Constantin Gane, a phenomenal man
One day, after a cursory search, I was put in a cell with two Aromanians from the commune of Tudor Vladimirescu (formerly Potur) in Constanta County. (…) They told me that in the next cell was the university professor Manu, who had been imprisoned since the time of Antonescu.
In the same cell with him was the writer Constantin Gane, whom I had known long before his imprisonment, since he had published his three volumes of “Trecute vieți de doamne și domnițe”.
With the publication of these volumes, he became one of the best known writers of historical literature in our country, appreciated by the general public for the painstaking way in which he researched the property deeds and old documents, as well as for the skilful and interesting way in which he presented historical figures in his skilful narrative style. During the first period of my stay in Aiud, 1952-1954, I saw him at the Zarca. Now, from the beginning of our neighbourhood, the prisoner who kept in touch with us, also a young Macedonian, told us in the morse code that Mr. Costică Gane was ill. We were very sad when one night our correspondent in the next room told us: “Mr Constantin Gane has died”. It was around June-July 1962. Those who had spent time in the cell with him spoke of the writer Gane as a phenomenal man. He was full of knowledge and, above all, history, not only our history but also the history of other peoples. He spoke German and French, he was fluent in Turkish and the Slavic languages, he knew ancient Greek. He hoped to escape and publish his writings, which he still had in manuscript. I prayed for his good and great soul.
(Ion Antohe – Crucifixions in Romania after Yalta, Albatros Publishing House, Bucharest, 1995, pp. 431-432)