Thermal waters and spas have been studied for several decades across a range of disciplines and fields: history (medical, urban, and social), anthropology and sociology, geography, architecture and urban planning, tourism studies, cultural and literary studies, and heritage studies. This research sheds light on various facets of the spa cure: the expertise that defines “good water” and its ties to the state; the experiences of curistes and tourists; spaces and infrastructure; and relations of class, gender, nation, and religion. “Thermal” water emerges as a resource that is appropriated, contested, and put to use, revealing relationships to the environment, territory, institutions, power, and identities. In recent years this research has been renewed through the study of knowledge and techniques, environmental approaches, and imperial, colonial, and transnational perspectives. It has developed mainly from Western and Southern Europe and remains more fragmentary for East-Central Europe.

The workshop aims to extend these reflections by grounding them in East-Central Europe, a heterogeneous region long shaped by the Habsburg, Ottoman, and Russian empires. Since the mid-nineteenth century, it has been marked by a series of upheavals: wars, changes in borders and populations, state socialisms, the dissolution of states, and post-socialism. A single spa in this region may have changed countries, languages, owners, and clientele. Yet infrastructure, forms of ownership, knowledge, medical elites, and the practices of curistes do not move at the same pace and do not follow political chronologies. These temporalities intertwine, with continuities as well as asynchronies. The challenge is to understand how they connect and interact by combining disciplines, sources, and methods (archives, field surveys, and architectural, literary, and oral sources).

Several lines of discussion could be pursued:

1. Who defines the cure? Doctors, balneologists, states, spa administrations, entrepreneurs, patients, and tourists.
2. How are water and territory developed and contested? Springs, protection zones, geological and chemical knowledge, rights, and conflicts over use.
3. What bodies, what leisure, what discipline? The cure as care, holiday, health education, sociability, and control, from the bourgeois clientele to socialist “social” thermalism.
4. What memories and what legacies? National rivalries and religious identities in “spa towns,” the legacy of socialist spas, and European heritagization.

The main objective of this research is to explore the interrelationship between the history of science and environmental history, from the perspective of the key figures of Romanian naturalism and alpine associations between 1870 and 1940. It analyses the ways in which the scientific development of nature protection, contributed to the production of Romanian national identity and the maintenance of power relations through scientific institutions, eugenic and racial concepts.

A full-length study is available here.