page_title: Ion Heliade Rădulescu
section_title: Early life
hierarchical_section_title: Ion Heliade Rădulescu / Biography / Early life
caption_attribution_description: English: Birthplace of Ion Heliade Rădulescu, Târgovişte, Romania
context_page_description: Ion Heliade Rădulescu or Ion Heliade was a Wallachian, later Romanian academic, Romantic and Classicist poet, essayist, memoirist, short story writer, newspaper editor and politician. A prolific translator of foreign literature into Romanian, he was also the author of books on linguistics and history. For much of his life, Heliade Rădulescu was a teacher at Saint Sava College in Bucharest, which he helped reopen. He was a founding member and first president of the Romanian Academy.
  Heliade Rădulescu is considered one of the foremost champions of Romanian culture from the first half of the 19th century, having first risen to prominence through his association with Gheorghe Lazăr and his support of Lazăr's drive for discontinuing education in Greek. Over the following decades, he had a major role in shaping the modern Romanian language, but caused controversy when he advocated the massive introduction of Italian neologisms into the Romanian lexis. A Romantic nationalist landowner siding with moderate liberals, Heliade was among the leaders of the 1848 Wallachian revolution, after which he was forced to spend several years in exile.
context_section_description: Heliade Rădulescu was born in Târgovişte, the son of Ilie Rădulescu, a wealthy proprietor who served as the leader of a patrol unit during the 1810s, and Eufrosina Danielopol, who had been educated in Greek. Three of his siblings died of bubonic plague before 1829. Throughout his early youth, Ion was the focus of his parents' affectionate supervision: early on, Ilie Rădulescu purchased a house once owned by the scholar Gheorghe Lazăr on the outskirts of Bucharest (near Obor), as a gift for his son. At the time, the Rădulescus were owners of a large garden in the Bucharest area, nearby Herăstrău, as well as of estates in the vicinity of Făgăraş and Gârbovi.
  After basic education in Greek with a tutor known as Alexe, Ion Heliade Rădulescu taught himself reading in Romanian Cyrillic (reportedly by studying the Alexander Romance with the help of his father's Oltenian servants). He subsequently became an avid reader of popular novels, especially during his 1813 sojourn in Gârbovi (where he had been sent after other areas of the country came to be ravaged by Caragea's plague). After 1813, the teenaged Rădulescu was a pupil of the Orthodox monk Naum Râmniceanu; in 1815, he moved on to the Greek school at Schitu Măgureanu, in Bucharest, and, in 1818, to the Saint Sava School, where he studied under Gheorghe Lazăr's supervision.
  Between his 1820 graduation and 1821, when effects of the Wallachian uprising led to the School ceasing its activities, he was kept as Lazăr's assistant teacher, tutoring in arithmetics and geometry. It was during those years that he adopted the surname Heliade (also rendered Heliad, Eliad or Eliade), which, he later explained, was a Greek version of his patronymic, in turn stemming from the Romanian version of Elijah.
caption: Site of Ion Heliade Rădulescu's birthplace in Târgovişte
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