Dear Reader,
Our journal, whose first issue You are holding in your hands, has set as its main aim, also due to the Romanian-English-Hungarian relations of our university and faculty, to establish an intercultural practice. The passage from one culture to the other, the free alternation of cultural perspectives offer such advantages that no culture today can do without, regardless of whether we are talking about the culture of large or smaller nations, about majority or minority cultures. Interculturality, however, cannot mean a kind of universality lingering above particular cultures, assuming to be culturally neutral. And neither can it be a large culture assuming the universality of some of its own features. It should rather mean reciprocal multilingualism and the plurality of cultural identities. Being familiar with several cultures offers us the possibility to view our “own” culture as well as “the Other” cultures from an inner and outer angle simultaneously. This dual perspective creates a much more comprehensive opportunity for self-reflection than any of the viewpoints based on a monolingual and monocultural existence. And, of course, it provides much more favorable conditions for learning about others. It is a well-known fact that architecture has been the art defining the styles of the great ages of art history. Architecture could fulfill this role exactly because, due to its specific structure, it has been capable of bringing about the union— inaccessible to any other art form—of this inside and outside perspective. Our journal—of course, with much more modest but professionally wellfounded ambitions—aspires to achieve something similar: to offer a simultaneous, outward and inside view of the Hungarian, Romanian, and English (and occasionally other) cultural universes. We hope that You take our endeavors with confidence and the patience that any new initiative deserves. Béla Bíró Executive editor
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