Prince Dimitrie Cantemir

Among a great deal else, he played the ney and wrote a treatise on music in Greek. An important composer and music theorist, he also invented his own system of musical notation and discovered an entirely new rhythm, the “zar-beyn” [the prince’s cube]. However, Dimitrie Cantemir, a Rumanian prince born in the Crimea in 1673 who is usually considered one of Constantinople’s Greek composers, was much else besides: a historian, geographer, ethnologist, novelist and—above all—a politician. The son of the Voivode of Moldavia, he became the ruler of the trans-Danubian principality in his own right in the early 18th century, when he succeeded his main political rival, Nikolaos Mavrokordatos. However unfamiliar his name may be to us now, Cantemir, the polyglot scholar who was one of the most significant intellectuals in the history of south-eastern Europe, was very much the product of Constantinople’s Phanariot culture and fertile climate.

The “Literature: people’s stories” cycle seeks to shed light on individual life stories which, having acquired a mythic dimension by being set down on paper in book form, can go so far as to influence a nation’s cultural, social and even political life.