Politiques identitaires et esthétisations de la mer Noire (le cas roumain)
Identity policies and aestheticisations of the Black Sea (the Romanian case)

Author(s): Ligia Tudurachi
Subject(s): History, Language and Literature Studies, Fine Arts / Performing Arts, Visual Arts, Studies of Literature, Local History / Microhistory, Romanian Literature
Published by: Сдружение „Транспонтика“
Keywords: heterotopia; annexation tourism; Mangalia; Balchik; decoration; landscape; coat of arms
Summary/Abstract: What we intend is to contrast two ways of using the Romanian territory of the Black Sea as a holiday space in the interwar period. These two modes are defined in relation to two spaces, Mangalia and Balchik. Having both their eastern roots in Greek Antiquity, and later having passed through a Romanian administration, these two settlements had different historical destinies in the twentieth century, which ended by differentiating them simultaneously as landscape, population and mode of life. Created on the ruins of old Callatis, Mangalia has always belonged to the Romanian territory. Of an exhilarating beauty, it was still in the 1920s an almost wilderness, whose life was simply prolonged on the old ruins, making one feel fatigue and exhaustion that were closely related to the missing civilisations. On the contrary, Balchik was an integral part of the Bulgarian territory, having passed to Romania only between 1913 and 1940, together with the rest of the Quadrilateral. At that time, Queen Mary of Romania built a castle here, to use it as a summer residence, a castle surrounded by a garden that would soon become famous throughout Europe. With the queen, Balchik began to be frequented by the Romanian aristocracy and, above all, by elite artists from Bucharest, by writers and painters whom the queen invited to her worldly salon. The Balchik Municipality also contributed to increasing the interest of the artists for this place, providing them lands for villas and creating here, starting in 1926, a Summer University. All these events are decisive in influencing the form, equally aristocratic and academic, of the summer sociability practiced in the Balchik; while the same writers and painters discovered, in the 1920s, the “wild” attraction of Mangalia. Romanian literature and plastic arts are thus nourished, at the time, by two very different types of “affections” of the sea, simultaneous and concurrent. On the one hand, the “vestiges” and ruins of Mangalia, a territory much older than the rest of the country, lived with a strong sense of ethnicity. On the other side, the castle and the princely life, well regulated by social codes, but newly created, on a borrowed territory, which continued to be linked to another national culture. In its Romanian part, the Black Sea thus feeds between the two wars a discourse about a wild paradise, raw and unappropriated (Mangalia) – and a discourse about an ideal exile and the utopian spaces of adoption (Balchik). All of this is due to expire in the early 1940s.

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