PROGRAM

Join Zoom Meeting (Recurrent link)
https://us06web.zoom.us/j/89685934902?pwd=yFA4xV9C6t9bGi8VmFgHmdthsH3aak.1

Meeting ID: 896 8593 4902
Passcode: 622265

Thursday, 22 October 2026

10.00–10.05
Opening remarks
Daniel CAIN, Director of the Institute for South-East European Studies

Panel 1
Defining Communities: Legal Status, Mobility, and Minority Formation
10.05–11.55
Chair: Ștefan DORONDEL
(Institute for South-East European Studies/“Francisc I Rainer” Institute of Anthropology)

Viorel PANAITE (Institute for South-East European Studies/University of Bucharest)
Subjects of the Sultan: The Legal and Administrative Status of Non-Muslims in the Eighteenth Century Danube Region

Edith UNCU (University of Bucharest)
The Greeks of Sulina: A Frontier Community between Commercial Mobility, Navigation, and Identity Formation

Metin OMER (“Ovidius” University of Constanța/Institute for South-East European Studies Bucharest)
Diplomacy and Minority Construction: Hamdullah Suphi Tanrıöver in Romania (1931–1944) and the “Discovery” of the Gagauz Community

Coffee break
11.55–12.15

Panel 2
12.15–14.40
Environment, Migration and Everyday Life in the Lower Danube Borderlands
Chair: Viorel PANAITE
(Institute for South-East European Studies/University of Bucharest)

Constantin ARDELEANU (Institute for South-East European Studies/New Europe College, Bucharest)
An Unstable Border. Fishing, Ecological Conflict, and Diplomacy in the Danube Delta in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries

Andrei SORESCU (New Europe College, Bucharest/Maynooth University)
Globalising Dobruja: Corruption and Migration in a fin-de-siècle post-Ottoman Periphery

Daniel CAIN (Institute for South-East European Studies, Bucharest)
Everyday Life al the Borderline: Some Aspects of the History of Dobruja (1878–1940)

Ștefan DORONDEL, Stelu ȘERBAN (Institute for South-East European Studies/Institute of Anthropology)
Local Resistance to Environmental Conservation Projects: Fishing Hamlets on the Bulgarian Bank of the Danube

*

Friday, 23 October 2026

Panel 3
10.00–11.45
Imperial Borderlands: Migration, Contestation, and Political Projects on the Lower Danube
Chair: Constantin ARDELEANU (Institute for South-East European Studies/New Europe College, Bucharest)

Svitlana KAIUK (“Oles Honchar” Dnipro National University)
Between Empires: War, Migration, and the Changing Forms of Cossack Identity in the Lower Danube Region (1770s–1820s)

Andrei EMILCIUC (Institute of History of Moldova State University, Chișinău)
Forms of Protest among the Lipovan Population of the Lower Danube against Russian Imperial Socio-Economic Policies (1812–1856 and 1878–1914)

Volodymur POLTORAK (Oriental Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences, Prague)
Michal Czajkowski’s (Sadyk Pasha), Cossack Project, and the Lower Danube Communities: Politics, Literature, and Memory

Coffee Break
11.45–12.00

Panel 4
12.00–13.45
From Nationalization to Kin-State Politics: Minority Communities and Boundaries in the Northeastern Balkans
Chair: Daniel CAIN (Institute for South-East European Studies, Bucharest)

Petar DOBREV (Sofia University/Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)
The Fate of the Penchev Family in Northern Dobruja: Between Integration and Nationalization, 1878–1913

Adriana CUPCEA (The Romanian Institute for Research on National Minorities, Cluj-Napoca)
Religious Soft Power in Turkey’s Kin-State Policy in the Balkans: Turkish State Actors among Muslim Communities in Romania’s Dobrogea Region and in Kosovo

Polina TRIFANOVA (Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with Ethnographic Museum at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia)
Maintaining Community Boundaries in a Multicultural Society: The Case of Crimean Tatars in Tsarev Brod Village, Bulgaria

This event is organized in collaboration with the Institute for South-East European Studies of the Romanian Academy.
www.acadsudest.ro