Introduction

The Romanian foundling home in Bucharest, established under Russian occupation in 1832, was intended to follow the same French and Russian models, but ended up keeping children linked to the urban market, rather than the rural one. Bucharest in the first half of the nineteenth century was a space of transformation, rightly regarded by Vasile Mateescu as a centre of progress, both cosmopolitan and challenging. The story of Vasile Mateescu is similar to others in the Romanian regions and the Balkans in general. Poor and orphaned children amounted to a significant proportion of the population of the Balkans and countries of the Ottoman Empire, as they did in Central, Western and Northern Europe. In order to identify a subcategory such as that of poor, orphaned and abandoned children, one must create a cycle of inheritance contextualised by both state initiatives and family history.