Constantin (Dinicu) Golescu was born on February 7, 1777, the youngest son of the great boyar Radu Golescu. He began his studies in his parents’ home with his older brothers, under the guidance of private teachers. Being one of the noblemen who appreciated the benefits of book knowledge, Radu Golescu paid great attention to the education of his sons. Among the teachers he employed were specialists in Greek, Latin and French. They studied mathematics, geography, history, geometry, logic, but also the classical Greek poets (Hesiod, Theocritus, Pindar, and Aristophanes), mythology, they did exercises in poetics, rhetoric in Greek and Latin, they studied Aristotle’s morals, etc.
He completed his education at the „Academia Domnească” (a Greek school) in Bucharest. Many of those who taught at the Academy were followers of the philosophy of the Enlightenment, so Dinicu Golescu was educated in the spirit of Enlightenment philosophy. Endowed with the ability to observe the things around him from the outside, he contributed considerably to the young generation’s interest in European ideas and civilization. Dinicu Golescu was not dependent on cabinet work, like his elder brother Iordache, but a keen traveller, a keen observer of what he saw at home and abroad. He contemplated people and things in a creative way, making useful comparisons, which he put down on paper, thus constituting material for reflection and lessons to follow for his contemporaries in order to correct the evils from which the country suffered, to bring it out of the darkness in which the past centuries had kept it.
The Golești Museum and the Argeș County Library will evoke, on February 7, 2023, the personality of the illuminist and traveller Dinicu Golescu. The event entitled “People in the memory of Argeș County – the scholar Dinicu Golescu” will start at 11.00 a.m. and will take place in the Conference Room of the library.
