The body of writer Ion Druță was laid at the National Theater “Mihai Eminescu” in Chisinau. Hundreds of people, among who are writers, poets, dramatists, actors and politicians, came to say goodbye to him. “The death of writer Ion Druță is a great and irrecoverable loss for the Romanian literature and for our cultural community,” said the president of the Writers Union Teo Chiriac, IPN reports.
He noted that the children’s books, novels, then the volumes of essays, publications and memoirs form a vast and diverse literature work. The literate inheritance left by Ion Druță is valuable and especially important for critics from all over the space of the Romanian language. “In his works, Ion Druță treated moral themes of human existence with amazing spiritual, artistic force. He wrote with his soul and spirits about the spiritual identify and national identity, but he first of all wrote about the destiny of the people from this piece of land that has been impacted by the heavy burden of history, of this bloody, cruel, unjust history,” stated Teo Chiriac.
“Today, we bid farewell to writer Ion Druță. We actually say goodbye to a whole epoch. He lived for 95 years, for almost a century, and his works and principally his destiny are emblematic for us, for the Bessarabian Romanians who have been caught between the two rivers – the Prut and the Nistru,” said actor and film director Petru Hadârcă, director general of the National Theater “Mihai Eminescu”. He noted that the man by a titanic effort, with devotion and stubbornness and with love for the native land, first built his works and later those works, with the same stubbornness, perseverance, fight against the system and censorship, raised the man to a higher level.
Writer Arcadia Suceveanu said that Ion Druță knew as no one else to put the souls of the Bessarabians and those from Bucovina on the patterns of artistic writing. “The dust now returns into the ground. This is our destiny for temporality and no one can change it regrettably. The allotted time passed, but the work remained. This is the thought that comes now to give us strength and to take away the tears of the Romanian literature and the whole Bessarabia. Providence gave us a great personality, a remarkable writer who assumed Bessarabia’s destiny from the beginning, even if in time he probably made some mistakes. In his works, Bessarabia is depicted as a stepdaughter that always wanders through history,” stated Arcadia Suceveanu.
The farewell ceremony involved Parliament Speaker Igor Grosu, ex-Presidents Petru Lucinschi, Vladimir Voronin, and Igor Dodon, MPs, ministers and others.
Writer Ion Druță, who recently turned 95, died on September 28 in Moscow, where he had lived for a period. His body was brought to Moldova to be buried in Soroca, as his last wish was. After the ceremony at the National Theater “Mihai Eminescu”, the writer’s body will be taken to the Candle of Gratitude Monument in Soroca, which he patronized, and will be buried there.
By presidential decree, October 2 was declared a day of national mourning in connection with the funeral. According to the President’s Office, a moment of silence will be observed in memory of Ion Druță at midday. The state flag will be flown at half-mast in all the localities in the country and at Moldova’s embassies and consular offices abroad.
