Our Goal

About Us

Jessica Douglas-Home and Mary Walsh

Jessica Douglas-Home
Chairman
Artist and writer. She was a Trustee of the Jan Hus Foundation in Czechoslovakia (known as the Underground University) to help persecuted academics before the fall of the Berlin wall by smuggling in books and journals so that the dissidents could keep abreast of their subjects. She then co-founded three more in Slovakia, Poland, and Hungary - and finally the Mihai Eminescu Trust in Romania under the auspices of President Ceausescu’s dictatorship.

Mary Walsh
Trustee
Mary Walsh has worked in the Balkans since the late 1980s. She was a founder member of the British wing of the international Campaign for the Protection of Romanian Villages in 1988 (also known as Operation Romanian Villages), and found the first village in Britain, Welsh Newton in Herefordshire, to twin with Jedu in northern Romania. From January 1990 she drove trucks of humanitarian aid, medicines, books and writing materials to twinned villages in Romania and numerous times throughout the war to Bosnia and Croatia. She has also worked as an independent election observer in the former Soviet Union and Balkans. She became a trustee of the Mihai Eminescu Trust in 1992.

Sir Noel Malcolm
Trustee
Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and a Fellow of the British Academy. His many publications on the history and culture of south-eastern Europe include George Enescu: His Life and Music (1990). This was the first study in English of the great Romanian composer, based on research carried out in Bucharest in the early 1980s. He was a founding Trustee of the Mihai Eminescu Trust in 1986 and travelled to Romania to help the dissidents, three years before the fall of the Berlin Wall.

Jeremy Amos
Trustee
Architect. He has a specialised practice where all projects are personally handled. Amos has a long experience of attending to requirements of private clients. He engages in restoring and building and designing gardens for them both in England and in Europe. He has been a Trustee of the Mihai Eminescu Trust since 1992 He is also a founder of the Horizon Foundation in Holland which supports threatened cultural heritage and identity as well as educational and social initiatives, in Latin America, Russia, Georgia, Bulgaria, Romania, The Balkans, Turkey, Namibia as well as in Germany, Italy and the United Kingdom.

Origins of the trust

The past and the future
Are two sides of one page;
He who learns them will discover
A beginning's found at the end of an age.
Mihai Eminescu (1850 - 1889)

The Mihai Eminescu Trust was formed during Ceaușescu’s dictatorship, to help persecuted dissident academics by smuggling in books and journals so that they could keep abreast with the civilisation they had once shared. Our clandestine contacts took us to strange places. In 1987 I visited the lonely mountain hut of Constantin Noica, a much-revered sage who told me the ancient villages around him were facing the imminent threat of “systematisation”—obliteration by bulldozing—to make room for factories and concrete apartment blocks.
In response...

Events

Notable events

Apafi Manor the setting for award winning film "Malmkrog"

1st March 2020

At the 2020 Berlin International Film Festival, the award for Best Director in the Encounters Competition went to Cristi Puiu for his film "Malmkrog". The film is based on a text by Russian philosopher Vladimir Solovyov and is described as a global journey through history, a tour de force of thought. It was entirely shot in and around the Apafi Manor.

After filming had completed the Manor's library was left in a state of disarray. We are truly grateful to ...

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