Arboroasa

Arboroasa (roughly, "the woodland") was a society (Studentenverbindung) for Romanian students in the Austro-Hungarian city of Czernowitz (Cernăuți; now Chernivtsi, Ukraine), located in the Bukovina region of Cisleithania. Operating between 1875 and 1877 and attracting several dozen participants, its activities were both cultural and patriotic in nature; a central figure within the group was composer Ciprian Porumbescu. Arboroasa was shut down by the authorities and the leadership arrested after members sent two politically sensitive telegrams to the Romanian Old Kingdom. However, a year later, the organization was largely reconstituted as Societatea Academică Junimea.

The society, which was given an old name for Bukovina, was founded on December 22, 1875, at the newly established Czernowitz University. Meanwhile, similar organizations were set up for German, Polish and Ruthenian students, as well as a pan-national group. Arboroasa's initiator, Teodor V. Ștefanelli, had been a member of the Romania Jună Society, and used the latter group's statute as a model for the new organization. Its stated purpose was to perfect members' patriotic, literary and cultural consciousness, to develop a social spirit and to assist poorer members, including free medical care in case of illness.

Among its leaders were students Ciprian Porumbescu, Gherasim Buliga, Ion Topală, Zaharia Voronca, Gheorghe Popescu and Dimitrie Onciul. They aimed to strengthen the identity and raise the prestige of Romanians in Bukovina. To this end, they organized conferences related to national literature and history, as well as Romanian-themed musical and literary evenings; set up a library and reading rooms; and maintained ties with other student societies in the Romanian Old Kingdom and in Transylvania. Buliga was the first president, followed by Porumbescu. The motto was by Vasile Alecsandri (Uniți să fim în cugete, uniți în Dumnezeu — "Let us be united in our thoughts, united under God"), members wore a ribbon with the blue-yellow-red of the Romanian tricolor, and the official song was written by Ștefanelli, with music by Porumbescu.

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