–34 between 1990 and 2022. Follow the same dots by year, birth order and county.
- [Can I Bring Food into the UK?](https://mariuscomper.uk/pot-sa-aduc-mancare/en/): Pick where you are travelling from and what is in your bag to get an instant verdict: YES, NO, or YES UP TO X KG. UK rules produce counter-intuitive results: EU poultry is permitted while EU cheese and ham are banned; Indian mangoes pass freely while Turkish strawberries are seized without a plant-health certificate. Includes instant checker and 10-item customs quiz.
- [The Housing Paradox](https://mariuscomper.uk/paradoxul-locuirii/en/): Romania holds Europe’s highest homeownership rate (95.3%) alongside its most overcrowded dwellings (40.5%), with just 1.1 rooms per person. A sociological investigation into the 1990 mass privatization, mortgages melted by hyperinflation, and the concrete flat drafted as a private welfare state of last resort.
- [Risk, everywhere](https://mariuscomper.uk/risk-everywhere/): Twenty-six questions about how a society lives with a future that can go wrong: how badly famine can strike, why misfortune is thought to come, how an infant is shielded, who lends to whom, who can harm you by looking. Every answer comes from the 186 dated societies of the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, with the number coded beside every count and the uncoded societies drawn into the same figure, plus a 140-country survey from 2025. Then every society's record, 11 cases read at their dates, 5 arguments and the questions nobody has coded.
- [Death, everywhere](https://mariuscomper.uk/death-everywhere/): The anthropology of death, sorted by question: who may touch the body, whether the name may still be spoken, how long mourning lasts, where the spirits go, whether what relatives do after a death changes the afterlife. Every answer comes from the 186 dated societies of the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample and 137 Austronesian cultures in Pulotu, with the number coded beside every count and the uncoded societies drawn into the same figure. Then every society's record, a map, 21 cases read at their dates, 12 theoretical arguments and the questions nobody has coded.
- [The Atlas of Human Possibility](https://mariuscomper.uk/feluri-de-a-trai/en/): Anthropologists described 1,291 societies and coded every record under the same headings. The atlas sorts them by 54 everyday questions: who gives wealth to whom at a marriage, who inherits the land, where a baby sleeps, what is done with the bones. Three lenses (answer, region, language family), ten rare possibilities and a game: in which societies did people live most differently from what feels normal to you.
- [Romania is moving, one commune at a time](https://mariuscomper.uk/tara-care-se-muta/en/): From 1990 to 2025, Romania's National Institute of Statistics counted, for every locality, how many people registered a new address there and how many left. The map shows big cities standing still or shrinking, the communes around them growing by up to 56 per thousand a year, and several border population explosions linked to registered address changes.
- [Where do the children go to school?](https://mariuscomper.uk/unde-merg-copiii/en/): Per 100 children born in Romania between 2015 and 2019, the country has 85 primary-school pupils in the autumn of 2025: 91 in towns, 79 in communes. The map shows, for each of the 3,181 localities, how many pupils it has per 100 children born there, which children go to the next town and which towns gather them.
- [When did modernity reach your town?](https://mariuscomper.uk/modernitatea/en/): A year-by-year timeline of water, sewerage, gas and district-heating networks for 3,181 Romanian localities from 1990 to 2025. Modernity arrived in layers: 1,065 have piped water but no sewerage, and 56 of 382 district-heating systems remain.
- [How old is your town?](https://mariuscomper.uk/varsta-localitatii/en/): The median age of each of Romania’s 3,181 localities, computed from the registered population by single year of age (INS, POP107D), on a map with every real boundary. Search your locality, see how old it is against the country and the county, its age fingerprint in one hundred squares, its pyramid by sex and its path from 1992 to 2026. In 528 localities there are now more registered people aged 80 or over than children under 10; in 1992 there were 9.
- [What Romanians die of](https://mariuscomper.uk/de-ce-mor-romanii/en/): Of every thousand deaths in Romania, 545 come from diseases of the heart and the blood vessels. Counted as years of life lost before 75, the same diseases come to 297, and where the red used to be there rise the liver, the road and the first days of life.
- [What We Know About Ourselves](https://mariuscomper.uk/ce-stim-despre-noi/en/): One hundred propositions about Romanians, in ten chapters, each deduced from at least two independent measurements: land, place, kin, house and money, rule and faith, state, time, body, language, word and play. From river names to the 5.00 grade, from the house bought in cash to the 3.1 million who left. With each deduction and limit in plain sight and a map of its 134 sources.
- [From me](https://mariuscomper.uk/de-la-mine/en/): In 1886 Marian printed the first large collection of Romanian folk charms. In 43 of 56 texts in the main collection the patient is named. ‘As… so…’ is a command by likeness, one of eleven.
- [The Arithmetic of Survival: How Romania’s Parallel Economy Worked in the 1990s](https://mariuscomper.uk/bazarul-tranzitiei/en/): When the national currency lost three quarters of its purchasing power in a single year, Soviet military optics became a reserve asset and a pyramid scheme absorbed a third of the country's cash. Four physical artifacts show how households improvised capitalism before commercial banking and cable TV.
- [Releasing the house](https://mariuscomper.uk/slobodirea-casei/en/): In 1892 Simion Florea Marian records that the first rite after birth releases the house. The priest sprinkles. Then anyone may enter. The mother stays inside the farm boundary for forty days. The child takes a first step into church only then.
- [Red after yellow](https://mariuscomper.uk/rosu-dupa-galban/en/): In 1882 Simion Florea Marian read at the Academy the first Romanian book on colour, dyeing and custom. Wool turns red only after it has been yellowed. The last shade follows the bath before it. The names sit on the liquors: gălbinele, albăstrele, flori, negrelă.
- [Linen on the threshold](https://mariuscomper.uk/panza-pe-prag/en/): In 1892 Simion Florea Marian set the Romanian funeral out in 36 chapters. The family lays cloth on the doorstep, at the gate and across the stream; the coffin passes; the cloth is given as pomană. The body lies in the house for three days. The soul, according to most, passes 24 aerial customs. The bones are washed at three, five or seven years.
- [What Isn’t Done](https://mariuscomper.uk/ce-nu-se-face/en/): In 1915 the Romanian Academy printed more than four thousand folk beliefs collected in villages and put the name of an entire people on the cover. The numbering reaches 4,549, with six labels skipped: 4,543 printed entries. I reconstructed them from the OCR export and the scan, tied them to the places where they were heard, and read them as a system of rules. One in four is a prohibition, and 795 of the entries with a locality attribution point to Țepu, in Tecuciu county.
- [What is known — reading Zanne by numbers](https://mariuscomper.uk/ce-se-stie/en/): 19,653 entry heads from «Proverbele românilor», the ten volumes Iuliu A. Zanne published between 1895 and 1912, counted for the first time: the bestiary, the body, God and the devil, the collectors’ map.
- [Fourteen Societies Live Like You](https://mariuscomper.uk/societatea-medie/en/): Take the six questions every ethnographer asks about a family — how many spouses, where the couple moves after the wedding, who sleeps under one roof, what changes hands, what cousins are called, whose line you belong to — and give each the archive's commonest answer. You have built the average human society. In the archive of 1,291 societies coded by George Peter Murdock, it exists five times. The configuration you live in exists fourteen times, and the Romanian village of 1910 is one of them, alongside four Pueblo villages in New Mexico. Of the 909 societies coded on all six, 438 share their record with no other.
- [How long you live on your own, before you marry](https://mariuscomper.uk/doisprezece-ani/en/): Between the day a woman leaves her parents’ house and the day she marries, a Swede has 12.6 years, a Romanian 3.1, and a Croatian minus seven months: she marries before she moves out. The line John Hajnal drew in 1965 from Saint Petersburg to Trieste still captures 95% of the marriage pattern and only 60% of the household one, because the household axis has rotated sixty degrees and now divides north from south. An instrument that rotates the line across 36 countries.
- [Panel Block Civilization](https://mariuscomper.uk/civilizatia-de-la-bloc/en/): Over 8.4 million Romanians live in prefabricated concrete panel blocks. Decree-Law 61/1990 privatized socialist state housing, creating the EU's highest homeownership rate (>95.3%) while sparking an unprecedented structural paradox: absolute sovereignty inside the door, and an unceasing war of attrition in the stairwell. An anthropological investigation across 36 unwritten rules, the Saturday morning hammer drill panopticon, the interactive noticeboard, and a stairwell friction audit.
- [The Envelope Economy](https://mariuscomper.uk/economia-de-plic/en/): Every year, over 100,000 weddings and 150,000 baptisms power an unwritten €2 billion shadow credit union. The cash envelope is a zero-interest loan maturing across a generation. Ten unwritten laws of the wedding ledger, an interactive mental algorithm simulator, and the 30-year lifecycle of a moral credit union explicitly shielded from statutory income tax under Article 62 of the Romanian Fiscal Code.
- [Everyone Is a Relative](https://mariuscomper.uk/toata-lumea-e-ruda/en/): Romanian has words for your child's in-laws, your godchild and your co-godparent, which English cannot say, and no word for an elder brother or a maternal uncle, which 70% of the world's languages have. The dictionary records that almost any kinship term may be said to a stranger. Ten rules of the kinship vocabulary, with an interactive map of 1,056 languages from Kinbank.
- [The Unwritten Grammar of Romanian Everyday Life](https://mariuscomper.uk/gramatica-nescrisa/en/): 42 unwritten social rules, 12 simulated dilemmas, 3 anthropological treatises, and a cross-cultural matrix inspired by Kate Fox’s Watching the English.
- [Who’s watching?](https://mariuscomper.uk/cine-se-uita/en/): Why the same act seems less appropriate around peers or a boss. Change the audience and explore a study of 25,384 people across 90 societies.
- [Why We Say "Dumneavoastră"](https://mariuscomper.uk/cincisprezece-din-doua-sute-sapte/en/): "Dumneavoastră" comes from "domnia voastră" — an old noble title compressed into a word said every day. Only 15 of the 207 languages coded by the World Atlas of Language Structures make more than one politeness distinction for "you." Romanian is the only Romance language on the list. Interactive map of all 207 languages.
- [The Same Mouth — How 32,000 Baby Name Spellings Collapsed Into 4,000 Sounds](https://mariuscomper.uk/aceeasi-gura/en/): US birth records contain 31,904 distinct baby-name spellings in 2024, but a phonetic algorithm reduces them to 3,998 sounds. The interactive charts trace how the gap has widened since 1950.
- [Nine of Thirteen](https://mariuscomper.uk/noua-din-treisprezece/en/): From 2013 to 2025, the World Bank's personal remittances received indicator exceeded net foreign direct investment in nine of thirteen years. The indicator is broader than money sent by the diaspora and does not identify the sender's citizenship. The interactive balance shows both series in the same currency and time window.
- [Three hundred and five regions to 2100](https://mariuscomper.uk/trei-sute-cinci-regiuni/en/): The atlas compares age structure across 305 NUTS-2 regions for SSP1–SSP5 and the years 2020–2100. Under SSP2, the 15–64 share across Romania's eight regions moves from 63.3–66.7% to 46.7–48.9%; the values are conditional scenarios, not forecasts.
- [91 percent of people live south of Bucharest](https://mariuscomper.uk/creasta/en/): In the 2020 population grid, 91.0% of people live south of Bucharest. The ridge is the 25 to 26° N band, with 278 million people. Move the parallel.
- [The Tree That Closes](https://mariuscomper.uk/arborele-care-se-inchide/en/): By generation 30, a family tree requires 1,073,741,824 ancestors, while Earth held only 320 million people in 1100 AD. Travel through 40 generations on the ancestry spindle.
- [Roots beneath the plate](https://mariuscomper.uk/radacinile-farfuriei/en/): Lift the food supply of 177 countries and trace their crops to their primary regions of diversity.
- [Three Centimeters of Border](https://mariuscomper.uk/trei-centimetri-de-granita/en/): Men in South and North Korea, born in 1930, were the same average height. The 1996 generation is 2.9–3.4 cm apart, and South Korean women hold the world's largest century-long rise in height: 20.2 cm. Pick any two countries and compare them on their own growth wall.
- [How Many Relatives Separate You From Genghis Khan?](https://mariuscomper.uk/pasi-pana-la-ginghis-han/en/): Thirty generations back you have, in theory, over a billion ancestors — more people than existed on Earth when Genghis Khan died, in 1227. Pick where your grandparents or great-grandparents came from, and the tool shows a distribution of the generations where a shared ancestor could sit, built from real historical corridors like the Golden Horde over Moldavia or the Crimean Khanate over the Budjak steppe.
- [Close in the data, far on the map.](https://mariuscomper.uk/romania-fara-judete/en/): Find your commune or town and compare three places in other counties with a similar profile. An atlas of 3,181 localities grouped using ten indicators of population, housing, employment, land and budgets.
- [Dan Ungureanu on the origin of Romanian: when, where from, how much is Dacian](https://mariuscomper.uk/dan-ungureanu/en/): Linguist Dan Ungureanu argues that Romanian is a northern-Italian Latin that split off after AD 500, with almost no word provably Dacian. His three ideas, shown on words: the Reichenau glosses, Genoese rhymes of 1300 and 189 substrate words.
- [How Romania's tourism breathes](https://mariuscomper.uk/respiratia-turistica/en/): 712 localities, each with its own tourist year traced month by month from INS TEMPO data, 2023-2025. Nearly a third of all reported nights in Romania fall in July and August alone, yet a clustering algorithm separates localities most cleanly into just two shapes of year: a nearly season-free group (597 localities, including the ski resorts) and a coast-dominated one (115 localities).
- [Is there anyone you could ask for help?](https://mariuscomper.uk/ai-pe-cineva/en/): The European survey on income and living conditions asks, every few years, whether you have a relative, friend or neighbour outside your household you could ask for help. In 2022, 293 people in 1,000 in Romania said no — the highest share of the 33 countries; the Union average is 112 and Norway's is 24. A few questions later in the same interview, Romania gives the Union's highest rating for trust in other people. The reader answers the question first, then sees where the answer falls. The shortfall does not gather in one group: Romania's richest fifth is worse off than the Union's poorest fifth.
- [Where the asphalt ends](https://mariuscomper.uk/unde-se-termina-asfaltul/en/): Romania has 87,220 km of public road, and 20,959 of them are gravel or bare earth. Almost all sit on the local network: 99.4% of the unsurfaced kilometres are county or communal roads, where the share is 30.2%, against 0.7% on national roads. A county map, the four surface classes year by year since 2000, and the streets of 319 towns.
- [The bride who disappeared](https://mariuscomper.uk/cine-cu-cine/en/): In 1990, nearly three in ten Romanian brides were under 20. In 2025, it's one in twenty-two. An interactive grid shows how the age at which Romanians marry has shifted, year by year.
- [Romania, last in EU road deaths](https://mariuscomper.uk/linia-de-sosire/en/): Romania has, again, the EU's highest road death rate. But over 25 years, no other member state has cut its rate by less. The race toward zero, year by year, 27 countries.
- [Romania's direct public purchases and Benford's law](https://mariuscomper.uk/prima-cifra/en/): Nearly 600,000 direct purchases each quarter follow Benford's law, while the legal cap remains clear in the amounts. SEAP data from 2022–2024 shows what the method can tell us, plus a tool for checking your own numbers.
- [The shortage has a shape | Romania labour map](https://mariuscomper.uk/romania-labour-map/): Romania's labour shortage is a set of matching failures. A source-backed map of skills, care, place, formal work and migration.
- [The state has birthdays](https://mariuscomper.uk/the-cliff-at-18/): At 18, 21 and 25, support can change sharply for care leavers. Vulnerability does not disappear on schedule.
- [The Name You Were Given](https://mariuscomper.uk/the-name-you-were-given/): England and Wales baby-name registers, 1904–2025. Type any first name to see its exact rank and count trajectory — and how the 100 most popular names covered 73% of boys born in 1996 but only 43% in 2025.
- [Romania's oldest monasteries are not where you would look for them](https://mariuscomper.uk/cele-mai-vechi-manastiri/en/): Along fifty-four kilometres of the Mureș, three monastic houses enter the written record within six years: Hodoș-Bodrog in 1177, Igriș in 1179, Bizere in 1183. One has monks, one has grass, one has an archaeological trench. The map starts in 992 and runs a thousand years across 461 dated, located sites from the national heritage list.
- [Two in Seven — the public holidays that land on a weekend](https://mariuscomper.uk/doua-din-sapte/en/): Romania writes more public holidays into law than any other EU country, seventeen of them. On average five a year land on a Saturday or a Sunday. Compare twenty-eight national calendars and see what one rule would change.
- [Your birthday, ranked](https://mariuscomper.uk/how-common-is-your-birthday/): Pick a day and month and see where it ranks among the 365 dates of the year in England and Wales, how many babies are born on it, and whose birthday is rarer. Every birth from 1995 to 2025, from the ONS.
- [Maramures 2026: Sighet, Sapanta, Viseu, Borsa, Barsana, Baia Mare — fares and access](https://mariuscomper.uk/maramures/en/): What to see in Maramures: Sighet Memorial 25 lei, Planetarium 20, Mineralogy 20, Sapanta with no official fare, Mocanita in the dedicated guide. Measured access.
- [Romania's smallest town by population, area and density, ranked](https://mariuscomper.uk/en/romania-smallest-town/): What is Romania's smallest town? All 319 towns and municipalities ranked by resident population, administrative area and density, from census and boundary data.
- [The Counter: serve them all before they walk out](https://mariuscomper.uk/ghiseul/en/): A pace-and-focus arcade game about everyday bureaucracy: six documents, impatient queues and three ever-busier shifts. Meet the quota or count the walkouts.
- [What Does a Month in Romania Cost? A Budget Simulator](https://mariuscomper.uk/cat-costa-o-luna/en/): Single-person monthly budget simulator for Bucharest: observed food basket, official STB passes, PMB taxi rates, ECB conversion to yuan; no rent figures (portal terms), you enter yours.
- [Study Medicine in Romania: The International MD Atlas (Verified Shortlist)](https://mariuscomper.uk/studiaza-medicina/en/): Compare tuition and admission conditions at four Romanian medical schools with English-language programmes. The guide explains how to check accreditation, diploma recognition and the steps Chinese graduates may need for licensing in China.
- [Romania vs China Dashboard: Time Gap, Exchange Rate, 10 Indicators, Trade, Distance](https://mariuscomper.uk/ro-cn-dashboard/en/): Compare Romania and China by local time, exchange rates, ten World Bank indicators, bilateral trade and the distance between their capitals. Each figure includes its source and year.
- [Romanian Pickle Fermentation Lab: brine calculator, Chiojdu timeline, murături × pao cai](https://mariuscomper.uk/fermentation-lab/en/): Compare Romanian pickles with Sichuan pao cai, follow four stages of fermentation in Chiojdu, and calculate brine concentration. The page includes a food-safety reference, not recipes.
- [The Romanian Menu Decoded: 30 Dishes, the Bill, and Flags](https://mariuscomper.uk/meniul-romanesc/en/): Explore 30 dishes from three Bucharest menus, with names, ingredients and allergen information. The guide also explains restaurant bills and tipping.
- [Romania's Folk Calendar: Mărțișor, Dragobete, and Sânziene](https://mariuscomper.uk/calendar-popular/en/): What the red-white March string and the June bathing ban are: six customs, every date sourced; the syncretism box; visitor flags for what you can see and where not to go.
- [Seven Roads to Romania: Which Path Fits You, and Which Myths to Ignore](https://mariuscomper.uk/sapte-drumuri/en/): A relocation router: 3 questions route you onto one of 7 legal roads — D/AM1, D/AM2, Blue Card, study, digital nomad, reunification, business. Each road with documents, the first official step, and the lie that traps most people.
- [How big is an iugăr? It depends who is measuring](https://mariuscomper.uk/iugarul/en/): In Rome: about 2,520 m². In the Transylvanian cadastre: 5,754.64. The ploughing day unites them — and a word story in which jug, inherited from Latin, is older than iugăr, re-borrowed late.
- [When the Sun Disappears: An eclipse atlas](https://mariuscomper.uk/eclipse-atlas/): A multidisciplinary atlas of what a total solar eclipse reveals about nature, minds, societies, institutions and knowledge.
- [More Women Graduate. From What?](https://mariuscomper.uk/mai-multe-absolvente/en/): In 2024, women were the majority of tertiary graduates in the EU. Change the denominator to see where the difference between fields sits.
- [Half the people, in 204 places](https://mariuscomper.uk/cantar/en/): The 2021 census placed 19,053,815 resident inhabitants in 3,181 municipalities, towns and communes. Half live in 204 places, half in 2,977. Move the fulcrum along the beam or type a locality.
- [Bektashi, between a spiritual centre and a proposed state](https://mariuscomper.uk/bektashi/en/): The Bektashi headquarters in Tirana exists, a diplomatic status was requested, a sovereign state is only proposed: no public act up to 2 October 2026. From Hacıbektaş to Tirana, Sarı Saltuk's tomb at Babadag and the real area: 27 acres, almost 11 hectares.
- [Where do Romania's airports fly? Every airport's destinations, 2001–2024](https://mariuscomper.uk/panoul-de-plecari/en/): The destinations of every Romanian airport, 2001–2024, from Eurostat. Luton has been the country's top destination since 2015. Pick an airport and a year and read the departures board; every airport has its own page with all its routes.
- [What We Mean When We Say We Want](https://mariuscomper.uk/desire/en/): A bilingual atlas of desire: body, cues, anticipation, pleasure, sex, relationships, culture, technology and self-regulation.
- [What Romania Names Its Streets](https://numele-strazilor.mariuscomper.uk/en/): Romania’s mapped street names, ranked by the number of distinct local administrative units in which each canonical name appears.
- [The Neighbour's Goat](https://capra-vecinului.mariuscomper.uk/en/): A 60-second village chase: herd Fane's goat out of six gardens before the vegetables disappear or the quarrel reaches town hall.
- [Why We Gossip](https://mariuscomper.github.io/why-we-gossip/en.html): A multidisciplinary synthesis of gossip as a mechanism of reputation, governance, cooperation and social order.
- [The Deep Logic of Male-Imposed Body Modification on Women](https://mariuscomper.github.io/deep-logic-webapp/): An interdisciplinary analysis of social conventions, reproductive strategy and coordination traps around male-imposed body modification on women.
- [Anger, Ranked](https://ragebait.mariuscomper.uk/en/): How rage bait became the operating system of public life.
- [The Winds of History](https://vanturile-istoriei.mariuscomper.uk/en/): A documented cultural history of farting, from Sumerian jokes to modern patents.
- [When excuses cannot be verified, rules harden](https://rigid-moral-rules.mariuscomper.uk/en/): A PNAS model explains why rigid moral rules can protect cooperation when people's motives remain hidden.
- [Before the baby, a promise with no guarantee](https://inainte-de-copil.mariuscomper.uk/en/): Claudia Goldin argues that part of low fertility is a credible commitment problem: women's autonomy advanced faster than the sharing of family work.
- [The Romanian Alphabet in 26 (?) Issues](https://alfabetul.mariuscomper.uk/en/): Thirty-one letters each carry a verified statistic about Romania, spanning alcohol, migration, education, health and infrastructure.
- [Before you take a job in Romania, check what is written down.](https://mariuscomper.uk/work-romania/en/): An independent, source-linked guide for workers recruited from Nepal, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka: what Romanian authorities say, what to verify, what to preserve, and where uncertainty remains.
- [Palmares: 21,000 people and a kingdom in the forest](https://mariuscomper.uk/palmares/en/): A documented story of the Palmares communities, the 21,000 figure, Macaco, colonial war and the split of 1678.
- [A Cheese Is a Map](https://mariuscomper.uk/urda-harta/en/): A map of urda and izvara opens three questions about whey technology, the movement of vocabulary and how a local distribution becomes history.
- [Festa Major Granollers: from a brick wager to a civic grammar](https://mariuscomper.uk/festa-major-granollers/en/): How Granollers turned a brickmakers’ wager into a participatory Festa Major, and how other Catalan towns adapted the form.
- [Holo, hype and heists](https://mariuscomper.uk/pokemon-carduri/en/): An analysis of Pokémon cards as game, memory, social badge, speculative asset and target for fraud and theft.
- [A plough, an auger and three saints](https://mariuscomper.uk/cerul-taranului/en/): The Romanian folk sky, collected by Ion Otescu in 1896 through a map posted to village schoolteachers, drawn here over real star positions: 39 figures, four of them inside the same Orion.
- [The Dragon Comes Halfway Through](https://mariuscomper.uk/basme/en/): 138 Romanian folk tales from Wikisource, each stretched from zero to one hundred so you can see where poverty, the forest, the dragon, the wedding and the closing formula fall.
- [Forty-five out of three hundred and ten](https://mariuscomper.uk/scara/en/): A snapshot of Romanian chess in August 2026: 45 of the 310 teenagers who played in 2016 still play today, while the active staircase empties sharply after 18.
- [Zero, seven, twenty-eight, thirty-five](https://mariuscomper.uk/patru-distante/en/): Western and Orthodox Easter can be zero days apart, seven, 28 or 35. Pick a year and see where both fall, and the year they share a day for the last time.
- [Read the pair, judge the law — gin, Hogarth and five Acts, 1729–1751](https://mariuscomper.uk/gin-craze/en/): Place eight fragments — verses and details — on their street, then call five Gin Acts, 1729–1751, against what the gallons did: Hogarth, Fielding and Webb on two dated proof rails.
- [Mamaliga from American maize — How a foreign grain became a national dish](https://mariuscomper.uk/mamaliga-porumbului-american/en/): Maize came from America and replaced millet and buckwheat. Pick a year and a crop, watch the fields change, then grind and stir the porridge yourself.
- [Money, explained](https://mariuscomper.uk/bani/en/): What happens to money kept at home, in the bank or in shares, on real Romanian data: inflation, compound interest, ETFs, 2026 taxes. Plus a 23-term glossary with calculators.
- [Moral Atlas — where in the world thinks like you?](https://mariuscomper.uk/moral-atlas/en/): Six life-and-death dilemmas, 60 seconds, then the map tells you which corner of the world judges exactly like you. Built on the Moral Machine data (MIT, Nature 2018): ~40 million decisions, 3 moral clusters.
- [Zero Maternity Wards](https://mariuscomper.uk/zero-maternitati/en/): A true Cockney had to be born within earshot of the bells of St Mary-le-Bow. In 1851 that radius was 5.06 kilometres. In 2012 it was 2.01 — and inside it, no maternity ward remains.
- [Pe datorie: Romania's public money, 1995–2025](https://mariuscomper.uk/pe-datorie/en/): Romania's public money, 1995–2025: spending per 100 lei collected, the deficit, interest against Poland, Hungary and the EU average, governments on one timeline, the EU excessive deficit procedure and the sovereign rating. With a game: build your own deficit package from the 14 real 2025 measures.
- [Six steps: a daily game of linking projects through verified facts](https://mariuscomper.uk/sase-pasi/en/): Every day: a start, a target and up to six steps. At each step you pick a real link between two projects on this site, with the verified facts side by side.
- [Which way to point at someone far away: direction and straight-line distance through the Earth](https://mariuscomper.uk/arata-spre-cei-dragi/en/): Which way to turn and how many degrees to lower your arm to point straight at someone you love in another country. From London, New York is at 288° and 25.0° below the horizon; the straight line dips 601 km into the Earth.
- [How Bucharest spread into Ilfov since 1975: a satellite map of buildings, locality by locality](https://mariuscomper.uk/bucurestiul-se-revarsa/en/): Ilfov now has more ground under buildings than Bucharest itself: since 1990, buildings have covered 42.1 km² of new ground in Ilfov and 11.1 km² in the city. The 1975–2020 satellite map for every street, neighbourhood and commune, with census population.

## Sources

- [D-PLACE: The Database of Places, Language, Culture and Environment](https://d-place.org/)
- [D-PLACE Ethnographic Atlas v3.3.0](https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.18229037)
- [Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/)