Vasile Conta

He attended primary school in Târgu Neamț (where he was a classmate of Ion Creangă), and graduated from the Academia Mihăileană in Iași in 1868.

Beneficiary of a fellowship, he went to study in 1871 in Belgium, first in Antwerp, and then at the Free University of Bruxelles, from which he graduated with a law degree in 1872.

[2] In 1877, Conta was elected deputy in the Romanian Parliament, and in 1880 he was briefly Minister of Public Instruction and Religious Affairs in the Ion C. Brătianu government.

On the occasion of the Congress of Berlin in 1878, he took a stand against the seizure by the Russian Empire of the three counties of Southern Bessarabia.

A high school in Târgu Neamț,[3] as well as streets in Cluj-Napoca, Craiova, Iași, and Sector 1 of Bucharest are named after him.