Constantin S. Nicolăescu-Plopșor

Constantin S. Nicolăescu-Plopșor or Nicolaescu-Plopșor, sometimes shortened to N. Plopșor (; April 20, 1900 – May 30, 1968), was a Romanian historian, archaeologist, anthropologist and ethnographer, also known as a folkorist and children's writer, whose diverse activities were primarily focused on his native region of Oltenia. A student and disciple of Vasile Pârvan at the University of Bucharest, he had a youthful activity collecting and publishing Oltenian songs and poetry, being the first to document Romanian folklore as produced during the peasants' revolt of 1907, and committing to writing the regional variants of Miorița ballad. Increasingly interested in the Balkans' prehistoric period, he researched various Paleolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic sites in his native country, placing them in a larger European context while producing his own systems of Prehistoric chronology and typology. His main contributions to archaeology include the classification of Oltenian microliths, the study of local cave paintings, and the disputed claim that a site in Tetoiu evidenced a regional contribution to anthropogenesis.

An active collector of art, including a trove of Romanian icons and modern public art by Constantin Brâncuși, Nicolăescu-Plopșor was also known for his activity as a museologist and head of the Museum of Oltenia in Craiova. During the interwar, he became noted as both a politician and activist for the welfare of the Romani-Romanian minority, also amassing land as an agriculturalist. Before World War II, he was one of the regional Oltenian leaders for the emerging Romani political movement, and a contributor to some of the first Romani-language newspapers in local history; chased out of the burgeoning movement by its internal schisms, he was for a while a prominent figure in the National Liberal Party-Brătianu, before being co-opted by the National Renaissance Front. Plopșor was additionally a follower of Christian mystic Petrache Lupu, whose preaching he explored in a work of religious anthropology. His contribution to Romanian literature includes collections of folklore and Romani mythology, editions of works by other Oltenian writers, as well as original anecdotes and quasi-fairy tales with folkloric roots. Plopșor drew attention, both positive and negative, for his heavy reliance on the Oltenian dialect, being sometimes incomprehensible to his non-Oltenian readers.

Nicolăescu-Plopșor's career peaked after the onset of Romanian communism in the 1950s. Although forced to sell his own land, he was controversially involved in the 1949 nationalization of Victor N. Popp's estate; he also adapted his style to Soviet historiography and the Stalin cult. Plopșor led both a national archaeological section and Craiova ethnographic branch of the Romanian Academy, of which he was elected a corresponding member in 1963. He was additionally tasked with directing teams of researchers at Bicaz, the Iron Gates, and Ada Kaleh. Involved with a literary club formed around Ramuri magazine, he published his final book of children's fiction, Tivisoc și Tivismoc, in 1965, and turned it into a screenplay the following year.

Biography

Early life The future scholar was born "Constantin Nicolăescu", with "Plopșor" being originally a literary pseudonym. His native village was Sălcuța, Dolj County, Kingdom of Romania. His birth date is generally given as April 20, 1900, Of partial Romani Romanian ancestry, he was the descendant of Dincă Schileru, an Oltenian peasant representative in the ad-hoc Divan which decided on the 1859 union between Wallachia and Moldavia. Specifically, his mother Polina was Schileru's daughter. Initially destined for a career in the Romanian Orthodox Church, Constantin preferred literature, but without interrupting his archaeological pursuits. He was for a while after among the most frequently published contributors in that magazine. Another article, carried by Revista Societății Tinerimea Română, detailed his ideas on Gypsy ethnogenesis. In tandem, Buletinul Societății Regale Române de Geografie hosted his typology of Oltenian pit-houses, or bordeie, as his first contribution to human geography. At Oltenia magazine, he was focusing on inventorying oral poems by a quasi-anonymous author, Radu of Giubega, in particular ones dealing with the peasants' revolt of March 1907. He became the first folklorist to ignore a self-imposed silence about the revolutionary events, though the actual task of collecting Radu's poems went to three other amateur folklorists—Ion Voinescu of Orodel, Ștefan Tuțescu, and Petre Danielescu. The collection was largely based on objects he had gathered during his many field trips. focusing of investigating, documenting and preserving evidence about the historical past of Oltenian villages. He set as his personal ambition an archaeological scrutiny of the entire region, in order to uncover "the traces of the most ancient people to have inhabited Oltenia", a population he initially believed had originated in Asia. Nicolăescu-Plopșor established a peasants' newspaper, also based in Plenița. Called Redeșteptarea ("The Renaissance"), it sought to defend the rural population from injustice and "usury". from the University of Bucharest Faculty of Letters and History. During that time, he became a disciple of Romanian historian Vasile Pârvan, noted for his work in researching and classifying the antiquities of Dacia, A sketch story of his, La struguri ("With the Grapes"), saw print in the inaugural issue of Suflet Românesc, in 1925. In 1927, Literary chronicler Șerban Cioculescu, who knew the work simply as Ceaùr, reports that it and all other interwar books by the same author had a minuscule circulation. In the early 1930s, his discovery of microliths at Carpen (Cleanov village) and his native Sălcuța (Plopșor) led him to propose the existence of two Mesolithic archaeological industries native to Oltenia, a theory first outlined at the 15th International Congress of Anthropology. In 1926, he traveled to Gorj County, where he documented the existence of a hunting-themed and charcoal-based cave painting in the proximity of cave bear bones and Copper Age pottery, but did not disclose its exact location (probably as a means to ensure its better protection). He is also credited with having dug up the first mastodon remains on Romanian territory, at Stoina. Plopșor was by then also a contributor to Arhivele Olteniei and Năzuința Românească. Scholar N. I. Herescu, who published the latter as a self-styled regionalist magazine, rated his colleague's work in folkloristics as "always interesting". Also that year, Nicolăescu-Plopșor recorded and published in Arhivele Olteniei 25 Oltenian variants of the national ballad, Miorița, at least one of which is significantly richer in solar symbolism than the standardized version. He followed up with another folklore collection, the 1930 Toiagul priotesii ("The Priest Wife's Cane"). His interest in inventorying folkloric elements often merged with his archaeological work: reportedly, his explorations were accompanied by thorough interviews with locals, and purchases of traditional objects. Shortly after 1930, he rallied with other intellectuals of Romani origin—Aurel Manolescu-Dolj, N. St. Ionescu, Marin I. Simion—in creating the first modern Romani (or "Gypsy") organization in Oltenia. It initially collaborated with the traditional structure of bulibașas, or local community leaders, as well as with the national associations founded by Orthodox Archimandrite and Romani activist Calinic Șerboianu, until Manolescu-Dolj and Simion split the local group and proclaimed themselves each Great Voivode of the Gypsies in Oltenia. Before these schisms, Plopșor was involved with the organization's two cultural venues, the newspapers Timpul and O Ròm, and published two bilingual Romani–Romanian collections of Romani song lyrics and mythology: Ghileà romanè - Cântece țigănești ("Gypsy Songs") and Paramiseà romanè - Povești țigănești ("Gypsy Stories"). In so doing, he became part of a cultural and political movement advocating the desegregation of Romani people into Romanian society, the replacement of Romanian word țigani (the equivalent of "Gypsies") with romi ("Romani people"), as well as the modernization of Romani society and culture. Linguist Alexandru Graur, who reviewed Ghileà romanè in April 1934, noted that the source material was of little documentary value, urging Plopșor to publish more developed works. Graur also criticized Plopșor's written Romani: entirely modeled on the Romanian alphabet, it "could only render exact pronunciation with some approximation"; it also used the word variants most popular with the Ursari tribes, but not consistently so.

Nicolăescu-Plopșor's detailed plan, published by O Ròm, supported making Romani a language for the church service in certain communities—he was among the first to propose its introduction into the Romanian curriculum. In addition to such designs, which went as far as to demand a "Roma Church" within Romanian Orthodoxy, he envisioned the creation of a Roma Museum and a Roma illustrated encyclopedia, as well as a program to record and inventory all forms of Romani music. As Romanian historian Viorel Achim notes: "These ideas indicate the emphasis placed on the preservation of the Gypsies' identity. However, some [Romani association members] promoted integrationist ideas, such as the sedentarisation of nomadic Gypsies at all cost, so the Gypsy movement in Romania in the 1930s cannot be considered a 'nationalist' movement."

Eventually, the inner-communal split harmed Nicolăescu-Plopșor's aspirations: Timpul, which remained a platform for Manolescu-Dolj's faction, called him a "Gypsy crook". Gheorghe Nicolescu's new community group, the General Union of Roma in Romania, claimed Plopșor as one of its collaborators. In September 1934, Nicolescu's secretary, Lengescu, argued: "We will need educated Roma [...]. There are already initiatives in this direction. Dr. Nicolaescu-Plopșor, a teacher from Craiova who still claims to be a Gypsy, is working on a Gypsy grammar and dictionary." Lengescu believed that Ghileà romanè was "the first printed book in the Gypsy language that was published in Romania" and perhaps "in the whole world".

Nicolăescu-Plopșor had by then turned to regular Romanian politics, initially as a member of the mainstream National Liberal Party (PNL). He quit that group in mid-1931, allegedly because he resented the policies of its Dolj-chapter leader, Constantin Neamțu. Reporting on this, Lupta newspaper noted that his departure had weakened the PNL's support among the peasantry. By his own account, Plopșor was also disappointed with the two-party system, which also included the National Peasants' Party; when one of the latter's least cultured politicians asked him to ghostwrite his speech, he purposefully infused it with ridiculous phrasing and self-mockery. He joined the National Liberal Party-Brătianu, or "Georgists", which had coalesced PNL defectors. In May 1932, he was leader of the Georgists' chapter in Dolj, and a member of their Oltenian Bureau. He took part in campaigning for the general election of December 1933, and was sustained a head wound during a related incident in Craiova. The authorities alleged that he had been brandishing a revolver, which prompted political adversaries to subdue him; an opposition newspaper, Cuvântul, challenged this claim, arguing that he had been pounced upon while walking down Madona Street. Nicolăescu-Plopșor then stood as a Georgist candidate in the 1934 elections for the Dolj County Council.

Interwar mysticism and communist turn Nicolăescu-Plopșor managed to set up his own agricultural estate in Plenița, using its yields of wheat to finance his intellectual pursuits. In tandem, Plopșor was active as a publisher: also in 1934, he issued in Craiova a modern edition of Hronograful, from the early 19th-century manuscript of Dionisie Eclesiarhul, the recluse Wallachian monk. Cerna-Rădulescu, who recalls being his disciple in the 1930s, also notes that he was putting out editions of historical memoirs by Ioan Solomon, collecting and recording by hand Radu of Giubega's full work (some 75,000 lines of verse), as well as printing "at his own expense" the literary works of his Oltenian peers. In addition, he was directing a literary society hosted by Casa Băniei of Craiova. and his own set of memoirs (as Amintiri).

Nicolăescu-Plopșor's involvement in cultural affairs also continued through his election as adviser to the Archdiocese of Craiova, during which time he participated in the Maglavit gatherings, celebrating the shepherd-turned-Orthodox mystic, Petrache Lupu. During August 1935, he addressed the Maglavit crowds, alongside journalists such as Stelian Popescu and Pamfil Șeicaru. In September, he advised that Lupu go into a partial retirement to avoid exhausting himself. By then, Plopșor was editing a new cultural magazine, Gând și Slovă Oltenească ("Oltenian Thinking and Writing"), listed by literary historian George Călinescu as one of the main interwar periodicals in the region (alongside Ramuri, Mihail Gușiță's Datina, and Constant's Condeiul). In 1938, he set up an Oltenian Archaeology Institute, also founding a Craiova branch of the National Archives—and serving as its director in 1939–1946. Plopșor himself was still a Georgist politician during the general election of December 1937, when he appeared as third on a list of Dolj candidates, headlined by George Matei Cantacuzino. In 1940, during a dictatorial regime established by King Carol II, he joined the state political party, called National Renaissance Front, and its Dolj organization, headed by Emanuel Tătărescu. Focusing on his scholarly work by 1942, he discovered and published a manuscript copy of Mihail Moxa's 17th-century chronicle. Also then, he was digging alongside Vladimir Dumitrescu at Cârna, whose parish priest had discovered a Bronze-Age necropolis. Plopșor participated in the "Oltenia Week", organized by Ramuri in November 1943. At this event, he networked with writers such as Virgil Carianopol, Mircea Damian, Elena Farago, George Gregorian and Ion Minulescu, as well as with singer Maria Tănase.

Nicolăescu-Plopșor reached scholarly prominence after World War II, and especially during the communist regime inaugurated in 1947–1948. In 1946, he was appointed the Museum of Oltenia's full director, holding the office until 1952. As caretaker of the Oltenian Museum, Nicolăescu-Plopșor controversially participated in the nationalization of 1949. By his own account, he traveled to Victor N. Popp's manor in Ostroveni, which had just been confiscated by the authorities, and managed to retrieve several modern sculptures by Constantin Brâncuși, which Popp had collected. Zeletin reports a version of the story according to which Plopșor was "drifting around" Argetoaia when he chanced upon a version of Brâncuși's The Kiss, taken from the Popp collection by a local. The peasant was entirely unaware of its value, and was using it for fermenting cabbage.

Nicolăescu-Plopșor was involved in the officially sanctioned campaign peaceful coexistence, and, in March 1950, sat on the Dolj Committee for Peace Struggle. The anthropologist now made returns to Romani activism, infusing it with Marxism-Leninism and samples of Stalin's personality cult; these feature in a Romani-language poem, Ghilabos ăl rom ghilabos ("Let's Sing, Roma! Let's Sing!"), which he sent to be published by Viața Romînească in 1952; it was rejected. According to scholar Raluca Bianca Roman, the piece, authored or just collected by Plopșor, may have been written during the interwar. In 1951, he was assigned to a researcher's post at the Romanian Academy's Institute of Archaeology, where he led the Paleolithic Section.

Communist repressions touched Plopșor's inner circle: by 1953, his collaborator Dumitrescu had been jailed; at Văcărești Prison, Dumitrescu was held alongside the engineer Bolomey, father of Plopșor's disciple Alexandra Bolomey, as well as alongside Cârna's priest (prosecuted as a former member of the Iron Guard). Plopșor's own preservation as a museum director was officially questioned in mid-1952, when musicologist Petre Brâncuș referred to him as a "former landowner" and a member of the "exploiting class". According to Brâncuș, he had never been challenged by his administrative supervisor, since the latter was himself a "hostile element". Plopșor was nonetheless successful in calling for the reestablishment of an Oltenian Orthodox Metropolis.

Final activities Dardu Nicolăescu-Plopșor excavating in Bugiulești. Photograph by Grigore Avakian After heading an "Institute of Complex Research" at Bicaz in 1956–1963, and before founding another one in the Iron Gates area (1966–1968), Personally heading such excavations after 1960, and working together with Dardu, he claimed to have discovered Australopithecus bones, and argued that these hominids engaged in conscious labor. Another focus of his work was the presence of Neanderthals at Bordul Mare (Șureanu Mountains), where he personally uncovered traces of habitation after a 1954 expedition. He completed his last work of literature, Tivisoc și Tivismoc ("Tivisoc and Tivismoc"), of which two chapters were published in 1964. also that year, Frăsina Vlad, the award-winning naive artist, exhibited a cycle of paintings directly inspired by Tivisoc și Tivismoc.

Also heading the Academy's Institute of Philology and Ethnography in 1966–1968, By then, he himself had been drafted into the Communist Party. With fellow intellectuals such as Petre Pandrea, Vasile Georgescu Paleolog and Stelian Cincă, he took part in literary sessions organized by the Oltenian magazine, Ramuri, having been a contributor from its first issue of this new edition, appearing in August 1964. From early 1965, he also served on Ramuris editorial board, alongside Constant, Ilie Purcaru, Sina Dănciulescu and Petre Dragu.

The embryonic University of Craiova employed Nicolăescu-Plopșor as the chair of history; he supported the creation of museums in Corabia and Orlea. He worked for a while in Coțofenii din Față, helping to rescue the local manor, and dating some of its walls to the late-15th century. He had by then dedicated himself to the localization of sites referred to in historical sources, such as the Daco-Roman city of Malva. He maintained that its ruins were to be found in the Dolj area of Fălcoiu, contrary to both Vasile Pârvan's Brădești and later consensus about Malva and Romula being one and the same locality.

Constant met Nicolăescu-Plopșor one final time in early 1968, at Craiova. The archeologist was by then visibly troubled by an "undisclosed physical suffering"; he had intended to set up a new edition of Arhivele Olteniei, but realized that ho could no longer see to such projects. Plopșor died on May 30, 1968, in Bucharest, His body was laid in state at the Archaeology Institute. In the immediate aftermath, his folklorist disciples Aurelian I. Popescu and Ștefan Bossun had a publicized dispute, with the latter accusing the former of plagiarizing from their teacher, and of contributing inferior versions of poems already collected by Plopșor; Popescu denied that this was the case. At the time, Bossun also reported that death had stopped the academician from publishing all his collected ballads, and also that he was preparing an anthology of Oltenian writers, and a bibliography of Oltenian periodicals.

Archaeology and anthropology

Early activities The beginnings of Constantin S. Nicolăescu-Plopșor's archaeological and paleoanthropological investigations were closely linked to his interest in uncovering Oltenian manifestations of Balkan prehistory. He cited as his immediate predecessors a small group of amateur historians, among them Magnus Băileanu and a schoolteacher by the name of Calloianu. Nicolăescu-Plopșor also contested the conclusions of Ceslav Ambrojevici regarding a Middle Paleolithic (Micoquien) presence in the eastern areas of Bessarabia region, suggesting, like others after him, that Ambrojevici had produced a flawed stratigraphy. He did however produce an isolated opinion in respect to the Peștera Oilor remains, proposing that the Oltenian site dated back to the Paleolithic. In his initial verdicts on the Upper Paleolithic, Plopșor followed a tendency common among scholars of his day, believing the Szeletian to be a manifestation of the Solutrean in Hungary and Transylvania, and saw both industries as related to the Aurignacian.

The research into măguri prompted Nicolăescu-Plopșor to draw a comparison with the Mesolithic køkkenmødding sites of Northern Europe, which he linked with the practice of hunting and fishing, whereas the Oltenian locations evidenced a lifestyle related to agriculture and herding. Similarly, his definition of remains found at Peștera Hoților, near Băile Herculane, as Azilian was disputed by fellow archaeologist Dumitru Berciu, who regarded them as early Neolithic. His texts offered personalized and dialectical alternatives to the since-standardized names, such as vârsta acioaiei instead of epoca bronzului ("Bronze Age", acioaiei being an archaism), vârsta cavalerilor ("knight age") for epoca migrațiilor ("Age of Migrations") etc. In tandem, Nicolăescu-Plopșor took personal part in reassessing the Pleistocene and Neanderthal presence in Romania. His Bordul Mare expedition uncovered fossilized Neanderthal and game remains, as well as a characteristic hearth. A collateral implication of Nicolăescu-Plopșor's discovery, based on stratigraphy, was the claim that Oltenia had a contribution to anthropogenesis alongside the Oldowan complex uncovered in Tanzania by Louis Leakey. Among Nicolăescu-Plopșor's critics in this respect is another archaeologist, Adrian Doboș, who creates an analogy with flawed deductions made about an archaeological industry existing at Makapansgat (conclusions which Nicolăescu-Plopșor himself cited as a precedent). This claim was reviewed a final time in 1966, when he concluded that the Szeletian did not exist east of Hungary. By the 1950s, he had arrived to the conclusion that the Mesolithic age was not an independent phenomenon, but rather a late form of the Magdalenian leading into the Neolithic. Doboș however notes that this was not an absolute conclusion, and that later texts show Nicolăescu-Plopșor contradicting himself in describing a Mesolithic "gradual transition" and the Epipaleolithic as "more or less: a delayed Paleolithic". Also according to Doboș, the researcher synthesized his opinion only in 1965, when he defined the Mesolithic as applicable only to those microlithic sites that stood "for a natural transition" toward the Neolithic, while arguing that no such examples could be found in Romania. Focusing his attention on claims made by some Western researchers, who argued that Chellean industries were superior to Clactonian ones for supposedly racial reasons, Nicolăescu-Plopșor accused his colleagues of scientific racism, and indicated that Chellean and Clactonian industries occasionally developed in the same areas. The Romanian scholar primarily designated local Gravettian sites as Kostenkian, after the Soviet model, and generally renounced mentioning industries under their Western names. He also spoke in favor of replacing neologisms coined for specific items in prehistoric typology with adaptations from the Romanian lexis. For example, he recommended following 19th-century researcher Cezar Bolliac in designating industrial nuclei as mătci ("sources" or "wombs"). According to Aurelian I. Popescu, his contribution is divided into two categories: the "exact collection" of folkloric records and the reworking of folkloric themes through the original interventions and expansions of a "great storyteller". The latter function saw Nicolăescu-Plopșor replicating the example of Ion Creangă, a 19th-century storyteller culturally linked to old Moldavia, and brought him the nickname of "Oltenian Creangă".

Cioculescu believes that Nicolăescu-Plopșor closely matches Creangă's outlook as a humorist, and also relies heavily on dialect—in his case, the Oltenian one. Ethnologist Alexandru Leca Morariu believes that Plopșor's dialectal writing is sometimes overdone and distasteful, "obscuring the meaning of phrases". He likens the effect with that produced by dialectal stories by the older Barbu Ștefănescu Delavrancea, noting that neither author reached Creangă's inherent skills.

Such works require a glossary of regional terms, including for the titular term ceaùr ("woozy", in reference to a drunken mouse that picks on his feline persecutor), the noun hat ("horse"), Plopșor also employs uncommon verbs, including a mitocosi ("to bewilder") and a scredi ("to overcook"), as well as the adjective buzgur (introducing a Romanian version of the bogeyman). In the Ceaùr cycle, Morariu detects numerous terms only found in Oltenian and Istro-Romanian: arâmbașa / harambașa for a hajduk commander, amânat used for "belated", besedie for "nonsense talk", the prefix ză- used for verbs, and the preservation of quaint grammatical tenses.

The main product of Nicolăescu-Plopșor's creative storytelling is Tivisoc și Tivismoc, but the category also includes a version of the Iovan Iorgovan stories and a fairy tale titled Cotoșman împărat ("Emperor Tomcat"). Other works of the series are entirely done in his hand, and reflect his direct experience of rural life—according to Morariu, they belong to the sketch story genre. In such pieces, he occasionally signed himself with the pen name Moș Plopșor, tartorul poveștilor ("Old Man Plopșor, ringleader of the stories"). The writer defined his own text as "a bundle of crafted stories, garnished here and there with lies", and "a new story, from older, forgotten stories". His technique, Popescu assessed, "penetrates the world of Păcală, which it enlarges and deepens with a new yarn, the marriage of the famous folk hero." The two brothers mirror each other's physical attributes, and are unrealistically grotesque in appearance: they display heterochromia and hemihypertrophy, their faces and feet being orientated backwards.

The main part of the story, in which the focus is on Tivisoc and Tivismoc, sees the unborn boys accompanying their future father on a quest to find a suitable mother, and later their trip to the mill, where they seem prone to do all things backwards and manage to literally lose their own heads (having to recover them from hungry dogs). The real adventure starts when birds transport them to Scaunu dreptății ("The Seat of Justice"), a mock version of the Last Judgment, which provides the setting for anticlerical jokes and satire of Christian mythology: God is depicted as aging and incompetent, Jesus as a young man "dozing off and scratching his thin beard", Mary as "a middle-aged woman with blue, terrified eyes". The two boys intervene to stop the lesser devils from pulling on the scales to send more people into Hell, but are upset to note that God himself is inclined to pardon a swindling tavern-keeper because he had not kept tabs on a priest. Saint Peter allows the two boys to bribe their way into Heaven, whose human population has been driven to disgust by the endless supply of milk and mămăligă—while in there, they repeat the story of Adam and Eve and taste unpalatable fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. The weight of this sin drags them into Hell, but they are able to easily impress the naïve devils, and eventually drive them away by burning some frankincense (an illustration of the Romanian expression a fugi ca dracul de tămâie, "to run away like a devil from frankincense").

Once in charge of Hell, Tivisoc and Tivismoc free all categories of folk heroes who are also sinners, primarily hajduks and other celebrated brigands, but, Popescu notes, display Păcală's mix of "intelligence and stupidity" in planning their getaway: the entire group follows the two boys up a rope of sand. After a seven-year climb takes them back to the mill, they redirect the river to flow back into Hell, and manage to drown the returning devils. Although they receive a human appearance, Tivisoc and Tivismoc still display supernatural attributes (such as consuming "fried chicken and garlic" instead of maternal milk). The story ends with their departure into the wild world, and the prospects of more adventures—possibly a second volume, which Plopșor never began writing. had won Craiova's beauty contest at age seventeen. Dardu Nicolăescu-Plopșor died in Craiova on June 8, 1989, being survived by his brother Ion, an engineer, and Stanca; Ion himself died just three days after. His father's memory had by then been honored with his inclusion into an anthology of Oltenian writers, put out by Florea Firan in 1975. Historian and journalist Vasile Surcel reported in 2009 that these locations had not been revisited by any Romanian archaeologist after the 1960s. Before 1987, a bust of the scholar, done by Anton Barbu Panaghia, had been placed on permanent exhibit at the Craiova center for social sciences. Following the December 1989 Revolution and the end of communism, as part of a larger trend to provide communes with individual coats of arms, Sălcuța chose to be represented by a golden quill and ink bottle, in honor of its native son. Plopșor's name was also given to the former 24 Februarie Street in Craiova, which was also home to an eponymous circle of humorists, led by Valentin Smarand Popescu.

In 1999, the Academy and the University of Craiova set up the C. S. Nicolăescu-Plopșor Socio-Human Research Institute, which publishes a yearbook of interdisciplinary studies. The Museum of Oltenia holds a special Nicolăescu-Plopșor collection, which includes his book manuscripts and published works, as well as his correspondence with fellow intellectuals such as Dumitru Berciu, Constantin Daicoviciu and Ion Nestor. In late 1995, a campaign was mounted for the museum to also purchase a large collection of Romanian icons once owned by the scholar; also then, a new edition of Gând și Slovă Oltenească was launched in Craiova.

The scholar's thirtieth commemoration in May 1998 was central to a festival in Sălcuța, with Stanca's participation—and with commemorative plaques prepared for local landmarks. Over the following years, another controversy erupted over his role in recovering the Brâncuși sculptures. Paul Rezeanu, who took charge of the items for the Craiova Art Museum, claimed that they had been originally recovered in innocuous circumstances. This was disputed by art critic Cătălin Davidescu, who argued that Rezeanu's claims were unverifiable, and that the cover-up risked tarnishing Plopșor's reputation.