Xenophobic Mountains. Landscape Sentience Reconsidered in the Romanian Carpathians (original) (raw)
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In the 1475 battle of Vaslui between Moldavian Stephan the Great and the Ottoman governor of Rumelia, Hadım Suleiman Pasha, the landscape and weather conspired. Historian Dumitru Almaş 1 describes the battle in one of the three volumes of history for school children that he wrote and published in the 1980s: One of the greatest battles fought by Stephan the Great was the one in Vaslui. It was wintertime when the Turkish Sultan sent a great army to our country. The army was led by a great, skilled warrior, named Soliman Pasha. He believed he would defeat the Romanians and would subjugate their country easily. Stephan's army was three times smaller.. .. As I said, it was wintertime. .. [and] the army hid around a river's marshes, where the enemies would pass.. .. On the day that Soliman's troops came through, a thick fog settled on the valley of the river. Soliman advanced blindly. He could barely see a few steps ahead. Out of nowhere, from their hiding places, the Romanians stuck their enemies. They slayed many. Others were swallowed by the icy marshes.. .. The battle of Vaslui was a brilliant Romanian victory. Soliman Pasha returned to his country with whatever troops he had left. Such a shameful defeat had never before been suff ered by a great Turkish general. (Almaş 1987: 41) 2 This open access edition has been made available under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 license thanks to the support of Knowledge Unlatched.
The progressive enlargement of the European Union has up to now entailed a steady effort made by the member states in view of reterritorialization and symbolic translocation. The participation in the construction of the E.U. always meant a rescaling of the geopolitical space, depending on the rights and duties that have kept reshaping its borders. The articles referring to the free circulation within the E.U. have proved to modify the concrete daily exercise of cultural exchanges over the borders, on the one hand, and, on the other, the collective perception of each single state's borders and of the Union's borders. The interest for what remains on the outside of such a construction at a certain point is vital, and the phenomena of partition, disruption and/or cooperation always say something essential about the internal architecture of this construction. This paper explores the ways in which Romanian culture builds up a border identity before but also after Romania's accession to the European Union. This border identity stands for something other than a peripheral identity which only has to ensure security. The public discourse in Romania tries to find arguments for a comfortable and speculative positioning in its own condition; thus, the border identity is always attributed mediation assignments and offers – without making any difference – resistance towards the separation, autarchy and homogenization phenomena. For a culture building its border identity, taking responsibility for the way it plans the relationships with its neighbors is vital. How does the periphery imagine the outside world, what are the benefits for its own economy, but also for the whole economy of the world it is part of? To ask such a question means to surpass the traditional articulation of the terms of center and periphery so as to shift the attention upon the relation between the periphery and the outside world, which the periphery necessarily is interested in and which, at some point, may become " central ". Such exercises, by which one can imagine the vicinity relations symbolically shift the borders between cultures, facilitate the exchanges and provide suggestions for subsequent re-territorializations.
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