Higher Education in Europe, Vol. XXVI, No.

2, 2001

Co-operation Through Cultural Interaction: Lessons from the Past and an Agenda for the Future1
RAZVAN THEODORESCU

Although the term much used to describe a major sub-region in South Eastern Europe, the Balkans, has unpleasant political connotations, evoking the ultimate in political fragmentation, its peoples share a long common history and many common cultural traits. In particular, there has been the heritage both of Orthodox Christianity and of the Byzantine Empire. Even the coming of the Ottoman Turks was not as divisive as has traditionally been thought. The pax ottomanica also brought elements of unity to the area, even attempts at religious syncretism involving Orthodox hesychastic mystics and Muslim Su bektasi dervishes. Recently, a Community of the Black Sea nations has come into existence that, extending to the Caucasus, could form a new South-East European-Pontic supranationa l unifying structure.

A BALKAN PARADOX OF UNITY IN DIVERSITY

Quite a few European intellectuals in the Twentieth Centurya period which started with two Balkan wars and nished with a terrible con ict in the very heart of the Balkan regioncould have shared the spirit of Georges Duhamels, Litanies des Balkans. The author, a member of the French Academy, wrote in his Images de la Grece, part of a trilogy ` that forms one of his most widely read works: O, peninsule balkanique, tourment des ideologues, traquenard des diplomates, purgatoire de lEurope (Duhamel, 1931). In the world of today, the term Balkanization has becomewith disconcerting and provocative meaninga political concept indicating instability, territorial claims, repression of ethnic and religious minorities, and incidences of foreign intervention (moreover, a concept that is applied tout azimuts from Asia to Latin America). Thus, the task facing every scholar or teacher with an interest in doing research on and comprehending South Eastern Europe, its constituent countries, and the area as a whole is to nd ways to explain how this demonized region of the Balkans was also a land of religious tolerance, of cultural synergy, and of a spiritual avant-garde. Such speci c traits are rarely mentioned (or not mentioned at all) in academic treatises or textbooks targeted at this powder keg of Europeone among so many others, one might add, from Ireland to the Middle Eastbecause people tend to forget that the world as we know it today still makes use of certain achievements of Balkan wisdom that deserve a less biased approach. Suf ce it to recall the very notions of constitutions, Roman Law, and Christian ethics. The division of Europeans, in the sense once suggested by Immanuel Wallerstein in his well-known book (1974)those of the Atlantic zone, those of the Mediterranean zone, and those of a third zone, the Oriental regionreminds one that beyond an Atlantic, Catholic, and Protestant Europe (i.e., a capitalist one in the sense proposed by Max Weber) facing the New World, there has always been an Eastern Orthodox and, on the fringes, a Muslim
1 A part of this article was published previously in the Romanian journal Millennium. It is devoted to the subject of South Eastern European civilization between synthesis and con icts. Additionally, here and now, the author has attempted to summarize his own recent research dedicated to geopolitical and cultural contacts between different areas of the European continent, with special reference to relations between the Balkans and Central Europe.

ISSN 0379-7724 print/ISSN 1469-835 8 online/01/020207-09 DOI: 10.1080/0379772012008260 6

2001 UNESCO

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Eastern Europe. This Europe relies on the traditions described by Dimitri Obolensky (1971) as a Byzantine Commonwealth, which was followed and, in part, imitated by that of the Ottoman Turks. One could add that, on the other side, the Western world, comprising the post-Roman fragmentation of states, developing into nations and nation-states after the Renaissance, and evincing today a propensity for supranational structures, has been faced with an Orient shaped by Roman and Byzantine supranationalisms into an inter-imperial order: Turkish, Russian, and Austrian. That European Orient was to discover, in the Twentieth Century, Herders mystique of Volkstaat, which was further translated into a set of utterly diverse national ideologies: the Dacian or the Neo Romanian doctrine of Romanians, the Turanian identity in Bulgaria and Hungary, the Neo-Hittite identity in Kemalist Turkey, and the Neo-Byzantine ideology of the Megali Idea in Greece. That Oriental Europe, lying for centuries in the spheres of Russocracy and Turcocracy, a world of cesaro-papism opposed, for a while, to the Western papo-cesarian, a world displaying political traditions tainted by absolutism, by the overbearing cult of the leader, practised today in those presidential republics in which modern parliamentary procedures have rather feeble roots, is something quite different from Central Europe (or, according to a description current in the 1920s and 1930s, Central-East Europe). That latter Europe emerged from the Jagellonian Empire and Austrocracy, which left their mark decisively on Hungary and the Czech Lands, on Slovakia and Poland, on Croatia and Slovenia (here at least we enter a traditional Balkan territory!), a Europe swinging between Orient and Occident, between the German world and the Russian world. One must quickly add that one should not forget the Oriental leanings of the Ostmitteleuropa, e.g., the predilection of Poland for the Czars, to say nothing of its most recent relationships with the former Soviet colossus in that region. We have in mind here that Central Europe, which ful lled the role of the shield of Christendom (propugnaculum, antemurale christianiatis), had a siege piece mentality, a role that it shared with the other Oriental Europe. Nevertheless, Central Europe became separated from Eastern Orthodox Europe as a result of its own experienceswhich it shared this time with the Westwith humanism and the Renaissance, from Ragusa and Cracow, all the way to Prague. Moving back to Eastern Europe, the criteria de ning it are both geographical and cultural, both ethnic and spiritual, thus accounting for a certain exibility of borderlines. They could encompass, according to the vagaries of the times, either Asia Minorin prehistoric times, during the Middle Ages, nowadays (within the fold of NATO)or Hungary, Poland, and even Finland, as countries submitted to the Sultan of sultans or to the Czar of all the Russias. Let us not forget that Eastern Europe is itself divided into two large sub-regions: on the one hand, South Eastern Europe comprising the Balkan space proper and the area between the Danube and the Carpathian Mountains, and on the other hand, the Slavic zone of Ukraine and Russia. The latter has an imperial tradition which produced supranational ideologies from the notion of the Third Rome to the theory of Panslavism, to proletarian internationalism, to the Asian-type state under Stalin. Eastern Europe as so described has a huge potential for Europe as a whole and for the world at large. Currently, however, it is experiencing a certain totalitarian nostalgia, certain nationalistic and Orthodox excesses (the renewed politicization of the Eastern Orthodox Church became a reality at the close of the Twentieth Century), and also certain projects for integration with the other two Europes: the Western and the Central.2
2

The same conclusion can be found in Theodorescu (1998, pp. 201202).

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Returning to the geographical demarcation that was mentioned above, the sub-region of South Eastern Europe comprises two large and closely related entities: (i) the Carpathians and the Danube; and (ii) the Balkans, including other less important geo-strategic components.3 The latter have had a historical destiny as varied as their territory. They stretch from the Greek Archipelago and the Peloponnesus to Macedonia and Albania and to Raska and the Banat; from Dalmatia and Montenegro to the Danubian and the Pannonian plains; from Thrace and Bulgaria to Transylvania and on to Moldova, Budjak, and Bessarabia. The existence of a powerful element of cultural synergy in that sub-region, symbolically positioned between two seas and two continents at Constantinopolethe Istanbul of todayleft a profound imprint on several civilizations: late Roman, Byzantine, and Ottoman. The speci c geography prevailing in parts of that wider area could also explain the development of stable lines in politics and commerce, notably the constant features of civilization in the entire Eastern European space. While the mountain ranges predominant in South Eastern Europe (the Dinaric Alps, the Balkans, the Pindus, the Rhodopes, and the Carpathians) played a decisive role in the emergence of the Balkan and the CarpathianDanubian autonomies, and while the wide steppes shaped the physiognomy of the Russian space, it was the large expanses of water that opened the main routes for cultural cross-connections. Since ancient times, the seas have truly been elements of historical-cultural unity: the Black Sea linking the Mediterranean and the Aegean to Asia; the Adriatic linking Italy to the Balkans; and the Baltic bringing together certain Scandinavian and Russian regions and the Polish plains, too, into a single cultural unit. We also have in mind the great rivers (the Danube, the Maritsa, the Vardar, the Morava) linking Central Europe to the Black Sea, the Danubian countries to the Aegean, and those of the RussianUkrainian sub-region (the Dnieper, the Don, the Dvina, and the Volga) linking Russia to the Balkan space, the Black Sea, the Baltic, and the Caucasus. Historical Europe has certainly existed as a separate entity since the time when the pax romana became, within the boundaries of an empire stretching over three continents, a pax romana christiana. The synthesis of South Eastern European civilizationas part of a culture that can be safely described as Europeanbegan with the Christian Empire of the Fourth Century with its centre, under Constantine the Great, precisely in the Balkans. It actually started with a type of co-existence that was unique in Europe by bringing together highly diverse ingredients: something that the author earlier described as the Byzantine front comprising the Roman period and oriental elements as its building blocks, and the Pontic front, i.e., the Black Sea space. In other words, the two forces present on the scene were, on the one hand, the settled civilizations of the ancient Mediterranean tradition expressed in architectural monuments and human images carved in stone, and, on the other hand, the civilization of the steppes carrying a nomadic spirit and illustrated by exquisite artifacts in precious metals and gems, which were highly valued by the people coming from far away, from that vagina gentium called Siberia and Central Asia. At a primary level, the co-existence between the declining Roman Empire and the Barbaricum extra nes imperii produced a cultural synthesis that further inspired the West at a time of political con icts opposing the Romans to the Goths, the Gepids, the Avars, the Arabs, and the Slavs. At a second level, the great gap of ancient civilization and the beginning of the Middle Agesto use the words coined by Denis Zakythinos (1973)was marked, in the age of
3 Some of these consideration s are derived from the authors study presented at the 15th International Congress of Historical Sciences. See Condurachi and Theodorescu (1980).

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European ethnogenesis, by a similar swing between cultural synthesis and political or religious con icts involving entities best described at the time as the two Europes. The Greeks, the Romanians, the Albanians, the Bulgarians, the Serbs, the Croats andbeyond the South Eastern European region proper, but related to itthe Magyars, the Russians, the Moravians, and the Poles emerged as states before and after the year 1000 (LEurope aux IX eXe siecle, 1968), in a process which was exactly the opposite of what ` was happening at the same time in the West, where the fragmentation of statehood became a typical feature of Charlemagnes heritage in its nal stage. The interesting element in this context is the unitary spiritual character of South Eastern Europeand, in fact, of Eastern Europe as a wholerevealed by the scope and duration of Byzantine missionary zeal. Originating from Constantinopole, Salonika, or Ohrid, it translated, in ideological terms, the expansionist tendencies of Byzantium in the aftermath of a religious crisisin that case the iconoclastic controversyto sustain an action aimed at disseminating the doctrine and the authority of the Second Rome into those regions of Europe in which local structures were ready to enter into a new historical stage building upon Christianity, sedentarism, and unity. With the exception of the CarpathianDanubian territoriesinhabited by the Romanians, the heirs of ancient Latin Christianity, the South Eastern European and Russian areas were submitted to Byzantine missionary action. This action was accompanied by the spread of certain grandiloquent artistic models, which were imitated in every targeted area, during the very years of conversion. The embodiments of these models were the unique monuments known, each of them, as monumentum princeps of large dimension, built with expensive materials at Pliska and Preslav in Bulgaria, at Studenica in Serbia, and at Kiev and Chernigov in Russia. As an extension of that missionary period, the entire rst half of the second millennium eventually created in South Eastern Europe a synthesis between the Byzantine modelin liturgy, architecture, iconography, manuscripts, hagiography, polemical and homiletic literature, lyrical poetryand the vigour of the speci c newly born cultures with their ancient Roman or barbarian, Slavic, or Asian heritages. New cultural prototypes thus emerged that radiated from the Balkans into the Romanian lands and Russia. The third chronological level of the South Eastern European synthesis was marked, in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries, by Hesychastic internationalism (Elian, 1967, p. 199), which originated in the tradition of Byzantine mysticism and monastic life despite local wars between the Byzantines and the Serbs or between the Serbs and the Bulgarians. That International of the Literati, a cosmopolitan association in a Byzantine Commonwealth (Obolensky, 1971), was illustrated by the example of Constantine of Kostenec, a Bulgarian who wrote about the Serbian despots; by Dimitrios Cantacuzino, a Serbophile Byzantine, who described the life of a Bulgarian saint; by Pachome, a Serb, who wrote about the lives of Russian saints; by Gregory Tsamblak, a multilingual Balkan author; and by Nicodemus of Voditza and Tismana, a Serbian monk who was active in Walachia and was known as serboalbanitobulgarovlahos , a term perfectly describing the multi-ethnic community of South Eastern Europe. The phenomenon of that Eastern International is comparable to the International Gothic, mentioned by Johan Huizinga in his memorable book, The Waning of the Middle Ages (1919). The spiritual internationalism that shaped the Balkansin its Greek and Slavonic expressionswas followed by the rst major clash of civilizations in that area opposing ByzantineBalkan and ByzantineRomanian Christianity to Ottoman Islam. It entailed territorial conquest, ethnic colonization, and abjurations of faith (more numerous in the ancient lands of dualistic haeresis balcanica from Bulgaria to Bosnia and Albania). That con ict had crucial consequences for South Eastern Europe for half a millennium. It also

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inaugurated the speci c feature of that part of the European continentthe inter-imperial situation4mentioned aboveand it co-existed in an almost paradoxical manner with a spiritual synergy that has hardly been noted by traditional historical writing. What is being evoked is the recently identi ed Rumelian cultural space, which covered, by the close of the Fourteenth Century, eastern Bulgaria and the eastern parts of the Lower Danube. It was characterized by unexpected, exemplary tolerance, a true exibility of doctrines, and religious syncretism, in the Islamic bektasi movement that preached in favour of joint places of worship, a real mixture of rites, and in contacts between Muslim dervishes and hesychastic Eastern Orthodox monks (Balivet, 1995, 1997). This kind of tolerance, which persisted until the dawn of modern times (and disappeared, unfortunately, in the dark ages that followed) was explainable, at least, by the connections of this area with Anatolia and with certain nomadic and shamanist Asiatic traditions. The European modern times, those of Humanism, of the Baroque, and of the Enlightenment, include a South Eastern European Byzance apres Byzance5 that received elements ` of Western culture through pilgrims, merchants, diplomats, and intellectuals who arrived everywhere, but especially in the Romanian countries that were autonomous after the fall of Constantinople and the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans. Conquest here meant, in many ways, the Roman and Byzantine inheritance and, in a way, a new cultural unity that was possible in the larger pax ottomanica. This presumed unity, which could be recognized in the Balkan, especially in the urban, environment, from the customs to the handicrafts, disregarding a certain confessional tolerance, would explain the cultural manifestations of the Christian nations that were dominant throughout the period of the Turcocracy, the most eloquent example of this domination being represented by the Greeksdragomans and Phanariotswho lived in the imperial capital and served the Sublime Porte. In this presumed unity of South Eastern Europe, a genuine synthesis of East and West, it is necessary to reveal a few conditionsrarely mentioned in the works evoking the history of this regionthat had their part in the creation of a general forma mentis, from the dawn of Modern times, in the Seventeenth Century, to the Eighteenth Century. Such was the attitude of the Romanian princes from Bucharest and Iasi, and of the merchant milieu of the Greek diaspora in Venice and Vienna; such was the increasing Russian in uence in South Eastern European matters determined by the ideologies of the Third Rome and the pan-Slavismpreached by the Croat Krejanicup to the Byzantine road of Catherine the Great. Such was the role of the Venetian printed work from Montenegro to Walachia that created the rst Slavonian religious books in the Balkans. Such was the role of the Greek iatrophilosophers who studied in Padua and diffused, throughout South Eastern Europe up to Moscow, the rst modern education along with Aristotles teachings and the wisdom of delectable books. They translated the texts of Gesnner and Florian, Marmontel and Metastasio, not to mention Voltaire, the supreme heretic in the eyes of Slavic, Greek, and Romanian monks from Mount Athos to Oltenia and Moldavia. All of the above appeared also as a fundamental proof of unity of the South Eastern European tiers etat just before the advent of the Nineteenth Century with the romantic discovery of folk traditions in the peasant environment of Northern Greece, Serbia, South Eastern Hungary, Bulgaria, and Wallachia, and in the city life of Crete and the Ionian Islands. This environment shaped a preference for an iconography approaching the spirit of
4 The concept was developed by the Austrian historian, Alexander Randa. See also his Pro republica christiana: Die Wallachei im langen Turkenkrieg der katolischen Universalmache15931606 (1964, p. 11). 5 This famous adage comes from the title of Nicolae Iorgas book, Byzance apres Byzance, which was rst published ` in 1935. It was reprinted by the International Association of South-East European Studies in 1971.

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folklore and of popular books, for lavish decorations in the visual arts, and for certain melodic and choreographic forms. During the past two centuriesthat of the nationalities and that of the revolutions South Eastern Europe was the scene of wars of independence, of political extremes, and of insurrections against foreign totalitarian movements. The region again proved to be a unity in its view of history involving ideologies and national mystiques, as mentioned at the very beginning of these pages. The historical quest for the primordial and the mythicfor the archetypal imagerelies on a solid ontological tradition, an essential one with the thinkers, the anthropologists of culture, and the phenomenologists of religion, such as Mircea Eliade, to cite but one prominent South Eastern European author. They tried to recognize the human unity of the Balkans and of the CarpathianDanubian area in the profound layer of folklore, archaeology, primeval history, and archaic beliefs that produced the idols of the Cyclades and of Dobrudja, the Hellenic megaron, and the calendar-sanctuaries of the Dacians, the Dionysiac feasts, and the cult of Orpheus in Thrace. Beyond the con icts of history, the synergies of South Eastern European civilization help us move away from the stereotypes that are so easily recognized in George Duhamels beautiful Balkan Litanies. Lets be clear. Not one Europe, but a New West and a New East: these are the lucid words of a German analyst, Cristoph Bertram, recently published in The International Herald Tribune (12 July 1994).6 With regard to this European New Orient, lying between the Euro-Atlantic and the Euro-Asian zones, it seems to be on its way in de ning its options after the spectacular political upheavals of these last years. At any rate, the European South-East, namely, the eastern space, which was the only space to directly experience the gap between two great military blocks, and which is again the theatre of a major crisis within the Yugoslav region, partly generated by cultural and confessional differences in which the concepts of Balkans and of Central-Oriental Europe are implied, is now seeking to make its own way.

TOWARDS A SOUTH-EAST EUROPEAN-PONTIC UNITY

More than half a century ago, one of the founders of South Eastern European studies, Nicolae Iorga, attempted to de ne the region. He clearly underlined that the Balkan component of the European South-East belongs, at the same time, to two worlds, to two possible cultural options: one that is grafted to the right of the terrestrial catenary, starting southward from the Alps, looking onto the Black Sea and the Archipelago, while that one ending on the other side keeps looking toward the Adriatic Sea, having most of its contacts with Italy (Iorga, 1940, p. 7). This Pontic view of the Balkans and of the whole of South Eastern Europe, with its multi-millenary history, seems today to scan horizons more vast than ever. The recently created Community of the Black Sea, with its eleven member-countries, six of which are riparianTurkey, Bulgaria, Romania, Russia, Ukraine, and Georgiaand the ve others, neighbouringArmenia, Azerbaijan, Moldova, Albania, and Greece (the last-mentioned representing the only link of the Community with the fteen countries of the European Union!) gives proof of its solid base, partly South Eastern European, if one considers that six of the countries concernedtherefore more than halfbelong to our cultural sub-zone. The contacts of the Black Sea, which receives the ows of some of the main Eastern
6

The following text is to be found in Theodorescu (1999).

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European Rivers, along with the Caspian Sea and the Mediterranean, turns this political and economic space into a reality destined to have a notable future. On the other hand, speaking strictly from a demographic point of view, the fact that three-quarters of the total population of the Community belong to Russia, Turkey, and the half-Balkan, half-Western antechamber of Russia, i.e., the Ukraine, raises multiple problems that, it seems, we are not yet ready to solve. From a political point of view, the simultaneous presence of the two great Eastern European powers, past or present, namely Russia and Turkey, within this recently created Community is not without signi cance. Their complex relations depend on the evolution of the Community of the Black Sea, as well as on Balkan and Central Asian evolution on both of its sides. One should not overlook the great interest of Turkeyin the sense of a modern, lay feeling, but gathering its traditions since Ataturks timein the Turkish-speaking countries, successor states of the former Soviet Union. Likewise, one should also not overlook the fact that from the Balkan and the Gagauz regions, east to Alma Ata, there are 150 million Turkish-speaking inhabitants, and that the Muslim presence in all of the current con icts in Europe represents a sometimes dramatic reality from Bosnia to Nagorno Karabakh and Chechenya. Here, perhaps, it is necessary to underline an even more evident reality: that in the great events of todaythe major con ictsethnic and religious criteria are playing a more important role than economic and political criteria. This reality is most obvious in the ex-communist world in which there was an attempt at levelling ethnic and national characteristics by means of proletarian internationalism, and religion was persecuted in the name of scienti c atheism. On the other hand, no lesser importance should be granted to the fact that between religion and ethnos, the former by far marks the most profound distinction between peoples. For, as Samuel P. Huntington, political science professor at Harvard University, wrote in a 1996 studyThe Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Ordera person can be half-French and half-Arab and simultaneously, even, a citizen of two countries. It is more dif cult to be half-Catholic and half-Muslim (Huntington, 1996, p. 10). Although most scholars admit that civilizations differ from each other in terms of history, language, tradition and, especially, religion, many contemporary politicians and diplomats ignore, neglect, or minimize the religious criterion of continental and transcontinental evolutions. And all of the above is taking place in spite of certain complex phenomena illustrated daily by events such as those in ex-Yugoslavia where the so-called kin-country syndrome became obvious. Accordingly, Germany, Austria, and the Vatican supported the Catholicism of Slovenia and Croatia; Sunnite Turkey, Shiite Iraq, and Saudi Arabia largely assisted Bosnia; while President Boris Yeltsins Orthodox Russia sided with President Milosevics Orthodox Serbia. I shall next add that the religious criterion can be the basis of the foreign policies of which I have just hinted: that of Turkey from Turgut Ozal onward, a Turkey directly neighbouring three zones of acute con ict wherein it gets involved in the Caucasus, in the Syrian and Iraqi Middle East, and in the Balkans with Greek and Cypriot disputed claims. It is a Turkey affected by the entire Islamic spiritual rebirth, albeit censored by Kemalist secularism, in a non-Arabic Islamic world from the Balkans to the very heart of Asia. It is a world, I must again add, in which evaluations regarding certain fundamental concepts, such as, liberalism and a free market economy, are completely different from those made by Western Europeans and Americans. On the other hand, returning to the Pontic Community, the traditional interferences of

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Russia in the Black Sea and the Balkan region are now based, rst of all, on economic grounds, if one considers that until recently, half the exports of the ex-Soviet Union and a quarter of its imports were transported by the Pontic eet and that nowadays a giant RussianBulgarianGreek pipeline is to be built along the NovorossiyskBurgasAlexandroupolis axis. The agreement linking the seaport of Burgas to the Caucasian seaport of Poti should also be mentioned, one opening the way to the Caspian Sea and the Iranian port of Stara, emphasizing the complementarity of the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, along with the RhineMainDanube uvial way. Here are some special implications leading to new re ections on the openings, fundamental for the future, of the European South-East to a RussianUkrainian world and to the Caucasus within the framework of a new unity of contemporary civilization that one could class under the name of South-East EuropeanPontic. Although running the risk of engaging in less favourable propaganda, reviving, with adjustments, an old slogansaying that the culminating points of Europe are marked by the arrow of Strasbourg Cathedral and the peaks of the Balkans, that still holds true today by merely adding eastward to the crests of the Caucasusscientists have to face this reality, try to explain it, and attempt to integrate it within a long, very long, tradition. For this tradition exists. It is a remarkable one, engendering a good number of civilizations set in a fashion by archaeologists, ethnologists, linguistics, art historians, and specialists in folklore and in the history of religions. If I believe that the International Association of South-East European Studies and the UNESCO Chair on South-East European Studies of the University of Arts of Bucharest must, in the future, become more involved in the study of the types of relations which have laid the bases of the South-East European-Pontic Community of today and tomorrow, it is that this Community is a kind of third Europe stimulated by the other two Europes, namely Western Europe and Central Europe, the borders of which are still those that separated the Turkish and the Austrian Empires. If I hold this conviction it is also for the following reason: in a period when we are dreaming of an ideal European unity, while having to face some very real inter-European hostilities, the South Eastern European space, including the Black Sea space, has the possibilitydespite its obvious disadvantagesof being able to initiate a dialogue between opposed spiritual attitudes which might also be those of tolerance (on condition, of course, that fundamentalist tendencies, particularly Islamic and Orthodox ones, are not provoked too much). Here and now, it is necessary to add something more. Orthodoxy can adjust itself to speci c political situations, particularly the dramatic situation in South Eastern Europe, this genuine Europe in miniature. For this area is the only part of the continent in which all its religions and confessions are to be found and where it is possible to build future bridges between Orthodoxy and Islam. In this Islam, Moses, Abraham, and Christ Himself are prophets. Its mosques have contributed their echoes to the decoration of Romanian and Russian churches. Its Su mystics or bektasi dervishes, accused of christianophilia, made considerable approaches to Orthodox hesychast mystics (Balivet, 1995, passim). Today, Orthodoxy and Islam, the once irreconcilable political opponents, who have nevertheless engendered splendid interactions in literature and the ne arts, share a common ineluctable destiny. They must live together within that vast area that the author has designated as South-East European-Pontic in the already outlined Community of the Black Sea that includes, within the Caucasus, Muslim Azeris and Igush and Christian Armenians and Ossetians, who as neighbours are sometimes explosive, sometimes peaceful. The whole area is home to 330 million souls.

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Out of minority elementsotherwise quite importantof Catholicism and Protestantism, throwing a shade of colour at the modern border of our historical sub-zone, the Orthodox world and the Muslim world could offer to future generations the pattern of a new Europe, which might become a model andwhy nota positive model. The author, therefore, pleads, once again, for directing the debates, colloquia, and congresses towards topics based on problems of international interest in the history, ancient and modern, of our South Eastern Europe. This very Europe which, on the map of an even more real space, the Euro-Afro-Asiatic space, representsand we have here a true paradoxthe very heart of the Old World.

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