page_title: Mihail Kogălniceanu
section_title: Descendants
hierarchical_section_title: Mihail Kogălniceanu / Legacy / Descendants
caption_attribution_description: (From left:) Lucia, Ion and Vasile, the children of Romanian politician Mihail Kogălniceanu
context_page_description: Mihail Kogălniceanu was a Moldavian, later Romanian liberal statesman, lawyer, historian and publicist; he became Prime Minister of Romania on October 11, 1863, after the 1859 union of the Danubian Principalities under Domnitor Alexandru Ioan Cuza, and later served as Foreign Minister under Carol I. He was several times Interior Minister under Cuza and Carol. A polymath, Kogălniceanu was one of the most influential Romanian intellectuals of his generation. Siding with the moderate liberal current for most of his lifetime, he began his political career as a collaborator of Prince Mihail Sturdza, while serving as head of the Iași Theater and issuing several publications together with the poet Vasile Alecsandri and the activist Ion Ghica. After editing the highly influential magazine Dacia Literară and serving as a professor at Academia Mihăileană, Kogălniceanu came into conflict with the authorities over his Romantic nationalist inaugural speech of 1843. He was the ideologue of the abortive 1848 Moldavian revolution, authoring its main document, Dorințele partidei naționale din Moldova.
context_section_description: Mihail Kogălniceanu was married to Ecaterina Jora (1827–1907), the widow of Iorgu Scorțescu, a Moldavian Militia colonel; they had more than eight children together (three of whom were boys). The eldest son, Constantin, studied Law and had a career in diplomacy, being the author of an unfinished work on Romanian history. Ion, his brother, was born in 1859 and died in 1892, being the only one of Mihail Kogălniceanu's male children to have heirs. His line was still surviving in 2001. Ion's son, also named Mihail, established the Mihail Kogălniceanu Cultural Foundation in 1935 (in 1939–1946, it published a magazine named Arhiva Românească, which aimed to be a new series of the one published during the 1840s; its other projects were rendered ineffectual by the outbreak of World War II).
  Vasile Kogălniceanu, the youngest son, was noted for his involvement in agrarian and left-wing politics during the early 20th century. A founder of Partida Țărănească (which served as an inspiration for the Peasants' Party after 1918), he was a collaborator of Vintilă Rosetti in campaigning for the universal suffrage and legislating Sunday rest. A manifesto to the peasants, issued by him just before the Peasants' Revolt of 1907, was interpreted by the authorities as a call to rebellion, and led to Kogălniceanu's imprisonment for a duration of five months. A member of the Chamber of Deputies for Ilfov County, he served as a rapporteur for the Alexandru Averescu executive during the 1921 debates regarding an extensive land reform.
  Vasile's sister Lucia (or Lucie) studied at a boarding school in Dresden during the late 1860s-early 1870s. Her third husband, Leon Bogdan, was a local leader of the Conservatives in Neamț County (according to the memoirist Constantin Argetoianu, Lucia was the one exercising real control over the organization's branch). After the Conservative Party faded out of politics as a result of World War I, she came to support the People's Party. Argetoianu later speculated that she was the most intelligent of the Kogălniceanu children, and claimed that Mihail Kogălniceanu had himself acknowledged this (quoting him as saying, "too bad Lucie is not a boy"). She was the mother of eight; one of her daughters, Manuela, married into the Ghica family.
  Kogălniceanu's nephew, Grigore, himself a local leader of the Conservative Party and a major landowner, married to Adela Cantacuzino-Pașcanu, a member of the Cantacuzino family. He died in 1904, leaving his wife a large fortune, which she spent on a large collection of jewels and fortune-telling séances. Adela Kogălniceanu was robbed and murdered in October 1920; rumor had it that she had been killed by her own son, but this path was never pursued by authorities, who were quick to cancel the investigation (at the time, they were faced with the major strikes of 1920).
caption: From right: Vasile, Ion and Lucia Kogălniceanu, photographed during the 1850s
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