Popricani is a

commune A commune is an alternative term for an intentional community. Commune or comună or comune or other derivations may also refer to: Administrative-territorial entities * Commune (administrative division), a municipality or township ** Communes of ...

Iași County Iași County () is a county (județ) of Romania, in Western Moldavia, with the administrative seat at Iași. It is the most populous county in Romania, after the Municipality of Bucharest (which has the same administrative level as that of a c ...

Western Moldavia Moldavia ( ro, Moldova), also called Western Moldavia or Romanian Moldavia, is the historic and geographical part of the former Principality of Moldavia situated in eastern and north-eastern Romania. Until its union with Wallachia in 1859, the P ...

Romania Romania ( ; ro, România ) is a country located at the crossroads of Central, Eastern, and Southeastern Europe. It borders Bulgaria to the south, Ukraine to the north, Hungary to the west, Serbia to the southwest, Moldova to the east, and ...

, part of the

Iași metropolitan area The Iași Metropolitan Area is a metropolitan association in Iași County, Romania, that includes the municipality of Iași and 19 nearby communes. It has a total surface of 1,159 km² (21.2%) of the 5,476 km² that the county has, an ...

. It is composed of nine villages: Cârlig, Cotu Morii, Cuza Vodă, Moimești, Popricani, Rediu Mitropoliei, Țipilești, Vânători and Vulturi.

Mass grave

In November 2010, a mass grave dating from 1941 was discovered in the nearby forest of Vulturi. It is believed to contain the remains of up to a hundred Jewish men, women and children murdered by Romanian authorities contemporaneously with the nearby

Iași pogrom The Iași pogrom (, sometimes anglicized as Jassy) was a series of pogroms launched by governmental forces under Marshal Ion Antonescu in the Romanian city of Iași against its Jewish community, which lasted from 29 June to 6 July 1941. Accordin ...

. It is the first such grave found in Romania since the 1945 discovery of 311 bodies at Stânca-Roznovanu, also in the vicinity of Iași. An official report concluded that the grave contained 36 victims, and that those responsible for the killing had already been sentenced in 1948.

Popricani in Jewish Literature

The village of Popricani was featured in the 1953 memoir ''Mayn tatns khretshme'' ("My Father's Tavern") by Yiddish writer Yitskhok Horowitz. Horowitz recounts his childhood in the family tavern, growing up in the sole Jewish family in the village of Popricani, with episodic tales of wolves, Shabbat, and the 1907 Romanian Peasants' Revolt. An English translation of the book, "The Tavern of Popricani" translated by Ollie Elkus, was published by Naydus Press in 2022.

References

Communes in Iași County Localities in Western Moldavia {{Iaşi-geo-stub