Was Dinicu Golescu Greek?

I The flight to Brașov¶

The claim“They fled en masse to Brașov, from the Turks' wrath”

Here the documents side with the story. When the Ottoman hosts entered the country, the national boyars and bishops crossed the mountains into Transylvania — so many that the Sibiu authorities grew alarmed, and Chancellor Teleki had the Corona (Brașov) boyars deported further inland, for fear of the revolutionary contagion.

Dinicu was among them: he had left for Brașov with the dead prince Alexandru Suțu's family. And he did not hide there. On 12 July 1821 he signed the refugee boyars' memorandum to the tsar, against the Ottoman occupiers' atrocities; in 1822, letters to Pini and to the new Prince Grigore Ghica — the last a request for money “so he could return to the country”, which is to say, plainly, a means of further delaying a return to a still unsafe place.

One nuance, and it matters: for Golescu, 1821 was not a unique flight but the fourth in 24 years — “from the unsettledness of it all”, as he himself puts it. In 1802 he had fled across the same mountains from Pazvantoglu. Unsettledness was the regime, not the accident.

The documents

True The flight, the memorandum, the letters: all documented.

II The “genocide”¶

The claim“the Turks unleashed a genocide against Greek-speakers north of the Danube”

The slaughter is real; the target, as the comment describes it, is not. Ypsilantis's hosts were crushed at Drăgășani; at Secu the remaining Eterists held out to the end — by 1828, two of the fighters were still alive. Bucharest fell to the Chehaia, feared for tolerated massacres and lootings; on 6 August the Ottomans liquidated even their circumstantial ally Fochianos with all his Arnauts.

But the documented targets are rebels, Eterists, and those suspected of ties to them — plus a population caught in the middle of a general terror. The massacre of Greeks as such, with the Patriarch hanged on Easter Sunday, is documented at Constantinople — another theatre, other victims.

The word “genocide” thus moves north of the Danube what happened south of it. The violence was appalling; evidence of a hunt by spoken language is missing.

The documents

Partly true The slaughter is documented; the linguistic target is not.

III The accent hunt¶

The claim“they hunted those who did not speak Romanian well or spoke with an accent”

We searched for this hunt — in memoirs, in the cited diplomatic reports, in the histories of 1821 — and did not find it. No trace of Turks testing accents north of the Danube, nor of “French and English sources” attesting it.

What the documents say instead overturns the frame. The man who carried the 77 boyars' pledge to Tudor was Dinicu Golescu himself — so the Russian spy Liprandi records. And Tudor, far from hunting him, sheltered his family: brother Iordache received a Pandur guard that escorted him all the way to Transylvania.

In 1821, danger stalked you by camp, not by accent. And Golescu was, on paper, in the camp that needed shelter.

The documents

Unsourced No source; the documents say otherwise.

IV “Self-colonisation”¶

The claim“they Romanianised in a process called «self-colonisation»”

The name does not exist in historiography. It looks invented for the occasion — and once the name falls, so does the mechanism it dresses: nowhere is there a documented process by which Greek boyars changed their nation overnight for fear of the Turks.

What actually happened is more interesting, and documented. In July 1822 the Sultan dismantled Phanariot rule and named native princes — Grigore Ghica in Wallachia, Ioan Sturdza in Moldavia. The Greek abbots were removed from the dedicated monasteries. And when the Porte wanted them back, by a firman of 1827, it was Golescu who reprinted old Matei Basarab's charter, to show his contemporaries “on whose side the right is”.

Institutional Romanianisation, yes — and Golescu was among its instruments. A process by this name, no.

The documents

Unsourced The term does not exist in historiography.

V The blood: a Greek parvenu?¶

The claim“Old parvenus like Golescu had nowhere left to return to”

The Golescus came from somewhere: their name from the Golești estate in Argeș, back in the 16th century — a cup-bearer Radu served under Radu Paisie — revived at the start of the 18th by Radu of Leordeni, of the same parts. Old native stock with a full pedigree, not Greeks arrived in the Phanariots' wake.

Prince Caragea's era had already caught them as players — a satire of the time lists them among the predators: “Chiriac seals, Golescu empties, Belu flays, Caragea scorches”. Local men, with local sins. And Dinicu's father had opened, back in 1814 at Golești, a school for “the village's learning in the Romanian tongue”, carried on by the son until “the time of the well-known uprisings”.

And then, page 122 of the 1826 book. Dinicu rides back from Trieste to Vienna in a diligence of seven nations and writes, black on white, who the seventh is:

“…cunoștinți ce face cu mulți voiajori, cum mi s-au întâmplat la întoarcerea dela Trieștii la Vienna să fim 7 neamuri în carâta cea mare, englezi, nemți, franțozi, italieni, moldoveni, Grec, și eu Românul, dela care multe află și învață, tot dintr' acelea ce fieșcare n' au știut, și mai vârtos când bagă cinevaș seama la obiceiurile naționalicești; căci pe unul aude vorbind toată ziua, ne mai dând…” (“…the acquaintance one makes with many travellers, as it befell me, on the return from Trieste to Vienna, to be 7 nations in the great coach: English, Germans, French, Italians, Moldavians, a Greek, and I, the Romanian, from whom they learn and find out much, all of those things which each did not know, and especially when one pays heed to the national customs; for you hear one of them talking all day, no longer giving…” — translation mine)

Moldavians, a Greek — and he, the Romanian. Written halfway between flight and print, not to escape, but to remember.

False Native stock since the 16th century; Romanian — in his own hand.

VI The tongue: “he knew no Romanian”¶

The claim“He did not know Romanian well enough to write a book… why he wrote in Greek”

The book exists, and it is in Romanian: 240 pages, printed at Buda in 1826, in Cyrillic letters — the alphabet Romanian was then printed in. The title page:

“Eu, plecând din Brașov, am început să scriu celea ce vedeam, în limba națională… am fost silit să scriu în limba grecească…” (“I, leaving Brașov, began writing what I saw in the national tongue… I was forced to write in the Greek tongue…” — translation mine)

The passage is real — and says the reverse of the claim. Golescu speaks of his road notes, begun in Romanian and switched to Greek “of necessity”, because Romanian lacked the words (fountain, statue, cascade). And he prints the shame himself: his companions asked whether he wrote in the national tongue, and he had to say it was Greek — “for in our fatherland, all sons of the nobility are more accustomed to write in the Greek tongue”. It is no pretext; it is an indictment demanding Romanian schools, placed inside the very book written in Romanian. And in 1826–1827 he himself translates from Greek: the Adunare de pilde (416 pages) and the Elementuri de filosofie morală, “rendered into the Romanian tongue for the use of Romanian youths”.

False The book is in Romanian; the Greek passage is a confession, not a pretext.

VII “Retevei din tei”¶

The claim“the famous «retevei din tei, miriște de mei» comes from this period”

The word exists: the dictionary gives it as folk speech, “a short piece of wood; a cudgel”, etymology unknown. So far, nothing to object to.

The saying, though, we could not find. It is not in the full text of the Însemnare — searched in full, not by sampling. It is not in the studies of the Golești. It is nowhere on the searchable internet, in any form. It may lie in an unprinted collection or a family memory; it may be a fine recent invention.

This page's rule is simple: what cannot be proven is marked, not filled in. If a source surfaces, the verdict below changes here, with the source beside it.

Unsourced The word exists; the saying — nowhere to be found.