The Barcelona‑Bucharest Connection: Forging Intellectual and Political Alliances at the 1924 Congress of Byzantine Studies
The Barcelona‑Bucharest Connection: Forging Intellectual and Political Alliances at the 1924 Congress of Byzantine Studies

Summary/Abstract: The 1924 International Congress of Byzantine Studies in Bucharest served as a crucial nexus for intellectual exchange between two European cultural peripheries: Catalonia and Romania. This article examines how this academic gathering facilitated a complex transnational dialogue that operated simultaneously on diplomatic, scholarly, and personal levels. Focusing on the interactions between the Catalan architect and politician Josep Puig i Cadafalch and the Romanian historian and statesman Nicolae Iorga, along with the mediating role of Iorga’s student Constantin Marinescu, it argues that the Congress became an arena for cultural protodiplomacy where both parties advanced their nationalist agendas through mutual academic validation. The analysis demonstrates how Catalan and Romanian scholars co‑produced historical narratives that reinforced each other’s claims to cultural distinctiveness, while personal encounters and travel accounts reveal the tensions between public solidarity and private perception. Drawing on archival sources and published works, the study shows how knowledge, identity, and diplomacy were intertwined in the reconfiguration of interwar Europe.

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