Institutul de Studii Sud-Est Europene

This article explores the aspirations of a small community in rural Bulgaria, devastated by postsocialist economic decline. The community's economic and moral aspirations are linked to the ruins of a thermal bath and the existence of a "miraculous spring"– formerly the source of local prosperity and pride. In the context of a vanishing agro-industrial sector, deindustrialisation and a mass exodus of the local population, the bath is the locus of capitalist fantasies for the villagers, who believe foreign investments will revive the entire community.

Governments have conferred ownership titles to many citizens throughout the world in an effort to turn things into property. Almost all elements of nature have become the target of property laws, from the classic preoccupation with land to more ephemeral material, such as air and genetic resources. When Things Become Property interrogates the mixed outcomes of conferring ownership by examining postsocialist land and forest reforms in Albania, Romania and Vietnam, and finds that property reforms are no longer, if they ever were, miracle tools available to governments for refashioning economies, politics or environments

This article seeks to explore the responses of villagers from north-western Bulgaria to neoliberal policies promoted by the post-socialist state in rural areas. We show the two strategies people mobilise in order to defend their interests. A first method is the everyday peasant strategy of resistance: quiet, covered and unopened acts of defiance against the neoliberal policies concerning food acquisition and food production. A second method of reaction is the open protest organised against a newly established polluting enterprise, which is feared to threaten their livelihoods. In both cases villagers use historically formed transnational networks based on friendship and kinship.

Abstract This paper explores the history of two islands of the Danube River, their movements due to the hydrodynamics of the river and the geopolitical consequences of these movements. The paper shows the process through which the Danube with its hydrological dynamics became a historical actor that provoked military actions, shifted political borders and was the source of intense diplomatic debates between Romania and Bulgaria at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth. The paper attempts to contribute to a stream of theory generally known as posthumanism by bringing to the forefront historical facts from the nineteenth century and the first years of the twentieth. It also contributes to enriching the environmental history of Southeast Europe.

Abstract In this article, I focus on the context in which levees were constructed on the Lower Danube, along the Bulgarian–Romanian border. I argue that after World War II, while the two states shared the management of the river in this region, Romania pursued a techno-nationalist hydraulic policy, which led to the complete damming of the left bank of the Danube with levees. Bulgaria also succeeded in building levees on its side of the Danube, that is the right bank of the common border; however, Bulgaria used different technologies and its building works proceeded at a different pace. Techno-nationalism as delineated in this article considers nation-states as basic units in the analysis of technologies. Technological development is not a flowing process, as it becomes entangled with the interests of nation-states seeking legitimation. Hydraulic technology may strengthen nation-states, and in some circumstances leads to the emergence of nationalistic ideologies.

In the first half of the 2000s, one project to restore the former Danube floodplain was carried out in Belene, a marginal town on the Bulgarian Danube. The aim of this article is to record the practices that were already in place before the interventions on the Danube, as part of a heterogeneous local knowledge that had an alternative vision to the scientific knowledge of experts involved in the restoration project. The data comes from qualitative interviews with locals and experts implicated in this project, as well as ethnographic observations from the fieldwork I carried out in 2013–2014, 2020 and 2022. The conclusion is that without attempting to replace the scientific knowledge, the locals aim to impose, through their local knowledge, a sort of slow ecology that eases the pace of the restoration of the former Danube floodplains.

The article provides a preliminary description of Late-Classical-Hellenistic roof tiles found in the offerings trench of tumulus TA95 at Orgame (Argamum) and suggests the existence of a roofing structure in close connection with it. The identification of the tile types was complicated in light of their fragmentary state. According to the chronology of the layers excavated in the offerings trench, where they have been discovered, the construction of tiles can be established in the second quarter-middle of the 4th century B.C. The identification of the tile types was complicated in light of their fragmentary state. Moreover, the article discusses the development of some types of roofed buildings connected to the ritual practices developed at the founder’s tomb. This preliminary approach will illuminate the benefits of even simple roof tiles in reconstructing ancient production and building practices at Orgame. One of the significant conclusions reported in this study is that our city and others in its regions (see Açik Suhat-Caraburun) not only went on to make characteristic roof-styles of their own, as a statement of local capacity of „savoir faire”, but also somethimes even adapt the „international” standards, as those Corinthian or Attic, at local versions of tiles.

The defeat of the Ottoman Empire by the Tsarist Empire in the 1877–1878 war created an opportunity for the emergence of new nation states located next to the River Danube, including Bulgaria and Romania. The aim of this paper is to consider the period during which the Danubian landscape was transformed by means of the modest technologies available to the two new nation states. On the one hand, the two nation states appeared to reach a tacit agreement that they would resolve their disputes without the intervention of external European powers. On the other hand, through the rise of its technocratic elite and the adoption of an aggressive policy towards developing the Danubian environment, Romania became the dominant partner in the two nations’ co-management of the Danube.

We explore the effects of prolonged contact with Croatian on the inflexional morphology of number-marking in the Istro-Romanian noun. One result of a reorganization of the nominal system is that certain bisyllabic plural desinences, originally associated with feminine gender, are reassigned to the masculine, and come to exist alongside other modes of masculine plural marking. The resultant variation in masculine plural inflexion becomes subject to new patterns of distribution which are clearly sensitive to Croatian models, including the exaptation of masculine plural morphology to provide distinctive specialized morphological marking of plurals in certain numeral quantifier expressions for ‘smaller’ numbers, in ways clearly reminiscent of Croatian. What is involved is a complex array of ‘pattern’ borrowing, although there is also some evidence for ‘matter’ borrowing of a dialectal Croatian plural ending which Istro-Romanian sometimes uses in numeral quantifier phrases with higher numerals. Overall, we seem to be in the presence of an emergent ‘numerative’. While the creation of numeratives is well known from the internal history of various languages, our data may show that they may also emerge through language contact.

The content of the new issue of the journal: Paweł Cholewicki, Si non vis recipere meam fidem et baptismum, exeas regnum meum vel solvas tantum; et quod plus est, te decapitabo: The Circular Letter of the Bosnian Vicar Bartholomew of La Verna and Repression of the Krstjani in 1459–1460; Joanna Poetz, A Waldensian Translation of D.8 c.5–6 and c.8–9 from the Decretum Gratiani—Gregori: Tota costuma es de dever pausar enapres la verita; Teodora Popovici, Elisabeta Negrău, Đorđe Branković's Description of the Portraits of Lady Despina and Metropolitan Maksim at Bistrița Monastery; Alina Kondratiuk, The Mother of God with Wings: In Quest of a Model; Ana Dumitran, Roksolana Kosiv, Bogdan Ilieș, Andrei Buda, Strâmba Monastery and the Oldest Wide-Intrados Iconostasis in Transylvania; Ioan-Ovidiu Abrudan, Biographical and Artistic Restitutions: Radul from Rășinari; Vladimir Agrigoroaei, Alessia Chapel, The Manufactory of Old French Psalters? part 3: The Semi-Diplomatic transcription of Douce MS 320; exhibitions / expositions; conferences and workshops / conférences et ateliers.

In Istro-Romanian, there are two main groups of verbs, one inherited from Romance, one borrowed from the co-territorial Chakavian Croatian variety. The Croatian-derived verbs are specified for aspect, while the Romance ones are not. Generally, these groups do not interact. However, for a number of verbs previous scholars have claimed that they form suppletive aspectual pairs consisting of a prefixed Croatian-derived perfective verb and a simplex Romance imperfective. Given the anaspectual status of most Romance verbs such an analysis deserves scrutinous empirical verification. In this paper, we survey a comprehensive corpus of Istro-Romanian spanning from the second half of the 19th century to the 21st century with respect to seven alleged suppletive pairs. After describing their behaviour with respect to Vendlerian verb classes, as well as the semantics of their arguments, we come to the conclusion that we cannot speak of aspectual suppletion in the case of these seven verbs. Rather, some verbs are semantically specialized, so that they cannot conceivably form a pair. Where there is no obvious specialization, the prefixed Croatian verb focuses telicity, while the Romance one does not.

This article aims to historicise the making of the border between the Russian and Ottoman empires in southern Bessarabia, drawn in the post-Crimean War context in 1856–1857. An international commission was appointed for this purpose, and delegates from five empires – Austrian, British, French, Russian and Ottoman – gathered in the province on the ground to demarcate the border decided by Europe's powers. Based on the commission's lengthy protocols, and on the memoirs of several experts involved in surveying, mapping and demarcating the border on the ground, this article delves into the mechanisms of border-making in the field, examining the challenges that commission members encountered with finding a common vocabulary and with balancing larger geopolitical interests with local geographical realities. The case study is also an excellent illustration of what it means to zoom in and out of the different scales involved in bordering. From the diplomatic meetings in Paris to the commissioners’ negotiations in Chișinău and the land surveyors adding names on maps after discussions with peasants in a village close to the Dniester, border making is a complex process that operated simultaneously at different scales, spaces and times.

A sensitive topic for decades (for ideological reasons), Dobruja is still a challenge for many Romanian and Bulgarian historians. A peripheral and hardly populated region, this territory lying between the Danube and the Black Sea became the major source of dispute between Bucharest and Sofia at the dawn of the last century. After 1878, legal history and statistics were the pillars of the new identity of this former Ottoman territory di?vided between Romania and Bulgaria, as a result of a decision made by the Great Powers. In order to meet the specific requirements of young national states, Dobruja underwent a colonisation process (whose intensity differed in the two parts of the region). Ethnic diversity caused much concern, particularly in the critical moments that endangered the relations between the two neighbouring countries. The Balkan Wars represented the moment when the Dobruja question officially emerged. Romania?s decision to annex South?ern Dobruja would traumatise Bulgarian society, which would look forward to retaliating. This moment occurred earlier than many Romanian politicians expected. The spirit of revenge explains why the fighting on the Dobrujan front was so intense in the autumn of 1916. Dobruja was the first province of the Romanian Kingdom that fell under the Central Powers? occupation. The documents stored in Romanian archives are too few to make it possible to accurately reconstruct the history of this province during its military occu?pation by the Central Powers. This is not an easy challenge: Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, Serbia, Germany, Turkey and Austro-Hungary were in some way involved in the events in Dobruja in the autumn of 1916.

Philotheos Kokkinos was one of the most prolific late-Byzantine hagiographers, who eulogized saints of old, as well as contemporaneous holy figures. He dedicated the first among his vitae of contemporaneous saints to the little-known holy man Nikodemos the Younger from the Philokalles monastery in Thessalonike. While superior of this monastery, Kokkinos gathered information about the holy man’s life and arranged it into the form of a short vita, titled hypomnēma (BHG 2307). This article analyzes the ways in which Kokkinos constructed an identity in narrative form for Nikodemos, exploring elements of holy foolery, hesychast influences, the miracle accounts weaved into the narrative, as well as its intended audience.

The content of the new issue of the journal: Paweł Cholewicki, Si non vis recipere meam fidem et baptismum, exeas regnum meum vel solvas tantum; et quod plus est, te decapitabo: The Circular Letter of the Bosnian Vicar Bartholomew of La Verna and Repression of the Krstjani in 1459–1460; Joanna Poetz, A Waldensian Translation of D.8 c.5–6 and c.8–9 from the Decretum Gratiani—Gregori: Tota costuma es de dever pausar enapres la verita; Teodora Popovici, Elisabeta Negrău, Đorđe Branković's Description of the Portraits of Lady Despina and Metropolitan Maksim at Bistrița Monastery; Alina Kondratiuk, The Mother of God with Wings: In Quest of a Model; Ana Dumitran, Roksolana Kosiv, Bogdan Ilieș, Andrei Buda, Strâmba Monastery and the Oldest Wide-Intrados Iconostasis in Transylvania; Ioan-Ovidiu Abrudan, Biographical and Artistic Restitutions: Radul from Rășinari; Vladimir Agrigoroaei, Alessia Chapel, The Manufactory of Old French Psalters? part 3: The Semi-Diplomatic transcription of Douce MS 320; exhibitions / expositions; conferences and workshops / conférences et ateliers.

This paper is the biography of a failed infrastructural project: that of building a Romanian seaport and of linking it to the mainland via a canal and/or a railway. It details its rich life, its initiators and partisans, but also its (mostly foreign) contenders; “born” in the early 1860s in a certain geopolitical, economic or infrastructural environment, the initiative morphed in the coming years in close connection and in direct competition with complementary or rival projects. While the plan of having an “independent” Romanian Black Sea port remained central to the Jibrieni project, most of its other infrastructural components were continuously reimagined, so as to fit into the Romanian government's priorities and – with them – into the extremely dynamic transportation map of Central and Eastern Europe in the 1860s–1870s.

Abstract In the late nineteenth century, Sulina, a settlement of about 10,000 inhabitants, was Romania’s busiest port. Located at the mouth of the only navigable branch of the Danube, the town held a strategic position along South-Eastern European transportation corridors, being the gateway of Lower Danubian trade and shipping. But Sulina was also a hydrobiological melting pot of natural and anthropogenic water flows carried by the Danube, the Black Sea’s currents, and the tanks and bilges of the thousands of ships that came to load their cargoes in the local harbour and roadstead. With advances in the science of bacteriology, provisioning Sulina with safe urban water became a Romanian and international public health priority. Investments in the town’s water supply and sanitation are a fascinating, yet little-known episode of sanitary internationalism, in which several actors in Romania and Europe cooperated – institutionally, technologically and financially – in the attempt to bring sanitary civilisation to one of Europe’s most crucial commercial and epidemiological gateways. In line with similar interest for water, disease and urban infrastructure in a peripheral (quasi-colonial) context, this paper will be illustrative for the growing debates in Romania around the quality of water in the context of the larger hygiene movement. The rhetoric of ‘improvement’ and ‘progress’ in providing access to safe drinking water, stemming from the idea that ‘uncleanliness with all its consequences comes mainly from lack of water’, was accompanied by calls for the construction of modern water infrastructure.

A review of the book: Dagnosław Demski and Dominika Czarnecka, eds. 2021. Staged Otherness. Ethnic Shows in Central and Eastern Europe: 1850–1939. Budapest – Vienna – New York: Central European University Press, 449 p.

Whether the navigation and, therefore, the foreigners’ commercial activity in the Black Sea continued after the conquest of Constantinople by the Ottoman Empire in 1453 – and above all after the final conquest of the last important Italian Black Sea colonies in 1475 (Caffa/Fedosia and Tana/Tanais) – is a matter of dispute. The new archival discoveries focusing on the Venetian commercial activity in the Black Sea in the period 1479–1499, delimited by the end of the First and the Second Ottoman–Venetian War, allow us to take the side of those who believe that the fall of Constantinople represented a certain continuation with the realities that preceded it, rather than a clear disruption of the Black Sea’s economy. On the other hand, the fact that the Venetians continued to trade in an area that was theoretically monopolized by Ottoman merchants indicates a lack of Ottoman commercial capacities, and a certain need of the Ottomans in reference to the Italian cities.

The content of the new issue of the journal: Paweł Cholewicki, Si non vis recipere meam fidem et baptismum, exeas regnum meum vel solvas tantum; et quod plus est, te decapitabo: The Circular Letter of the Bosnian Vicar Bartholomew of La Verna and Repression of the Krstjani in 1459–1460; Joanna Poetz, A Waldensian Translation of D.8 c.5–6 and c.8–9 from the Decretum Gratiani—Gregori: Tota costuma es de dever pausar enapres la verita; Teodora Popovici, Elisabeta Negrău, Đorđe Branković's Description of the Portraits of Lady Despina and Metropolitan Maksim at Bistrița Monastery; Alina Kondratiuk, The Mother of God with Wings: In Quest of a Model; Ana Dumitran, Roksolana Kosiv, Bogdan Ilieș, Andrei Buda, Strâmba Monastery and the Oldest Wide-Intrados Iconostasis in Transylvania; Ioan-Ovidiu Abrudan, Biographical and Artistic Restitutions: Radul from Rășinari; Vladimir Agrigoroaei, Alessia Chapel, The Manufactory of Old French Psalters? part 3: The Semi-Diplomatic transcription of Douce MS 320; exhibitions / expositions; conferences and workshops / conférences et ateliers.