Cercetări de teren la Cornova, 1991. A puzzle in progress

This article is a synthetic presentation of a field research conducted by the author between 2nd and 18th of August 1991, in the village of Cornova. The research needs to be approached from a multiple perspective imposed by different contexts. The first one is the fact that the research was conducted six decades after the field campaigns of the Sociologic School of Bucharest in Cornova. The second context is given by the fact that the village was included in the Ungheni district of Moldavian SSR, therefore it was a soviet territory at the time. The third context places the research between the first ethnological campaigns outside de Romanian borders in the post-socialist era. The article presents representative excerpts from a series of interviews recorded in the summer of 1991. The topics are: the main lineages of răzeși (free peasants) who had founded villages since legendary times; the deportation to Siberia of some families from Cornova; the random contacts between the Moldavians and their families left on the other side of the Ural Mountains, during the soviet period. Although these topics were intensely studied in the last decades, the value of the excerpts briefly analyzed in this article is given by the nature of the records they belong to – oral testimonies on subjects which could put the interlocutors at risk in the last days of the soviet regime.