Grigore Vieru

In memoriam

Grigore Vieru, a Moldovan poet admired for his courage in promoting Romanian, the country's native language, when Moldova was a Soviet republic has died. He was 73. Vieru died Sunday in a hospital in Chisinau, Moldova's capital city. He had been in a car crash there on Friday. Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin declared Tuesday a day of national mourning. Vieru was born in 1935 in the rural village of Pereita, in northeastern Romania, five years before that part of the country was annexed by the Soviet Union under a Nazi-Soviet pact, becoming the Socialist Republic of Moldova. His parents were Pavel and Eudochia Didic Vieru. He married Raisa Vieru in1959. Moldova declared independence in 1991 when the Soviet Union collapsed. Two-thirds of Moldovans are of Romanian descent. But the country has not reunited with Romania. In the Soviet era, when Russian was the official language and the use of Romanian was strongly discouraged in Moldova, Vieru fought for the cultural reunification of Moldova and Romania. In the 1970s, he wrote "The Little Bee," Moldova's first Romanian-language school manual for young children. The 73-year-old poet's body was laid outside the city opera house early Tuesday for people to pay their last respects. Vieru was buried later at Central cemetery in Moldovia.

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