Tim, all, You asked on 1 September whether I would formulate similar archival requests for Romania and Moldova. This is my reply, and it is a notice of intent rather than a proposal: I have no Romanian evidence yet, and I would rather bring documents than speculation.
I am posting it now, separately from the Bulgarian submission, because the reason to look at Romania comes directly out of the Bulgarian result and I would like that connection on the record before I commit anything on it. Reading the europe file with the Sofia material in hand, the Romanian block appears to lean on Bulgaria by name: # From Paul Eggert (1999-10-07): # ... For lack of better info, # assume that Romania switched to EU rules in 1997, # the same year as Bulgaria. Two things I want to be careful about, because the inference cuts in a narrower way than it first appears. What the Bulgarian archives do NOT do is move the year. Bulgaria did switch to the EU rules in 1997, by Decree 94 of 13 March 1997, which I have photographed. So the "same year as Bulgaria" reasoning survives on the date of the switch as such. What they DO undermine is the assumption underneath it. Bulgaria has been kept in the database on C-Eur from 1983 to 1991 and on E-Eur from 1991 to 1997 - and the primary sources say Bulgaria was on neither. It ran its own rule the entire time, changing at midnight, last Sunday of March and last Saturday of September, until the 1997 decree. The instant the Bulgarian block turns out not to have the shape the file assumes, "Romania looks like Bulgaria" stops being evidence for anything about Romania's shape. Two more things I notice in the file, and I would be glad to be told I am reading them wrongly: * Zone Europe/Bucharest runs on C-Eur from 1981 to 1991 and on E-Eur from 1994 to 1997, and the Rule Romania lines stop at 1993. As far as I can tell no Romanian primary source is cited for any transition in that period. * For Moldova the substantive citation for the period is the 1990 government act relayed in 2016; I do not find a Moldovan legal source cited for 1991 through 1996. I am not proposing any change to either zone at this point. What I would like to do, if it is of use to you, is repeat the procedure that yielded the Bulgarian material: read the official gazette for the period (Monitorul Oficial al Romaniei, and its Moldovan counterpart) alongside the national dailies for the transition weekends, photograph the pages, read them with two independent readers and a third checking against the image, and publish the plates so each transcription can be verified against the photograph it came from. Three questions before I begin: 1. Is this useful, or is the Romanian record already settled from a source I have not seen in the file? 2. You mentioned preferring one holistic patch for the region over piecemeal fixes. Should the scope be Romania and Moldova, or does it pay to include the other countries that stand in the same rule groups for the same period? 3. Is there a period or a transition you would want checked ahead of the rest? I would rather spend the first archive visit on whatever is weakest in your view than on whatever is easiest for me. The Bulgarian plates and transcriptions are at https://astrocogy.com/tz/bulgaria, and the same package is deposited with a DOI, as a specimen of what the output would look like: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.22695589 Ivan Petrov Ivanov OCO, Sofia https://oco.bg, https://astrocogy.com
