Review: Iolanda Ţighiliu and Marian Cojoc, eds. Dobrudja: a cross cultural pool. A multi-ethnic space (Târgovişte: Cetatea de Scaun, 2007), 204 pp.
Iolanda Ţighiliu and Marian Cojoc, eds. Dobrudja: a cross cultural pool. A multi-ethnic space (Târgovişte: Cetatea de Scaun, 2007), 204 pp.

Summary/Abstract: Coinciding with Romania’s integration in the European Union and with the EU’s search for combining regional, national and cross-border identities in creating one of the richest and most diverse of world’s cultural spaces, the publication of a book dedicated to Dobrudja and to its diverse ethnic landscape constitutes a fortunate accident. A peripheral part and ‘border zone of the Roman Empire, of the Byzantine Empire, of the feudal state of Wallachia, and of the Ottoman Empire’, to which I can add a springboard of the Ancient Greeks against the barbarians, who first entered in the history of mankind as a place of exile for Publius Ovidius Naso, this region, situated on the western coast of the Black Sea, is the cradle of a remarkably diverse civilization, a real Europe in miniature. To give an account of this diversity, we can quote a statistic of 1880, which found that out of the 157,114 Dobrudjan inhabitants, 51,915 were Romanians, 29,643 Bulgarians, 45,902 Muslims (Tartars and Turks), 17,708 Russians and Lipovens, 4,271 Greeks, 2,763 Germans, 1,135 Jews, 935 Armenians, 2,842 other nationalities. Moreover, the region is an important strategic region, commanding the control over the mouths of the Danube and the western Black Sea.

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