Bukovina, when it has existed on official maps, has always fit uneasily among its neighbors. The region is now divided between Romania and Ukraine but has long been a testing ground for successive regimes, including the Habsburg Empire, independent and later Nazi-allied Romania, and the Soviet Union, as each sought to reshape the region in its own image. In this beautifully written and wide-ranging book, Cristina Florea traces the history of Bukovina, showing how this borderland, the onetime buffer between Christendom and Islam, found itself at the forefront of modern state-building and governance projects that eventually extended throughout the rest of Europe. Encounters that play out in borderlands have proved crucial to the development of modern state ambitions and governance practices.
Drawing on a wide range of archives and published sources in Russian, Ukrainian, German, Romanian, French, and Yiddish, Florea integrates stories of ethnic and linguistic groups鈥攔ural Ukrainians, Romanians, and Germans, and urban German-speaking Jews and Poles鈥攚ho lived side by side in Bukovina, all of them navigating constant reconfiguration and reinvention. Challenging traditional chronologies in European history, she shows that different transformations in the region occurred at different tempos, creating a historical palimpsest and a sense among locals that they had lived many lives.
A two-hundred-year history of a region shaped by the conflicting pulls of imperial legacies and national ambitions, Bukovina reveals the paradoxes of modern history found in a microcosm of Eastern Europe.
Cristina Florea is assistant professor of modern European history at Cornell University.
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“Bukovyna in Ukrainian, Bukovina in Romanian and Yiddish, and Bukowina in German and Polish, this region, divided today by the Ukrainian-Romanian border, is known as the crossroads of Eastern and Central Europe. Cristina Florea explains why by presenting the history of the region in all its complexity but also its unity. An essential read for anyone interested in the history of European borderlands and the roots of modern states.”—Serhii Plokhy, author of The Gates of Europe: A History of Ukraine
“Bukovina is destined to become a classic defying easy categorization. It is at once a regional history and several imperial and national ones, attending as much to grandiose ideals and aspirations as to material realities and unintended consequences. It is that rare work of scholarship that enlightens the reader without flattening its subject, allowing the people of this region’s troubled past to live and breathe in multiple dimensions. Florea’s Bukovina is infused with rigor and brilliance that track through every page.”—Holly Case, author of The Age of Questions: Or, A First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond
“This book offers the first comprehensive English-language history of Bukovina. It is simply breathtaking in its use of languages (six in addition to English) and archives (including those in Austria, Ukraine, and Israel) and in the range of sources that are analyzed (poems, novels, and jokes, as well as state-based archival collections). It is incredible that a single scholar has put together such a well-researched, nuanced, and compelling narrative.”—Kathryn Ciancia, author of On Civilization's Edge: A Polish Borderland in the Interwar World
“This is a highly important book. It situates the history of a seemingly peripheral European region at the center of current historiographic debates. The scholarship behind the book is stunning. The author has an impressive command not only of the relevant languages, but also of the newest historiography.”—Joachim von Puttkamer, coeditor of The Routledge History Handbook of Central and Eastern Europe in the Twentieth Century
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