An Unpublished Visual Document: The Photo Album of Lawyer Augustin Rațiu

Abstract

Dr. Augustin Rațiu (1884–1970) was a distinguished member of the intellectual elite in the town of Turda. He participated in the National Assembly held in Alba Iulia on 1 December 1918 as the official delegate of the local electoral circle. After the Great Union, he had a series of administrative positions within the Turda–Arieș County Prefecture, and between 1932 and 1933, he was mayor of Turda. Through his entire activity, he zealously promoted the memory of his uncle, the great leader of the Memorandum movement Dr. Ioan Rațiu (1828–1902), both on the occasion of the centenary of his birth (1928) but, especially, two years later, when a statue was unveiled in Turda on 9 June 1930. To that end, Augustin Rațiu also composed an impressive Album containing over a hundred vintage photographs, many of them unique, which he grouped in chronological order. The visual documents included in the Album complete the conventional sources and enrich the knowledge of some historical events that marked the family’s destiny of the illustrious representative of the Memorandum movement, Dr. Ioan Rațiu. They directly capture moments and sequences of public or private life, carried out in succession, over almost eight decades, from the second half of the nineteenth century to the interwar period.