For Global Astronomy Month 2020 (278): Inertia of Inertia (124)

By Andrei Dorian Gheorghe (text and photos) and Florin Alexandru Stancu (design)

Published: Thursday, September 24 2020 19:04

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“Galileo oh Galileo…
Stop pulling the ears
Of your old boots!”
-Urmuz (1883-1923, excerpt of “Fable”;
English translation from Romanian by Andrei Dorian Gheorghe)-

NEAR THE LAZAR COLLEGE
(Bucharest, August 21, 2020)
Astro-photo-poem (cosmopoem) by Andrei Dorian Gheorghe

The Gheorghe Lazar College - High School
(named after an illustrious reformer
of Romanian education in the 1800s)
was founded in 1860
and became one of the most prestigious
institutions of this kind in the entire country.

I like its building
(made in a corner of the Cismigiu Park)
especially for its clock
(a clock building automatically receives
rights of astronomical building!)
and its semicircles above the windows
seeming like stone sunrises with blue beams.

“I liked especially two former students here,”
said the Sun in turn
from above the Lazar College,
“the avant-garde writer and poet Urmuz,
who wrote about Galileo -
the one who brought the first indubitable evidences
that the Earth moves around me -,
and the scientist Gheorghe Demetrescu,
an unforgettable leader of
Romanian professional astronomers
(1920s-1960s; the EURONEAR project
named an asteroid after him in the 2010s),
who did research on solar eclipses
and my physics.”