The overall character of the Black Sea region has been defined over time in various ways. For specialists in economy and trade, it has represented a region at the crossroads of the trade routes between Europe and Asia; for political scientists and historians, it has been a space of confrontation between the great terrestrial and naval powers; for the scholars attentive to its cultural dimensions, it has been a contact zone, a space of interaction between different peoples, religions and cultures. These attempts at a definition all revolve around an essential (and ambivalent) feature of the Black Sea as a factor of connection, a bridge, and at the same time a border, a dividing line between Europe and Asia, between the Baltic and the Mediterranean region. In this fluctuation between the two, the predominance of one over the other (bridge or border) has depended on a number of factors, first among them the distribution of power relations in the region. This volume, which originated in a symposium hosted by the New Europe College - Institute for Advanced Study in Bucharest, brings together contributions coming from scholars within the Black Sea region and outside it, in an attempt to look at the Balkans and Caucasus from a comparative and multi-disciplinary perspective, highlighting their differences, as well as their common features. The overarching question this volume and the papers included in it address - and leave open - is to what extent we are dealing with a coherent zone, whose past, present and future can legitimately be considered as being traversed by meaningful interrelations, suggesting a shared destiny.
About the Author: Ivan Biliarsky is Professor at the Institute of Historical Studies of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, and at the Department of Law, Varna Free University Tchernorizets Khrabar. He has published more than 150 articles in nine languages, in 15 European countries and in the USA, and several books, among which are The Biblical Models of Power and Law: Papers of the International Conference held in Bucharest, New Europe College (co-edited with Radu G. Paun; Peter Lang, 2008); Word and Power in Mediaeval Bulgaria (Brill, 2011); and The Tale of the Prophet Isaiah and the Creation of the Political Ideology of Early Medieval Bulgaria (Sofia, 2011). Ovidiu Cristea has been Researcher at the Institute of History Nicolae Iorga in Bucharest since 1993, and is currently its acting director. His interests focus on the crusades in the Later Middle Ages, Black Sea history, military history and the Medieval history of Wallachia and Moldavia. He has published numerous contributions on these topics, including Venice and the Black Sea in the Thirteenth-Fourteenth Centuries: Contributions to the Study of the Venetian Oriental Policy (Braila, 2004); A Prince from a Distant Land: Stephen the Great in Venetian Documents in 1484 (Bucharest, 2004); and The Black Sea: Maritime Powers - Continental Powers (Bucharest, 2006). Anca Oroveanu is Professor in the Department of Art History and Art Theory of the National University of Arts in Bucharest, and Academic Director of the New Europe College - Institute for Advanced Study in the Humanities and Social Sciences in Bucharest. She is a member of editorial boards of academic journals and of scientific bodies in Romania and abroad. Her writings include Psychoanalysis and the European Theory of Art (Bucharest, 2000); Recollection and Forgetting: Writings in the History of Art (Bucharest, 2004); several co-edited books; and a number of contributions to questions of art history and art theory published in specialized journals.