Teaching Slavic History in Romania in 2017 (original) (raw)

Studia Slavica et Balcanica Petropolitana

My contribution relies on my experience of more than ten years in teaching a university course of Slavic history in Romania. The course and seminar are entitled «The Slavs and Slavonism in the Medieval and Early Modern History of the Romanians» [«Slavii şi slavonismul în istoria medievală şi premodernă a românilor»]. It is a special course taught to third year students, BA level, at the History of Philosophy Faculty of the Babeş-Bolyai University in Cluj. For several years now, this teaching experience has led me to several questions regarding the opportunity of offering such a course from a didactic perspective, how it connects to the times we live in, the manner in which such a course should be prepared according to the education, expectations, and needs of our students. I continue to find answers to these questions throughout the years and on this occasion I shall attempt to formulate them. I will begin by presenting briefly the history of Slavic Studies in Romania, as an academic discipline. In Romania, scientific interest into Slavic Studies (Slavistics) dates back to the second half of the 19 th century. Such interests appeared as a result of Romanian historiography, culture, and society becoming modern and mature. For almost a century (from the end of the 18 th century until the mid-19 th century), the historiography of the Enlightenment and of Romanticism have revealed the Latin historical and linguistic factors as fundamental, even exclusive ones in the formation of the Romanian people and language. Around 1780-1820, Petru Maior, Gheorghe Şincai, Samuil Micu, and Ioan Budai-Deleanu, Romanian scholars from Transylvania, Greek-Catholics formed at the schools and universities of Buda, Vienna, Rome, and Trnava, have transformed stressing the Latin character of the Romanian nation and language into an actual platform, taking this discourse from the cultural and academic environments to the political ones and spreading it among the public. By stressing and overvaluing the Latin elements, understandable in context, they ended up denying the non-Latin elements of the Romanian language (Slavic, Greek, Turkish etc.), denying the role of the Cyrillic alphabet that they deemed not representative for the spirit of the Romanian language, and disregarding certain moments of Romanian medieval history and culture, especially those associated with the Slavs, the Bulgarian influence etc. 1