# 1900, in autumn. A calendar of undated sayings

One-eyed Pazvante, Prince Reed, a flea shod in iron. A journey through Romanian sayings that kept their characters and stories while muddling the calendar.

## De la 1900 toamna

We know the year. And the season.

An expression that gives you almost everything you need to write down a date — yet leaves you without one.

A coat, a piece of furniture or an idea that has aged badly can be “from 1900, in autumn”. The round year pushes it into the past. The season adds comic precision: as if someone could still remember the leaves. These examples were written for this page.

There is a printed trace. “Trenul” (The train), a poem by Axente Pop in the 14 October 1989 issue of Luceafărul, begins “cam prin o mie nouă sute toamna”: roughly, sometime in nineteen hundred, in autumn. A train passes through a landscape of memory; the phrase belongs to its uncertain time.

The opening “cam” — roughly — does something lovely. It places uncertainty before a date that seemed settled. Read this way, the expression resembles a memory that kept its atmosphere and lost its calendar.

1989 dates this attestation, not the birth of the expression. The source does not explain why autumn was chosen.

[Luceafărul, 14 octombrie 1989, p. 3 · Axente Pop, „Trenul”](https://www.bibliotecadeva.ro/periodice/luceafarul/1989/10/luceafarul_1989_10_41.pdf#page=3)

## De pe vremea lui Pazvante Chioru

Pazvante died. His era lives on.

You can know nothing about Vidin and still use the name of one of its rulers to say how old something is.

Osman Pazvantoğlu was a rebellious regional ruler based in Vidin. He revolted against Ottoman authority in 1795. The siege of 1798 failed to defeat him; in 1799, the power he had fought granted him the rank of vizier. He died in January 1807.

In Șăineanu’s 1929 dictionary, “Pazvantoglu” could also mean “rebel, tyrant”. A 2007 slang dictionary explains “from the days of one-eyed Pazvante” as a very distant past. The name has two documented jobs: describing a person and ageing a world. These sources do not establish a transition from one meaning to the other.

The name outlasts the biography. Using the phrase does not require reconstructing the wars around Vidin. A memorable character with a nickname is enough to carry everything that seems hopelessly out of date.

The story in which Iancu Jianu takes his eye in an 1809 encounter conflicts with his death in 1807. The historical sources used here do not establish who caused the injury.

[Kemal Beydilli · TDV İslâm Ansiklopedisi, 2007](https://islamansiklopedisi.org.tr/pazvandoglu-osman)

[Dicționar de argou, 2007 · „de pe vremea lui Pazvante Chiorul”](https://dexonline.ro/definitie/de%20pe%20vremea%20lui%20pazvante%20chiorul/516700)

[Lazăr Șăineanu, 1929 · „Pazvantoglu”](https://dexonline.ro/definitie/pazvantoglu/820340)

## Din timpul lui Papură Vodă

Behind the funny name, hunger.

Papură is the wetland plant, cattail or reed. Next to Vodă — prince — it sounds like a fairy-tale ruler. The chronicler’s account is much harsher.

Historian Valentin Constantinov quotes Miron Costin’s explanation linking Ștefăniță Lupu’s nickname to famine: people had been reduced to eating dried, ground papură. A food of desperation became attached to the ruler’s name.

Scriban records “to be from the time of Papură Vodă” in 1939, meaning antiquated or ridiculous through age. The expression can raise a smile long after the circumstances behind the nickname have been forgotten.

A short phrase holds two very different tones together: the speaker’s amusement and the deprivation of people who lived through the time being invoked. That distance makes its story more unsettling than a dictionary gloss.

The chronicle explains the nickname. The dictionary records the figurative use. They do not date the formation of the expression itself.

[Valentin Constantinov · Revista de istorie a Moldovei, 2/2018, p. 30](https://ibn.idsi.md/sites/default/files/imag_file/18-32_0.pdf#page=13)

[August Scriban, 1939 · „papură”](https://dexonline.ro/definitie/papur%C4%83/691208)

## De când se potcovea puricele

The flea needed iron. A lot of iron.

Fairy-tale openings give the past its own weight, creatures and laws. Things are measured with delightful seriousness.

In the opening of “Youth without age and life without death”, collected by Petre Ispirescu, the flea gets 99 oca of iron on one leg, then jumps to heaven to fetch stories. The precise number makes the impossibility even more vivid.

In the excerpt from the Paralela 45 edition of “Golden-haired Prince Charming”, the weight is 90 oca. The heel still remains bare, and the flea finds the load light. The tales keep different accounts of the iron, while preserving the disproportion between the tiny creature and its enormous equipment.

In the same opening world, bears fight in their tails, wolves embrace lambs and a fly signs its name on the wall. A few ordinary rules have been turned upside down. By the time the story proper begins, the reader has already crossed the threshold.

These are fairy-tale formulas. The numbers belong to the cited versions; they are not measurements of an actual past.

[Petre Ispirescu · Tinerețe fără bătrânețe și viață fără de moarte, p. 9](https://www.edituracorint.ro/media/attachment/file/b/a/basme_petre_ispirescu__fragment.pdf)

[Petre Ispirescu · Făt-Frumos cu părul de aur, p. 94](https://www.edituraparalela45.ro/wp-content/uploads/2017/03/Pages-from-Basmele-romanilor.pdf)

## La Sfântu-Așteaptă

The saint who never brings your money.

An invented feast day can have a very practical use: it removes a deadline while preserving the shape of a promise.

In volume IV of “Proverbele românilor”, published in 1900, Zanne records “A plăti la Sântu-Așteptă” — paying on Saint Keep-Waiting’s day. His gloss is brief: never. The debt seems to acquire a due date, but that day will not arrive.

The phrase uses familiar materials: a saint, a feast, the habit of setting payment for a known day. “Keep waiting” takes the place of the name and breaks the mechanism. The calendar still looks like a calendar, although the required date is missing.

On the same page, Zanne sets it beside the French week with four Thursdays. The comparison shows that more than one language can imagine this kind of postponement. Each gives the calendar a different fault.

The heading uses modern spelling; Zanne’s form is retained in the passage. The French comparison does not establish borrowing.

[Iuliu A. Zanne · Proverbele românilor, IV, 1900, p. 502, nr. 12532](https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/0/0d/Iuliu_A._Zanne_-_Proverbele_rom%C3%A2nilor_din_Rom%C3%A2nia%2C_Basarabia%2C_Bucovina%2C_Ungaria%2C_Istria_%C8%99i_Macedonia_-_Proverbe%2C_dicetori%2C_pov%C4%83%C8%9Buiri%2C_cuvinte_ade.pdf#page=526)

## About this edition

This edition follows five families of expressions and formulas, selected for their unusual characters and times. Each story links to its evidence: a literary periodical, historical scholarship, dated dictionaries, Ispirescu’s fairy tales and Zanne’s collection.

Attesting a phrase, tracing a person’s biography and establishing an expression’s origin are different questions. Comments about the imagery are readings proposed here. We do not claim to have found the first use of each formula, or infer an etymology from an appealing story. Literal English translations preserve the Romanian images; they are not presented as established English idioms.