Relations Gréco-Roumaines: Interculturalité et Identité Nationale/Greek-Romanian Relations: Interculturalism and National Identity (review)

In polite society, first impressions count and last. In the realm of the historical imagination, however, this rule does not apply, as recent memories tend to erase older ones. Greek-Romanian relations handsomely illustrate this point. The Danubian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia (which became "Romania" when they united in 1859) had manifold relations with the Greek world, for they formed an integral part of what Dimitri Obolenski termed the "Byzantine Commonwealth." This was a pre-modern Greek-Slavonic-Romanian world, based on the cultural and spiritual foundations provided by Byzantine traditions and Orthodox Christianity. This world survived the fall of Constantinople and produced a "Byzantium after Byzantium" (Byzance après Byzance), as suggested in the 1930s by the distinguished Romanian historian Nicolae Iorga. The Principalities had supported Mount Athos since the fourteenth century, became important centers of Greek-Orthodox learning and printing in the seventeenth, were ruled by the Phanariots (Greek or Hellenized families from the Phanar district of Constantinople) in the eighteenth, and hosted a substantial Greek community that lasted well into the twentieth century. And yet, during the cold war (and after) most Greeks would be hard pressed to remember (let alone to relate to) things Romanian, with the exception perhaps of the Dacia, a rather unfortunate car produced in Romania under license from Renault, popular among those who could not afford anything racier. Three reasons account for such a dramatic reversal: first, the gradual death of the "Byzantine Commonwealth" with the rise of nationalism in the nineteenth century; second, the dominance of communism in Romania during a period of rampant anti-communism in Greece; and, third, the "Vlach Question." The Vlachs, transhumant shepherds speaking a Latin-based language close to Romanian, were intermittently claimed by Bucharest as their kin, causing much bitterness in Athens.

But the Danube does flow and things do change. Like Greece, Romania is now a member of the European Union and likes to depict itself as a "Central European" (not "Balkan") country, just as Greece styles itself a "Southeast European" one; thousands of Romanians are seeking their financial future in Greece; Greek businesses are thriving in Romania; and the Vlach question is sleeping a deep sleep. This is indeed a good time for scholars from both countries to reassess their historical relations. In this context, the book under review here, based on a conference held in Athens in 2000 and expertly edited by Kitromilides and Tabaki, is a timely endeavor. It includes 23 papers, almost evenly divided between Romanians and Greeks, and hosts both established historians and younger ones. Of the 23 contributions, 18 are in French and five in English. The chronological framework of this work is the post-Byzantine period, ranging mostly from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, with much (although not overwhelming) attention paid to the Phanariot era. In that sense, this book is a kind of sequel to an earlier Greek-Romanian conference, which was held 30 years earlier in Salonica and produced L'Epoque Phanariote, a useful work of reference. It seems that those interested in the post-Phanariot period and the twentieth century shall have to wait for a third conference, hopefully to occur sooner than 30 years from now.

The book is structured around seven thematic parts. The central theme of the post-Byzantine tradition in the Principalities is judiciously discussed in the first part by Andrei Pippidi and Maria Nystazopoulou-Pélékidou. In the second, Paschalis Kitromilides and Alexandru Zub focus on historiography: the former reflects with a sure hand on some crucial aspects of the passage from a "common history," shared by both Greeks and Romanians, to the "national histories" of the nineteenth century and identifies many a caveat for future research, while the latter deftly investigates the dilemmas of Romanian historiography. Literary developments is the subject of the third part, with papers on...