Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu

Bogdan Petriceicu Hasdeu was a Romanian writer, philologist and historian of the late nineteenth century. He worked in Romanian and Latin, and his pioneering work in several branches of Romanian philology and history makes him a central figure in his country's culture.

He was born in northern Bessarabia, then part of the Russian Empire, the son of the writer Alexandru Hâjdeu. After studying law at Kharkiv, he served as a hussar in the Crimean War. He settled in Iași in 1858 and moved to Bucharest in 1863, where he edited a satirical magazine and worked in the national archives. His historical and philological studies, such as the Arhiva historică a României and his edition of the Psalter of Coresi, set new standards of critical scholarship. His ambitious etymological dictionary remained unfinished, as it never got beyond the letter B. In the debate over the Latin origin of Romanian, he argued that Slavic words were never used as widely as Latin ones. He was also a controversial politician, close to the republican wing of the Liberal Party, and was tried and acquitted after an arrest.

After his only daughter, Iulia, died in 1888, he became a spiritualist and turned his house in Câmpina into a shrine to her and to his beliefs. His legacy endures in Romanian philology and historiography, although some of his interpretations, such as his portrait of Ioan the Brave, remain debated.