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Meeting ID: 850 6813 1917
Passcode: 176307

PROGRAM

9.30 – 9.45 Welcome & Opening Remarks

9.45 – 11.45 Session 1: Opposing Lenses on the Black Sea: from Transnational Leisure Encounters to “Lake Geopolitics” and Beyond

Chair: Claudiu OANCEA (New Europe College / University of Bucharest)
Mioara ANTON (“Nicolae Iorga” Institute of History, Romanian Academy)
When the West Meets the East: The Experiences of British Tourists on the Black Sea in Communist Romania

Alexandra BARDAN (Faculty of Journalism and Communication Studies, University of Bucharest)
Western Oasis on the Socialist Seashore: Leisure and Dance on Romania’s Black Sea Coast

Orazio Maria GNERRE (University of Perugia)
Hikmet, Ponomarev, Ceaușescu, and Socialism on the Black Sea

Iuliana DUMITRU (National Museum of the Romanian Peasant)
Bordering Freedom: Memory, Art, and Everyday Escape on Romania’s Socialist Seaside

11.45 – 12.00 Coffee Break

12.00 – 13.30 Session 2: The Darker Side of the Black Sea: From Diplomacy and Geopolitics, to Military Uses

Chair: Constantin ARDELEANU (New Europe College / Institute for Southeast European Studies of the Romanian Academy)

Alexander GOGUN (Freie Universität Berlin)
Stalin´s Liquid Border on the Balkans. The Black Sea – Danube Canal as an Element of the Preparation of the 3^rd World War: 1948-1953

Alexandru D. AIOANEI (“A.D. Xenopol” Institute of History, Romanian Academy, Iași)
British Diplomats in Bucharest and the Black Sea at the Beginning of the Cold War

Tetiana KOSTIUK (Borys Grinchenko Kyiv Metropolitan University)
Black Sea Region QR Code and Initiatives: Above the Time and Sea Level

13.30 – 14.30 Lunch Break

14.30 – 16.00 Session 3: Argus’ Sight on the Black Sea: Entrepreneurs, Cultural Transfers, and the Curatorial Vision of a Maritime Region

Chair: Valentina SANDU-DEDIU (New Europe College / National University of Music, Bucharest)
Mladen ZOBEC & Rory ARCHER (Centre for Southeast European Studies University of Graz)
Yugoslav Albanian Entrepreneurs as Cold War Border Crossers in the Balkan and Black Sea region

Corina OPREA (The Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme)
The Black Sea Anoxic Museum: Curatorial Strategies for Submerged Histories and Disappearing Coastal Worlds

Ilaria SICARI (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice)
From the West With Love: Sending Books to Bulgaria and Romania during the Cold War (1954-1974)

16.00 – 16.15 Coffee Break

16.15 – 18.15 Session 4: New Lenses on the Black Sea: Sports, Travelogues, and Environmental Policies
Chair: Claudiu OANCEA (New Europe College / University of Bucharest)

Adelina ȘTEFAN (New Europe College / University of Ostrava)
Tourism and Nature in Socialist Romania: Engineering Landscapes on the Romanian Black Sea Coast, 1950s-1980s

Alexey KOTELVAS (University of Florida)
The Black Sea Region in Soviet Travel Narratives

Taylor ZAJICEK (Williams College)
Lords of the Sea: Cold War Encounters and the Black Sea Dolphin Hunt

Mauricio BORRERO (St. John’s University, New York)
Transnational Sport Contacts in the Black Sea Region from the 1917 October Revolution to the 1980s

18.15 – 18.30 Concluding Remarks

This workshop is organized by New Europe College – Institute for Advanced Study, with funding from the University of St. Gallen, Center for Governance and Culture in Europe, as part of the BLACK SEA Initiative for 2025-2026.

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Short abstracts:

Mioara Anton („Nicolae Iorga” Institute of History, Romanian Academy)
When the West meets the East: The experiences of British tourists on the Black Sea in communist Romania
At the beginning of the 1970s, socialist Romania joined the global world by developing its tourism industry. The revitalization of the tourism industry took place at a time of pronounced foreign policy openness by the Romanian communist regime. During this period, the Romanian authorities modernised and built new facilities for resorts on the Black Sea coast, started constructing the first highway, inaugurated the only international airport (Bucharest Otopeni) and opened the Intercontinental Hotel in Bucharest. The Ministry of Tourism also published two special magazines România pitorească (1972) and Vacances en Roumanie (1976), inviting foreign tourists to spend their holidays in Romania.

Using the Foreign Office archives, our paper aims to analyses the experiences of British tourists in late communist Romania both from the perspective of cultural values and perceptions of the political regime. In the 1960s, Romania placed great hope in developing links with Britain and growing its tourism industry. N. Ceaușescu promoted the development of the tourism industry and encouraged the attraction of as many foreign tourists as possible because they were a valuable source of hard currency for the economy. The Romanian authorities have attempted to attract as many British tourists as possible to the Black Sea through tourism propaganda campaigns and the promotion of attractive tourist packages. Consequently, the number of British tourists increased from 3,000 in 1964 to almost 12,500 just in a few years later. However, figures began to drop when advertisements proved to be contrary to real conditions in the country. British tourists often had disappointing experiences in picturesque Romania. Inadequate accommodation, poor restaurant options and limited leisure facilities, as well as travel restrictions and rationing, pushed British tourists into abandoning their holidays and opting for other destinations.

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Tetiana Kostiuk (Borys Grinchenko Kyiv Metropolitan University)
Black Sea Region QR Code and Initiatives: Above the Time and Sea Level
Historically, the region was both an arena of rivalry between great empires and a territory where ideas of cooperation based on economic and trade intentions with the help of cultural expansion shaped political contexts and geopolitical aspirations. Civilizational and geospatial intentions, multiplied by complexes of imperial superiority or historical inferiority of the peoples of the region formed security challenges through territorial encroachments and “subjugation of the peoples”, at sea as often as on land. Such thalassocratic priorities and existential need to guarantee trade-economic, political, cultural, territorial integrity and well-being prompted states to unite within the region and beyond. One such initiative is the Intermarium project, which covers the space between the Baltic, Black and Adriatic Seas and encompasses deep civilizational, economic and security aspects. It’s worth considering Intermarium comprehensively, in order to understand its historical dynamics and foresee future scenarios.

Our study represents a contextual analysis of the Black Sea region significance to highlight a number of factors determining the “urgent actualization” of discussions around the concept of “Intermarium” due to Russian-Ukrainian war and aspirations to dominate the sea. Chosen approach allows to avoid simplified understanding of the region, to reveal its potential with focus on security issues revisionism, hybrid threats, the dominance of “subtle” (thin) ideologies and the slowdown of integration trends influencing cultural, economic, touristic and recreational sustainability of the region.

In order to define the position and joint strength of the Black Sea states and to outline the underpinning of their capabilities through beneficial alliances beyond the regional dimension, we propose to explore both, the modern ways to make ​​Intermarium a new potentially powerful actor of international security provision and the degree of revisionist ideas dissemination in the national security discourses of the Baltic-Black Sea conglomeration countries.

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Alexandra Bardan (Faculty of Journalism and Communication Studies, University of Bucharest)
Western Oasis on the Socialist Seashore: Leisure and Dance on Romania’s Black Sea Coast

This proposal explores how socialist discotheques in 1970s–80s Romania operated as nodes of cultural transfer along the Black Sea coast, mediating between Western popular culture and socialist leisure policy (Bardan, 2020). Using a case study of venues in tourist resorts like Mamaia, the study examines how international operators such as Club Méditerranée (France), Continentresor (Sweden), and Neckermann (West Germany) partnered with Romanian state agencies—including ONT and IAPIT—to create tailored experiences for foreign tourists. These state-sponsored ventures positioned Romania as a competitive leisure destination within the socialist world, mirroring the appealing spaces seen in Club Med resorts or Neckermann travels.

I will employ a transnational lens to show how cultural flows, be they musical, technological, and ideological, traversed the Iron Curtain via tourism-mediated contact. I highlight how disc-jockeys acted as cultural brokers, adapting foreign influences under ideological constraints. The Romanian Black Sea coast thus functioned not as a periphery but as one of the major hubs of popular culture, challenging the East–West binary representations (Bren and Neuburger, 2012; Yurchak, 2006, Reid, 2016). Using archival sources, press materials, oral histories, and tourism industry catalogs, I argue that Mamaia was more than a vacation destination—it was a platform for regulated cultural convergence between East and West. These encounters produced a semi-official form of transnationalism, one that both bypassed and subtly engaged with Cold War ideological divides.

By situating Mamaia within the broader network of Black Sea cultural flows, this proposal contributes to reconceptualizing the Iron Curtain as a Nylon Curtain. The Romanian coast emerges as a semipermeable membrane of Cold War interaction, where pop culture, foreign currency, and socialist aspirations converged in manifold (in)formal, and meaningful ways. Through this lens, discotheques became more than entertainment, they were stages where several forms of the emerging globalization can be identified.

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Orazio Maria Gnerre (University of Perugia)
Hikmet, Ponomarev, Ceaușescu, and Socialism on the Black Sea
The Turkish poet Nâzım Hikmet was known for his sympathies for the Soviet government and his adherence to communist ideology. He famously fled to the Soviet Union in 1951, denouncing both his country’s and the United States’ policies. His writings, well received in the Soviet Union, still remind us today of the importance of Turkish-Russian and Turkish-Atlantic relations. These relations are deeply rooted in a history rooted in the Cold War, as well as in Turkey’s processes of autonomization and development. Boris Ponomarev, a high-ranking representative of the Soviet Union, welcomed Hikmet’s move with interest, demonstrating Soviet interests in the region. This phenomenon, as can be deduced from the thinking of these two historic figures, was seamlessly intertwined with ideological and more specifically geopolitical issues. Nicolae Ceaușescu, however, represented a different form of socialism in the same geographical and political region, due to a particular orientation, sometimes defined as “national-communist”, that developed in the Romania he governed. Although he was loyal to the Soviet government and a prominent member of the Warsaw Pact, the Romanian political and social model represented a differentiated form of socialism in that specific sector. With Hikmet and the Turkish case, Ponomarev and the Soviet perspective dictated by the line of the Third International, and Ceaușescu and Romanian national-communism, we will outline, in this speech, three visions of the relationship between geopolitics and ideology in the Black Sea region, defining the issue according to the model, already developed by the German political scientist and jurist Carl Schmitt, of the relationship between territories and socio-cultural organizations. Specifically, it is with “lake geopolitics” applied to a maritime space that these transitions can be understood—as we will demonstrate.

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Iuliana Dumitru (National Museum of the Romanian Peasant)
Bordering Freedom: Memory, Art, and Everyday Escape on Romania’s Socialist Seaside
This paper presents findings from my research centering an autoethnographic perspective on the lived realities and remembered geographies of Cold War seaside life in 2 Mai and Vama Veche, two villages on Romania’s southern Black Sea coast, near the Bulgarian border. Beginning in the 1960s and continuing well beyond the Cold War, these places were visited each summer by writers, artists, and intellectuals in search of distance from the rhythms of official life. Though located in a militarized border zone, where travelers were subject to document checks and informal filtering by border guards, the villages are remembered as spaces of unexpected freedom and quiet transformation. I was born and raised in 2 Mai during the final years of the socialist period. Though still a child when the Cold War ended, I grew up among the stories, gestures, and traces left behind by this long-lasting bohemian presence. My insider position shaped the way I approached this project, not only as a researcher but as someone emotionally connected to the place and the people who passed through it. Since the 2000s, a wave of memoirs and journals has emerged, many written by those who continued to return after 1990. These texts blend fact and fiction, layering new memories over old ones, building a shared imaginary of summer ritual and escape. An important part of my research was curating an exhibition based on the artworks and narratives collected. It showed how locals and tourists, though living different seasonal rhythms, some working, others resting, shared courtyards, kitchens, and summer days. They did not live the same life, but they witnessed one another’s presence. The paper offers a personal, affective reading of the socialist seaside as a border space shaped less by Cold War politics than by repetition, intimacy, and the desire to step briefly outside history.

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Mladen Zobec & Rory Archer (Centre for Southeast European Studies University of Graz)
Yugoslav Albanian entrepreneurs as Cold War border crossers in the Balkan and Black Sea region
This contribution explores the liminal and underexplored category of Yugoslav Albanian private sector entrepreneurs and their workforces in the context of translocal and transnational encounters in the Cold-War Balkan and Black Sea regions. The phenomenon of the Albanian ethnic economy in socialist Yugoslavia has become increasingly well-known, with the figure of the Albanian ice-cream seller being a part of a standard (post-)Yugoslav imagery. Less widely recognized, however, is that a small number of Albanian and Turkish ethnic businesses from Yugoslavia also operated in neighbouring socialist countries such as Romania, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia, as well as in capitalist Turkey, Austria, and Italy. Yugoslav Albanian entrepreneurs were uniquely placed due to their Yugoslav citizenship and transnational ties dating back to the late Ottoman and interwar periods, which helped facilitate Cold War era migration and mobilities. Relying on translocal ties, and their experience in the private and informal sectors, this group developed a set of skills and resources that extended beyond their modest craft businesses. With access to both Western and Eastern markets, many became informal traders. They even facilitated the formation of informal value transfer systems that operated not only on the fringes of the socialist economy but also on the margins of legality. This paper explores the experiences of such private entrepreneurs under state socialism on the basis of oral history interviews and archival documents.

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Corina Oprea (The Swedish Arts Grants Committee’s International Programme) 
The Black Sea Anoxic Museum: Curatorial Strategies for Submerged Histories and Disappearing Coastal Worlds
The Black Sea Anoxic Museum proposes a curatorial and artistic framework that reimagines the Black Sea as a living, fluid archive of entangled human and non-human histories. Rather than reinforcing Cold War binaries, this project positions curatorial practice and art history as active tools to uncover and re-contextualize fragile cultural memories, multispecies ecologies, and coastal architectures that have been marginalized or erased.

A key example is the island of Ada Kaleh, a vibrant Ottoman-influenced community submerged in 1970 during the construction of the Iron Gates hydroelectric dam. Ada Kaleh stands as a powerful symbol of cultural disappearance and forced transformation — histories literally drowned to make way for infrastructural modernization. Similarly, Romania’s socialist coastal resorts were designed to showcase the success of the socialist project to international tourists; while these architectural experiments ultimately failed as ideological showcases, they left deep marks on both the cultural and ecological landscape. By linking these submerged sites to social and ecological micro-exchanges, the project explores how the sea itself becomes an archive of Cold War entanglements and cultural disappearances. The concept of an anoxic environment — where materials are paradoxically preserved in the absence of oxygen — serves as both metaphor and method for revisiting these contested stories and proposing new forms of curatorial engagement.

This research builds on the international symposium How to Mend a Broken Sea, held in October 2024 at the National Dance Center Bucharest, which gathered guests from the Black Sea region and beyond to trace shared cultural, ecological, and colonial routes, including connections to the Middle East. The project is further supported by a research grant from the Romanian Cultural Institute. Through transdisciplinary collaborations, the Black Sea Anoxic Museum proposes to transform exhibition practices into fluid, relational, and more-than-human approaches, inviting us to reimagine the region as an evolving multispecies memoryscape rather than a fixed geopolitical border.

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Ilaria Sicari (Ca’ Foscari University of Venice)
From the West With Love: Sending Books to Bulgaria and Romania during the Cold War (1954-1974)
In 1954, the Free Europe Committee (FEC) launched its first program for sending printed materials (leafleats, books, magazines, journals etc.) from the West to the Eastern bloc by-passing the ideological and geopolitical border traced by the Iron Curtain. FEC’s secret distribution programs were targeted to several Central and Eastern European countries – among which Romania and Bulgaria – with the aim to sent printed materials censored and/or un-published (primarily for ideological reasons) in the Eastern bloc.

Through the close reading of FEC’s archival documents stored at Hoover (Stanford) and OSA (Budapest), the aim of this paper is to trace and analyze the impact of the transnational flow of these printed materials, by analyzing the routes of texts circulating across and beyond the Iron Curtain.  On the basis of FEC’s operational reports of book distribution programs (balloon program, mailing program and person-to-person program), this paper illustrate the political aims, target readers and contents of the printed materials sent in Bulgaria and Romania, in order to map the transnational circulation of knowledge and ideas and, consequently, to evaluate the impact that the reception of these forbidden texts produced in the Black Sea region.

The analysis of statistical data, as well as the digital visualizations of routes and relational networks among the socio-cultural actors (state and non-state individuals and institutions) involved in the circulation and reception of these texts, will offer a new insight on the dynamics of the field of cultural production in the Black Sea area, by taking into account the transnational interactions between the two blocs despite – and, in such an extent, even thanks to – the ideological divisions of the Cold War era.

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Adelina Ștefan (New Europe College / University of Ostrava)
Tourism and Nature in Socialist Romania: Engineering Landscapes on the Romanian Black Sea Coast, 1950s-1980s
In 1977, Arhitectura magazine, the mouthpiece of Romanian Union of Architects, highlighted the need for tourist constructions to match their natural setting. (Arhitectura, no-1-6, 1977) This view reflected the new approach to nature and tourism of architects, socialist planners and tourist practitioners in the 1960s and 1970s. As already in the mid 1950s socialist Romania began to pay attention to international tourism, a new and modern tourist infrastructure was built on the Black Sea Coast, especially around Constanta, the main city in the region, between the late 1950s and early 1960s. However, by mid-1960s it became clear that the newly built hotels were insufficient to deal with the pace of tourism growth and that new resorts had to be erected. This is why the Neptun-Olimp chain of resorts was built on the southern part of the Romanian seaside.

This paper examines how nature was integrated both in the building of these resorts as well as in the tourist promotion of the Black Sea Coast. The main questions it wants to answer are how and why Romania decided to prioritize the Black Sea Coast? How the systematization process took place and what was the role of natural environment in the new landscape and last but not least how was nature presented in the promotion of the Romanian Black Sea coast abroad?

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Alexey Kotelvas (University of Florida)
The Black Sea Region in Soviet Travel Narratives
Maritime cruises became the standard form of Soviet international tourism for a number of reasons: ideological, economic, connected with control and security ones. The trip of Soviet citizens abroad on cruise liners was designed to demonstrate that leisure activities were available to a Soviet citizen, which in the West were associated with the lifestyle of the middle and upper middle class. The organization of foreigners’ trips on Soviet cruise liners also made it possible to demonstrate the best side of the Soviet hospitality industry. The first attempt to organize Soviet travel was made in 1930-31 as a part of the shock worker’s trips aboard the ships Abkhaziya and Ukraina. After the trips of the early 1930s, Soviet outbound tourism stopped for a quarter of a century. That practice resumed in 1956, when Soviet people traveled around Europe on the cruise ship Pobeda. During the four tours of this vessel, over a thousand Soviet citizens (up to 1,600 people) got the opportunity to visit Bulgaria, Turkey, Greece, Italy, France, the Netherlands and Sweden. The assemblage of texts, written in response to the European Cruises 1956, 1930 and 1931, formed the solid basement of the primary sources. In addition to the official travelogues, the archives contain personal notes, minutes from public lectures, brochures with the tour program, and even a script prepared for broadcasts made over the ship’s radio system. After the first attempts to organize Soviet cruises in 1930, 1931 and 1956, that form of travel became regular. Soviet passengers started or ended European cruises in Odessa, calling at Black Sea ports of other countries along the way: Bulgaria, Romania, and Turkey. African cruises, first organized in 1962, also began from the Black Sea. The Black Sea cruises were regular in Soviet domestic tourizm. Tickets for those tours were promoted for foreign tourists. Western travelers have saved their impressions in their travel account too. Sea cruises as a form of Western, if not bourgeois leisure, were Sovietized and enriched with ideological objectives. Traveling on Soviet ships was a means of advancing the Soviet geographical imagination. In my research, I study construction of geographic space in Soviet travel narratives. I show with what events and emotions the organizers of the tours associated the Soviet Black Sea territories and how fluctuations in international relations influenced the construction of other countries of the Black Sea basin.

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Taylor Zajicek (Williams College)
Lords of the Sea: Cold War Encounters and the Black Sea Dolphin Hunt
This paper will consider the history of environmental diplomacy during the Black Sea’s Cold War, through a transnational examination of the dolphin-hunting industry.
The first part of the presentation will frame Black Sea dolphin hunting in the Braudelian longue durée. Dolphins shaped nearby civilizations for millennia, appearing in their myths and coinage—as well as their nets. Under Ottoman rule, seasonal hunters fanned along Bulgaria and the Caucasus, blasting the animals with shotguns and melting their fat for oil. Yet the hunt took on industrial proportions only in the 1930s. In Turkey, small crews shot dolphins with state-subsidized rifles. In the Soviet Union, fishing collectives perfected a technique for netting hundreds of dolphins at one time. After 1949, Yalta and Novorossiisk boasted factories capable of grinding up to 120,000 dolphin carcasses a year. Communist Romania and Bulgaria took note, jumpstarting their own industries under Soviet tutelage in the 1950s.

The presentation’s second part will trace the origins of the 1966 moratorium on dolphin hunting—passed first by the Soviet Union and then by its satellites. After detailing the moratorium’s institutional context, I will argue that the ban rode two historical waves. First, a new appreciation of cetacean intelligence that emerged in the US but quickly spread via the socialist bloc’s own scientific and cultural productions. And second, a severe slide in the sea’s cetacean populations following a record catch in 1954.

The third part will ask why Turkey did not pass its own dolphin hunting ban until 1983—seventeen years and perhaps one million dead cetaceans later. I will again highlight two factors. First, the Cold War political order, which militated against Turkey’s participation in the region’s fledgling fisheries institutions. And second, a belief that dolphins were not friends, but competitors for the Black Sea’s fish wealth. This idea existed across the Black Sea region but appears to have been particularly durable within Turkish publications and practices.

The presentation will conclude with broad take-aways about the Black Sea’s Cold War, underscoring the interplay of science, environment, and diplomacy in regional patterns of cross-border exchange.

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Mauricio Borrero (St. John’s University, New York)
Transnational Sport Contacts in the Black Sea Region from the 1917 October Revolution to the 1980s
Modern sport history provides a rich and unique vantage point from which to study modern societies.  Standing at the intersection of social, cultural, economic, and political history, sport is also inherently multidisciplinary, mutually drawing from and contributing to a wide variety of other disciplines such as memory studies, sociology, anthropology, geography, literature, and psychology.  In the twentieth century and since, through numerous exchanges and competitions, sport has been one of the leading vehicles for internationalization and globalization.

For the upcoming workshop on transnational Black Sea encounters, I wish to propose a paper that will trace the development of transnational sport contacts in the Black Sea region from my position as a historian of Soviet and post-Soviet sport.  Focusing on international football matches and tours as examples of transnational cultural transfers can make an important contribution to the workshop’s stated goal of situating the Black Sea region as a place of transfers and convergences.

Beginning with the visits of the Turkish football club Fenerbahçe to late imperial and early Soviet Russia and going through the increased internationalization of football in the 1950s and 1960s there is a relatively unexplored history of international friendly matches and competitions between football clubs of the Black Sea region. I will examine international friendly matches between Soviet clubs and other Black Sea clubs in two main periods: a) the interwar years and b) the early Cold War decades.  In the interwar period, ideological reasons limited these contacts to Soviet and Turkish football teams, and were part of a broader diplomatic and propaganda agenda as scholars have argued. In the early Cold War decades, with Bulgaria and Romania becoming part of the Soviet Bloc, the nature and frequency of contacts expanded significantly, featuring a larger number of Black Sea adjacent football clubs from ports such Odesa, Varna, Constanța, Trabzon, and of course Istanbul.