THE LEGENDARY HORIA AGARICI BETWEEN MYTH AND PROPAGANDA

Abstract

Captain Horia Agarici has certainly become a legend. His story has become a myth, and myths must live on. After all, they can't even be touched by time. The notoriety of the famous aviator was also preserved due to Păstorel Teodoreanu’s poem, made into a song by Gherase Dendrino in the summer of 1941: "He went hunting, Agarici / He went to hunt Bolsheviks...”1, a fashionable hit between 1941-1944, a period during which Romania was leading a crusade against communism! Broadly speaking, Horia Agarici's life was accessible to the general public after 1989, and it appeared, in part, even on the ultra-publicized Wikipedia [1]. But most of the details were brought to light, naturally, by post-communist newspapers. Horia Agarici (born April 6, 1911, Lausanne, Switzerland, d. 1982, Constanţa, Romania) was a major aviator in the Romanian Air Force, one of the elite aviators of the Romanian Army during the Second World War, a poet and a Romanian author [2]. For his extraordinary deeds of bravery during the Second World War, he was also nicknamed “The Savior of [the city of] Constanța”