Historia Religionum Direttore Natale Spineto (Università Di Torino)

historia religionum Direttore Natale Spineto (Università di Torino)

Comitato scientifico Gustavo Benavides (Villanova University) Philippe Borgeaud (Université de Genève) Bernard Faure (Columbia University) Giovanni Filoramo (Università di Torino) Jean-Marie Husser (Université Marc Bloch, Strasbourg) Massimo Raveri (Università Ca’ Foscari di Venezia) Jörg Rüpke (Erfurt Universität) Giulia Sfameni Gasparro (Università di Messina) Guy G. Stroumsa (Hebrew University of Jerusalem · University of Oxford) Emilio Suárez de la Torre (Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona)

Redazione scientifica Augusto Cosentino (Università di Messina) Alberto Pelissero (Università di Torino) Alessandro Saggioro (Sapienza Università di Roma) Roberto Tottoli (Università degli Studi di Napoli ‘l’Orientale’) *

« Historia Religionum » is an International Yearly Peer Reviewed Journal. The eContent is Archived with Clockss and Portico. anvur : a. * Per i riferimenti bibliografici si invitano gli autori ad attenersi scrupolosamente alle norme specificate nel volume di Fabrizio Serra,Regole editoriali, tipografiche & redazionali, Pisa-Roma, Serra, 20092, in particolare al capitolo Norme redazionali, consultabile e scaricabile Online alla pagina « Pubblicare con noi » del sito web www.libraweb.net * Gli articoli proposti per la rivista devono essere inviati, per posta elettronica e in formato pdf, all'indirizzo del Direttore : [email protected] HISTORIA RELIGIONUM

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sezione monografica religions in the roman empire: a discussion of pantheon by jörg rüpke Edited by Cristiana Facchini

Cristiana Facchini, Pantheon: In Conversation with Jörg Rüpke 11 Roberto Alciati, Religione o religioni? 17 Alessandro Saggioro, Per una nuova storia della religione romana, fra comunica- zione e individualismo 23 Luca Arcari, I seguaci di Gesù come attori religiosi individuali dell’Impero Romano. Note in margine alla ‘nuova’ storia della religione romana di Jörg Rüpke 27

sezione monografica angelo brelich, incroci tra italia e ungheria · i A cura di Valerio Salvatore Severino Valerio Salvatore Severino, Angelo Brelich, incroci tra Italia e Ungheria 41 Giorgio Ferri, A braccetto con Giove: Angelo Brelich e la religione romana 43 Cornelia Isler-Kerényi, Gli eroi greci di Kerényi e di Brelich a confronto 79

saggi Giuseppina Paola Viscardi, The Wilderness Experience. Liminality and Cosmogo- ny in Ancient Greece Kingship Narratives 87 Marco D’Alano, Rileggere la santità in chiave esoterica a inizio Novecento. Il caso della Società Teosofica di Roma 113 Ludovico Battista, L’ultima secolarizzazione del cristianesimo: Memoria passio- nis. La teologia-politica di J. B. Metz al vaglio della critica alla secolarizzazione di H. Blumenberg 127 Giuseppe Tateo, Bless to spoil: revanchism, nationalism and defilement in an anti-mosque ritual in Bucharest, Romania 149 Luigi Berzano, La religione nell’era digitale 165

Norme redazionali della casa editrice 177 BLESS TO SPOIL : REVANCHISM, NATIONALISM AND DEFILEMENT IN AN ANTI-MOSQUE RITUAL IN BUCHAREST, ROMANIA Giuseppe Tateo

Abstract · Drawing on ethnographic data gathered in Bucharest in 2015 and 2016, the present paper aims at unpacking a specific ritual of defilement and consecration. Fearing that the erection of a mosque would be the cornerstone of a possible Islamisation of Romania, two activists elaborated a strategy to stop the project. First, they defiled the respective land by digging some pieces of pork bought in a supermarket, and then « re-Christianized » the place by driving hundreds of crosses and celebrating a ritual for blessing it. Following Maurice Bloch’s reflections on ritual practice, I dwell on the complementarity of functional and symbolic action in a ritual performance composed of two different moments : defilement (of the “other” or aimed at it) and re-consecration (for or aimed at the “self ”). The paper ends arguing that expressions of contemporary inter-religious and inter-ethnic unrest – such as the anti-mosque affair in Bucharest – are better understood in the light of how protesters conceive their historical identity. Keywords · Bucharest, Mosque, Ritual, Islam, Nationalism, Orthodoxy.

Introduction 1 n July 2015, mass media reports revealed the project of building a new, imposing I mosque in Bucharest. Through the government resolution 372/2015, a piece of land in the north of the city was loaned for free to the Muslims’ community in Romania, under the condition that construction works started within three years. Fearing that the erection of a mosque would be the cornerstone of a possible Islamisation of Ro- mania, two activists elaborated a strategy to stop the project. First, they defiled the respective land by digging some pieces of pork bought in a supermarket, and then « re-Christianized » the place by driving hundreds of crosses and celebrating a ritual for blessing it. The activists were two cousins, Cătălin Berenghi and Cătălin Ioan Gornic, and had already organized other « undertakings » (demersuri, as Berenghi calls them) in the past, gaining some visibility in the capital. The case study discussed here combines the growing importance of online media consumption and conspiracy theories with geopolitics and the predicaments of the migration crisis in the EU. Such phenomena contribute to re-activate revanchist sentiments in an area that was a buffer zone between empires for centuries. Drawing on ethnographic data gathered during a twelve-month fieldwork in Bucharest, the present paper aims at unpacking a specific ritual of defilement and consecration. Beyond the

[email protected], Charles University, Prague. 1 On this topic, for a chronology of the news coverage, see Corneliu Simuţ, Negative Economy in Romanian Politics and Religion : Anti-Muslim Attitudes in the Bucharest Mosque Scandal during the Summer of 2015, « Religions », 6, 4, 2015, pp. 1368-1390, available online : https ://doi.org/10.3390/rel6041368, accessed on 06.09.2019.

https://doi.org/10.19272/202004901011 · «historia religionum» · 12 · 2020 150 giuseppe tateo pig burial – which is a common tactic among anti-mosque movements – it dwells on a few other elements : the creation of an open-air shrine on the respective land, the ref- erence to Wallachian rulers and martyrs as symbols of Romanian lands’ anti-Ottoman history, and cross-placing activities. One of the main arguments of the paper is that contemporary inter-religious and inter-ethnic conflict such as the anti-mosque affair in Bucharest are better understood in the light of how people conceive their historical identity and are influenced by their recent past. The crosses they drive in the land, in fact, demarcate time, not just space. Crosses are markers of Christian identity used to keep away the other, which in the given case is an undesirable near future (the feared « Islamisation » of Romania) that evokes a far past of subalternity (the centuries spent under Ottoman rule). The paper ends highlighting the role that another, closer past – the decades of socialist regime – plays nowadays in the emergence of inter-ethnic disputes. If islamophobia arises because of revanchist interpretations of history, opposition along ethnic lines is also a legacy of the more recent socialist past.

A controversial project Before discussing the project of the new mosque, I will give a brief historical overview of the Muslim presence in modern-day Romanian territories. Although the Cumans and Pechenegs ruling Wallachia in medieval times included also a Muslim minorities, the first Muslim settlements date back to the 13th century, when Crimean Tatars and Anatolian 1 Turkomans settled in the south-eastern region of Dobrogea. The Ottoman occupation of Dobrogea in the early 15th century was the prelude to the Ottoman suzerainty estab- lished in Wallachia and Moldova since 1541 and lasting for more than three centuries. Fur- thermore, waves of Crimean Tatars moved to Dobrogea on occasion of specific events, such as the annexation of Crimea by the Russians (1783) and the Crimean War (1853-1856). The Romanian War of Independence (1877-1878) was a turnaround for the Muslim communities settled in Dobrogea, as the new-born Romanian state inaugurated a period of ethnic homogenisation that made about 90,000 Muslims emigrate from the 2 province in a few decades. Romania reached its maximal territorial expansion – and highest degree of multi-ethnic composition – during the interwar period, when it in- corporated Transylvania, Bukovina, Bessarabia, and Southern Dobrogea. In the latter, 3 according to a 1930 census, Romanians were only the 20% (while Christian Orthodox were still the majority, about 60%, as Bulgarians constituted another 40% of the population). Southern Dobrogea was re-annexed by Bulgaria in 1940, while the end of WWii resulted in the start of the socialist experiment. Throughout the four decades of socialist rule, Party policies towards the Muslim minority varied contingently, at the same time following strictly ideological purposes : in the 1950s/60s, for instance, Tatar language was promoted in order to counterbalance

1 Alina Isac Alak, Types of Religious Identities within Romanian Muslim Communities, « Journal for the Study of Religions and Ideologies », vol. 41, issue 14, 2015, pp. 148-173. 2 Ibidem. In this respect, Grigore highlights also the deterioration of economic conditions as a factor behind the massive migration of Turkish and Tatar to Turkey. See George Grigore, Muslims in Romania, « isim Newsletter », 3, 7, 1999, p. 34. Also on this topic, Adriana Cupcea, Religion and Ethnicity : Muslim Turkish and Tatar Identity in Dobruja (Romania) throughout the 20th Century, « Marmara University Journal of Political Science », 6, 2, 2018, pp. 111-125. 3 Dennis Deletant, Romania, in Joining Hitler’s Crusade : European Nations and the Invasion of the Soviet Union, 1941, edited by David Stahel, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2017, pp. 46-78 : 57. anti-mosque ritual in bucharest, romania 151 1 the predominance of Turkish, considered the language of a capitalist state. Already in the end of the 1960s, instead, Ceauşescu’s foreign policy strengthened ties with socialist Arab countries, thus favouring again Muslim immigration to Romania and bilateral ex- 2 change. Yet in terms of religious practice, Muslim communities were severely limited by the atheist educational agenda all along the duration of the socialist regime. After the demise of the socialist regime and the opening of national borders, new Muslim ethnic groups appeared not just in Bucharest, but also in other major Romani- an cities like Iaşi, Cluj, and Timişoara. As noticed by expert of Islam in Romania, lin- guist George Grigore, at the turn of the century, such groups comprised « Arabs (who came mostly from the countries of the Arab Mashriq like Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine) ; the Iranians ; the Kurds (who came from northern Iraq and south-eastern Turkey), etc. Some of these communities have their own mosques, schools (such as the Iraqi School in Bucharest), bilingual periodicals (…) and cultural and religious centres 3 (especially in Bucharest) ». According to the last census (2011), there are about 64.337 Muslims in Romania : 26,903 are Turks, 20,060 Tatars, 3,356 Roma Muslims, 6,281 Ro- manian Muslims and 6,906 of another ethnicity. Muslims represent almost 0.34% of 4 the Romanian population and are mostly Sunni. The majority lives in the historical region of Dobrogea and in its main city and historical capital, Constanţa. The about 10.000 who are settled in Bucharest are divided into Turks, Tatars, students and busi- nesspeople from the Arabic peninsula, and a smaller number of migrants from North Africa and the Middle East. The Muftiate is the only official institution representing the Muslims in Romania : at the moment of its foundation, in 1877-1878, there were four Muftiates, which became 5 one in 1943. The Mufti « promotes a local understanding of the Hanafi Sunni Islamic 6 school of thought », is based in Constanţa and represents Turks and Tatars, who are the two Muslim ethnic groups historically present in the south of the country. Bucha- rest’s Arab Muslims, instead, de facto are not affiliated to the Mufti. The idea of building a more capacious mosque in Bucharest originated in the mid- 2000s but became reality only under the government of social-democratic Victor Ponta in 2015. The project seems to be rooted in the blueprint of the Turkish President Er- 7 dogan to erect mosques all over Europe (and not only there). The Turkish Presidency of Religious Affairs Diyanet( Işleri Başkanlığı, henceforth the Diyanet) would have taken charge of the financing. But after that the land was given on loan, mounting criticism towards the alleged imposing size of the building resulted in some small protests or- ganised in the capital, which contributed to slow down the implementation of the project. In April 2016 the city district granted the planning certificate and one year later the Diyanet released for the first time some images showing how the future mosque

1 Cupcea, Religion and Ethnicity, cit., pp. 119-120. 2 Adriana Cupcea, Construcţia identitară la comunităţile turcă şi tătară din Dobrogea, « Working Papers in Roma- 3 nian Minority Studies », 49, 2013, pp. 1-36. Grigore, Muslims in Romania, cit., p. 34. 4 Secretariatul de Stat pentru Culte, Statul şi cultele religioase, Bucureşti, Litera, 2018, pp.161-162. However, in 2007 Nuredin Ibram esteemed that the number of Muslims in Romania could reach even 100.000 people, as some Muslim Roma and irregular migrants may not have been counted in official records. See Nuredin Ibram, Musulmanii în România, Constanta, Golden, 2007, p. 135. 5 Secretariatul de Stat pentru Culte, Statul şi cultele religioase, cit., pp. 161-162. 6 Isac Alak, Types of Religious Identities, cit., p. 151. 7 Michael Bird, Zeynep Şentek, Revealed : Turkey’s massive global mega-mosque plan, « The Black Sea », 29 Sep- tember 2015, available online : https ://theblacksea.eu/index.php ?idT=88&idC=88&idRec=1211&recType=story, accessed on 05.09.2019. 152 giuseppe tateo

Fig. 1. The protest in front of the Cotroceni Palace (residence of the Romanian president) to stop the construction of the mosque, organized by the far right-wing political formation Par- tidul România Unită (United Romania Party, henceforth pru) in April 2016. Note the several placards exalting Vlad the Impaler as a symbol of resistance against the Ottomans. Personal archive of the author.

1 may look like. Nevertheless, City Hall never granted the zonal urban plan for starting the works, and after three years no official plan of the religious complex has ever been made public. At first, Mufti Yusuf Murat declared that the Bucharest mosque would have been the biggest in Europe (a statement that he will retract some time later, as the capacity 2 would be of only 1.500 people). When asked about the motivations for building a new mosque in Bucharest, he did not address capacity matters but rather the chance to get small, informal communities of local Muslims under control : « We need a mosque to keep on a check on all religious activity (…) In Bucharest there are many mosques 3 and we don’t know what the Imams preach there ». If constructed, the new mosque would be the biggest in the country. Currently in the capital there are four registered 4 houses of worship and other thirteen which are not authorised by the Mufti. Never-

1 Radu Cupcea, Moscheea din Bucureşti : despre cum va arăta cu adevărat, « Adevărul », 14 June 2017, accessible online at : https ://adevarul.ro/news/eveniment/moscheea-bucuresti-despre-arata-adevarat-1_5940f3b95ab6550- cb8211eeb/index.html, accessed on 12.09.2019. 2 Alice Draghici, Muftiul Iusuf Murat : Moscheea din Bucureşti nu va fi cea mai mare din Europa, « Mediafax »,14 July 2015, accessible online at : http ://www.mediafax.ro/social/muftiul-iusuf-murat-moscheea-din-bucuresti-nu- va-fi-cea-mai-mare-din-europa-14591069, accessed on 09.09.2019. 3 Michael Bird, Turkey-funded mega-mosque in Bucharest sparks resistance, « Eu Observer », 21 July 2015, accessible online at : https ://euobserver.com/beyond-brussels/129714, accessed on 09.09.2019. 4 Mihai Ivascu, De ce vor musulmanii o mare moschee in Bucuresti ? Muftiul Iusuf Murat pentru HotNews.ro : 90% din cele 17 moschei nu sunt autorizate, « Hotnews », 7 July 2015, available online at : https ://www.hotnews.ro/stiri-esen- tial-20283178-vor-musulmanii-mare-moschee-bucuresti-muftiul-iusuf-murad-pentru-hotnews-90-din-cele-17-moschei-nu-sunt-autorizate-alta-capitala-construita-cea-mai-mare-moschee-din-europa-78-000-metri-patrati.htm, accessed on 12.09.2019. Vainovski-Mihai talks instead of sixteen houses of worship, See Irina Vainovski-Mihai, Romania, in Yearbook of Muslims in Europe, Volume 5, Leiden, Brill, 2013, p. 538. anti-mosque ritual in bucharest, romania 153 theless, his ambition to centralize scattered, informal communities within the new religious complex was received with scepticism by Turkish residents in Bucharest. First, they found it unlikely that Shias, Sunnis and Salafi would pray in the same mosque – a 1 concern shared by experts of Islam in Romania too – second, the mosque would rise in the north of the city, thus too far away from the Turkish minority residing in the 2 east. The suspicion that this project was rooted in the political agendas of Ponta and Erdoğan – rather than launched by a grassroots initiative – spread quickly and became soon one of the main points backed by far right-wing groups, who picketed against the project on a few occasions since September 2015.

The ritual After having read on the internet of a protest against the construction of a mosque in Spain, Berenghi and Gornic decided to take a stand and act in the same way : by defiling the land where the edifice should have been erected. The land the government destined for the construction of the mosque was not fenced, having thick vegetation and wild animals such as pheasants. Some people used to come here to collect berries for selling them or for self-consumption. Only when it was assigned to the Muslim representative, this land came to be matter of interest for radical Christian-Orthodox activists. In August 2015, Berenghi, who is the leader of the initiative, first bought three frozen pig’ carcasses from the supermarket and some small, young pigs from a farmer. He then painted the piglets with the colours of the Romanian flag and let them graze on the land, while he buried the carcasses in three different spots. A few weeks after the desecration, Berenghi and Gornic organized a ritual of « re-Christianization » of the place. On 14 September – which is also the Holy Cross day, even though the two activists did not know it – a small sanctuary was erected on the spot. A stone cross donated by a monk was installed on the land, surrounded by flowers, an icon of the Brâncoveanu martyrs and a Romanian flag with the image of Michael the Brave. I will discuss the importance of such historical figures for the construction of an anti-Ottoman and anti-Islamic Romanian identity further on. Berenghi had previously announced on Facebook that a ritual of blessing of the land would take place on the site and invited whoever wanted to join. A few dozen people took part in the ceremony. Each was given a wooden cross which had been blessed with holy water, and that will be stuck in the land afterwards. All the participants surrounded the small 3 sanctuary, where a retired priest blessed the land according to the Christian Orthodox praxis. The ritual of blessing a place or an object is called sfeştanie and is widespread in Orthodoxy. The priest sprinkles the area and all the bystanders with blessed water (aghiazma mică), while he recites from his Book of Prayers (molitvelnic). It is important to keep in mind that this ritual does not make the place sacred – that is, a place whose

1 « [The new Muslim ethnic groups appeared in Romania after 1989] have not joined the old Muslim community in Romania, the two groups living almost parallel lives », Grigore, Muslims in Romania, cit., p. 34. 2 This does not mean that Muslims in Bucharest have adequate religious spaces : for instance, in 2015 celebra- tions for the end of the Ramadan had to be performed in the Dinamo Bucharest football stadium. 3 The Romanian Orthodox Church seems to have nothing against the construction of the mosque and publicly condemned Berenghi’s undertakings in a press release promptly circulated after the facts. In the same release, the ROC exhorted the protesters to assume a more tolerant attitude and specified that the priest was retired and thus not entitled by the roc to celebrate rituals. 154 giuseppe tateo

Fig. 2. During the ritual of « re-Christianisation » of the land (source : Facebook page of Cătălin th Berenghi, 4 October 2015, available online at : https ://www.facebook.com/1715989055291587/ photos/a.1725280437695782/1725280764362416/ ?type=3&theater, accessed on 12.09.2019). access requires a specific deferential disposition – but it rather purifies and delivers it from evil. Priests usually bless the faithful’s houses every year on Epiphany (Boboteaza, January 6), during Christmas Time, but blessings of cars, land and small businesses are 1 also common. After the ritual, crosses were planted here and there. Crosses stood here as agents of both purification and profanation. In fact, to carry out a religious service and a blessing was – in the mind of the activists present there – a sort of additional defilement that reinforces the effects of the pigs’ burial. As stated by Berenghi during our interview : « Not only we have spoiled this place, but then a priest blessed it… now it is too much for building a mosque, because the land is not clean anymore by their laws […] We are not the only ones [who took action], some others told us that they had been there and poured the blood of the pigs they had slaughtered [for personal consumption] ». Beyond this original defiling feature, crosses are conceived – in a less surprising way – as markers of Christian identity, and ward off strangers by indicating precise ethnic, religious, and cultural boundaries. In rural Romania, crosses were once used to mark land borders and crossroads, that is, to separate portions of space. Instead, in the anti-mosque initiative, the boundaries drawn by cross-placing separate time, as they restate the discourse of the clash of civilizations on the basis of an historical argument : Romanian lands has suffered for centuries the Ottoman domination, so that permitting the construction of a mosque would mean getting back to those times of forced political submission.

1 I did not witness this ritual of blessing in person – as I was following a procession in the city centre on the very same day – so the information I report is indirect and acquired by mass media, by Berenghi himself and by some videos shot by participants. anti-mosque ritual in bucharest, romania 155

At this point, how should we consider these actions ? Only when put together the pig burial and the consequent re-Christianization assume proper meaning. I will argue now for considering them as two different moments of a single ritual. By talking of a ritual of defilement and re-consecration I have made no distinction between the acts 1 of profanation and blessing. At first, following Stanley Tambiah’s definition of ritual, it is evident that only the latter can be called as such. From the perspective of the two activists, the pig burial is not symbolically laden and lacks formality and redundancy : it has a simple instrumental value. As aptly formulated by Turner « a symbol is the small- 2 est unit of a ritual » and here such a founding unit is missing : instead, this act has the sole aim to foil the erection of the mosque through the defilement of the respective plot of land. Yet what I believe counts more is not determining what can be called ritual and what cannot ; but what’s the function of the pig burial and of the cross placing. Both defilement and re-consecration are essential for the two activists to achieve their purpose. It would not have been enough to set that piece of land aside through profanation, it was also necessary to state to whom it belongs through a ceremony of « re-Christianization ». This is why the acts of spoiling and blessing should be considered here as part of one single process which is both instrumental and symbolic. This case highlights the performative nature of ritual, a cultural fact that, as Maurice Bloch 3 as brilliantly put it, « it is not fully a statement and not fully an action ». Similarly, this ritual of defilement and re-consecration combines instrumentality (the pig burial) and symbolism (the land blessing, the cross placing), thus maintaining a tension between statement and action. The question of effectiveness suggests too to dissect this ritual in two parts : the first part represents what the activists think is impure for Muslims, the second part brings in objects and practices the activists themselves associate with the notions of re-habili- tation, sanctification, and belonging. Pig burial is performed according to the activists’ understanding of what is impure, defiling, or unacceptable for Muslims. I realised once more during our interview that Berenghi and Gornic had no real knowledge of Islamic principles about defilement but based their suppositions on some superficial internet research. For Mufti Yusuf Murat – the representative of the Muslim historical minority in Romania – the effectiveness of such ritual of defilement is debatable. Interviewed right after the episode, he declared that, if needed, a ritual of purification would be 4 conducted on the land before starting the construction works. Instead, in one of the most famous precedent of anti-mosque defilement, in Grenchen, Switzerland, the lo-

1 « Ritual is a culturally constructed system of symbolic communication. It is constituted of patterned and ordered sequences of words and acts, often expressed in multiple media, whose content and arrangement are characterized in varying degree by formality (conventionality), stereotypy (rigidity), condensation (fusion), and redundancy (repetition) » : Stanley Tambiah, A Performative Approach to Ritual, London, Oxford University Press, 1979, p. 119. 2 Victor W. Turner, The Forest of Symbols. Aspects of Ndembu Ritual, New York, Cornell University Press, 1967, p. 19. 3 Maurice Bloch, From Blessing to Violence. History and Ideology in the Circumcision Ritual of the Merina of Mad- agascar, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 195. 4 One of the Bucharest members of the ssra (State Secretariat for Religious Affairs) told me in an interview that Berenghi and his helpers did not incur more serious repercussions only because they operated a sort of « preventive defilement », as the land had not been blessed yet : « If they had defiled a land which was already blessed, they could have been legally persecuted. But this was not the case. [Moreover] their action was actually ineffec- tive, as the place where they intervened is not exactly where the mosque should be erected ». 156 giuseppe tateo cal Muslim representative affirmed that it would have been enough to wait for some 1 rain for considering the land pure again. The presence of pigs is an aspect of interest. In opposition to how they are conceived among Muslims – where they are associated with prohibition and impurity – pigs are very iconic animals in the Romanian rural imagery : pig meat and fat is central in many people’s diet, while the pig’s slaughter is still an important tradition that rural house- 2 holds perform during Christmas time. Therefore, the idea to paint pigs with the colours of the Romanian flag instantiates nationalist sentiments together with a tradition- alist interpretation of (Romanian) culture. The installation of the shrine and the hundreds of crosses planted represent, instead, what is effective for the activists themselves. In Orthodoxy, icons and crosses are deemed sacred in the sense that they deliver from evil the area where they are placed. Beyond their religious function, these objects claim the historical and ethnic owner- ship of the respective land. The icon of the Brâncoveanu martyrs, the colours of the Romanian flag present everywhere, and the flag itself with the image of Michael the Brave : all these symbols indicate how religious and national identity interweave seamlessly among those who stand up for impeding the construction of the mosque. The next section provides a few more details about them, and looks at the motivations they marshal for justifying their actions.

The activists While the informal agreements with the Romanian authorities were supposed to pro- vide a land for building a pilgrims’ centre in Istanbul, no plot of land was ever assigned to the Romanian Orthodox Church. Berenghi and his followers were aware of this and included such disparity among their arguments, but the deep motivations pushing them to actively oppose the project lied elsewhere : This little country has paid a huge tribute to Turks in terms of money, animals and children. Our rulers sacrificed themselves, some of them paying at the price of their head (Constantin Brâncoveanu). Because of this tribute, people got poorer and suffered hundreds of years, and now you [main Romanian political representatives] give to Turks a piece of land of the Brân- 3 coveanu family !

Already from the first adjective used for describing his country («little »), Berenghi reflects what Verdery defined as a form of self-victimization of one’s own country 4 against foreign forces, which are blamed as the foremost cause of misfortune. There- fore, the first and most important element of Berenghi’s rationale had to do with his understanding of history. The construction of a big mosque on Romanian land coin-

1 Brian Walker, Muslims outraged over pig parts dumped at Swiss mosque site, « cnn World », 12 November 2011, available online at : https ://edition.cnn.com/2011/11/12/world/europe/switzerland-mosque/index.html, accessed on 08.09.2019. 2 See, for instance VintilĂ Mihailescu, Scutecele națiunii și hainele împăratului. Note de antropologie publică, Bucureşti, Polirom, 2013, pp. 5-24. 3 Facebook post of Cătălin Berenghi, 29 March 2016, available online at : https ://www.facebook. com/1715989055291587/posts/1789437684613390/, accessed on 12.09.2019. 4 « I believe this experience of self as both national and victim–of a self that has been victimized by history just as one’s nation has been–disposes many Romanians to accept nationalist demagogy : “Oh wretched Romanians, your troubles have always come from the scheming of aliens in your midst. Expel them and all will be well” ». Katherine Verdery, Nationalism and National Sentiment in Post-socialist Romania, « Slavic Review », 52 (2), 1993, p. 196. anti-mosque ritual in bucharest, romania 157 1 cided, for him, with a betrayal of his ancestors. Beyond the figure of Vlad the Impal- er – which was more present in the rhetorical strategies of the pru – the anti-mosque activists I talked to mainly referred to Micheal the Brave and Constantin Brâncoveanu. The former, Michael the Brave (Mihai Viteazul, 1558-1601), was a Prince of Wallachia and military leader famous for having defeated the Ottomans in the Călugăreni battle (1595) and being the first ruler who was able to hold at the same time – although only for about four months in 1600 – the crowns of the three Romanian historical Princi- palities of Wallachia, Moldova and Transylvania. The latter, Constantin Brâncoveanu, is the probably most iconic symbol of the Romanian resistance against the Ottoman yoke. He was Prince of Wallachia between 1688 and 1714, which was back then under Ottoman suzerainty. He is known for the period of cultural splendour the region experienced under his rule. After being accused of organising an anti-Ottoman conspiracy with the help of the Habsburg family, he was arrested and imprisoned in Constantino- ple together with his sons. The only chance given to him and his children for escaping death was to convert to Islam. As he staunchly refused to renounce Orthodoxy, they were beheaded and their heads publicly exposed. For this reason, in 1992 he and his sons were canonized as saints and martyrs by the Romanian Orthodox Church. Driven by revanchism, Berenghi was no stranger to other glorifications of Roma- nian history : in 2015 he obtained from the Town Hall and the Ministry of Culture the permission to add the inscription « Budapest » – which was liberated by the Romanian Army immediately after wwi – among the other cities inscribed on Bucharest’s Arch of Triumph. Berenghi’s interest for the military world originated from his familiar background, as his father was a helicopter army pilot. Moreover, he experienced the military world from within, as he joined the foreign legion after high school for a few years. He then came back to the motherland and opened an oriental-themed café in the capital. The fact of owning a shisha bar (and thus having often to deal with Mus- lim customers, as he said) was indeed one of the first arguments that Berenghi show- cased to prove that he was not racist, but merely a patriotic citizen with a strong civic attitude. Berenghi’s idea of patriotism was visible in his strong engagement with Romania’s national history, and particularly in the respect that he harboured for historical figures like Constantin Brâncoveanu. By justifying his activism as a tribute to those local rulers who fought against the Ottomans, Berenghi validated the theory according to which « nationalisms are forms of ancestor cult », an expression I borrow from Verdery, but that – as she admits herself – can be found also in the works of Edmund Leach, 2 David Schneider, Meyer Fortes, and Benedict Anderson. Verdery came to formulate this assumption after having dealt with practices of burial of dead human bodies (kin, political personalities, bishops etc.) in postsocialist Romania and Serbia, showing how conceptions of the dead, ethnic nation and kin are closely related with soil, land and territory. The present case shows us something similar : that historical figures are conceived as ancestors and treated as such. By consequence, a piece of land in the outskirts of the capital is thought as inalienable because it once belonged the forefathers of the

1 See on this topic also Corneliu C. Simuț, Johan Buitendag, Promoting Ancestry as Ecodomy in Romanian Eastern Orthodox Christianity. The Role of Ancestors in Contemporary Romanian Orthodox Rhetoric, « The Exposito- ry Times », 126, 10, 2015, pp. 475-487, available online : https ://doi.org/10.1177%2F0014524615571245, accessed on 12.09.2019. 2 Katherine Verdery, The Political Lives of Dead Bodies, New York, Columbia University Press, 1999, p. 41. 158 giuseppe tateo

Fig. 3. The « oriental-style » cafè owned by Berenghi (Source : Facebook – public profile of Cătă- lin Berenghi). nation, and lending it to the Turkish government for building there a mosque would be disrespectful for those who fought against the Ottoman invader. Secondly, Berenghi’s motivations and tools reveal the powerful role of digital media and social networks in shaping political cosmologies in postsocialism. If on the one hand such acts of protest are inspired by patriotism, Islamophobia is the flip of the coin. Berenghi, Gornic and their supporters fear that the construction of a mosque would be the cornerstone of a possible Islamisation of Romania ; just as it has already happened – they say – in Europe. Such conspiracy theories are fuelled by information gathered on the internet, even though Gornic told me during our interview that he had lived in Africa for a while and thus had already been in direct contact with Muslims. The power of conspiracy theories spreading through online media is so effective that people like Berenghi and Gornic end up being captured by apocalyptic narratives and the racist discourses contained in it, although they claimed they never had negative personal experience of Muslims. The two activists insisted on declaring themselves not racist and having nothing against Muslims, but the reasons they deployed for oppos- ing the project betrayed a xenophobic understanding of the Islamic world. Therefore, 1 conflict arises notwithstanding the «everyday diplomacy » that the activists themselves assert of having personally practiced with the Muslim counterpart :

CG : Beyond the mosque, they also want to build an Islamic teaching institute for 8.000 students. In the whole country we have 64.000 Muslims. It is clear that, in case they will open this school,

1 Michael Marsden, Diana Ibanez Tirado, David Henig, Everyday Diplomacy. Introduction to Special Issue, « The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology », 34 (2), 2016, pp. 2-22. anti-mosque ritual in bucharest, romania 159 they we will get more Muslims from other countries. And maybe 500 of those 8.000 will be terrorists ! […] Erdogan is building new mosques for sending refugees there, because Turkey is full of refugees […] but they [Muslim refugees] are not civilized, they do not respect rules and laws […] Then just imagine, having thousands of Muslim students here, how risky can be for a 1 woman to walk in the area… The ethnic and religious cleavage here is not expressed in historical terms, but as a matter of civilization. Behind the apparent concern for women’s safety, one can dis- cern the preoccupation regarding a possible competition for the autochthonous patri- archal control over them. While the opening of the teaching institute and the coming 2 of thousands of students was fake news that the Mufti himself refuted, the words of Gornic help understanding that anti-Ottoman, anti-Turk, anti-Erdogan, and broader anti-Muslim sentiments recur seamlessly in the imagery of such activists. Although Berenghi, Gornic and the PRU organizers of the anti-mosque protests have in common a strong nationalist ideology that skirts fanatism, nationalism can assume multiple con- notations. Among the people who openly showed their dissent against the erection of 3 a new mosque, there were nostalgic of the Iron Guard, Dacian protochronists, and zealot Orthodox believers who were primarily moved by their religious belonging. The mosque project was opposed by different people and for multiple reasons, ranging from simple political considerations to concerns about ethnic and religious diversity : for some, it was a political move with no real benefit for anyone but the two prime min- isters, for others an abuse of power by Erdogan and an unnecessary concession by Ro- manians politicians, or even a project setting the precondition for the invasion of thousands of dangerous, uncivilised Muslims. For Berenghi and Gornic, all these were true. Obviously, Berenghi and Gornic were not alone in their crusade. On 24 October 2015 Berenghi announced a new undertaking on Facebook : to plant new crosses on the plot of land in order to give more resonance to the protest. The first to arrive to the event were an old woman in her sixties with a black headscarf, an extremely thin man with a long beard like the one Orthodox priests usually sport, and two youngsters. The young man started to make crosses assembling the blessed boards of wood he had brought along with him, while the old woman tidied the small sanctuary : watering the flowers, placing small Romanian flags, putting in order the candles and wiping the icon of the Brâncoveanu martyrs.

1 Interview of the author with Cătălin Ioan Gornic and Cătălin Berenghi, 22nd August 2016. 2 Sinziana Ionescu, Cât de periculoasă este marea moschee ? Opiniile specialiştilor despre cel mai controversat proiect musulman din România, « Adevărul », 12 July 2015, available online at : http ://adevarul.ro/locale/constanta/ cat-periculoasa-marea-moscheee-opiniile-specialistilor-despre-mai-controversat-proiect-musulman-romania- 1_55a296d4f5eaafab2c806c7f/index.html, accessed on 10.09.2019. 3 During socialism, protochronism « encouraged critics and literary historians to look for developments in Romanian culture that had anticipated events in the better-publicized cultures of western Europe (thus ‘pro- to-chronos’ : first in time) (…) Clearly symptomatizing the plight of subaltern cultures dominated by metropoli- tan centers, protochronism soon attracted the attention of a Romanian party leadership that also wished to raise Romania’s image in the esteem of the world. Romanians and outside observers alike have considered protochronism among the strongest manifestations of national ideology under Ceauşescu – even, perhaps, that leadership’s basic ideology. Protochronism was an intensified resuscitation of interwar indigenist arguments about the national essence », Katherine Verdery, National Ideology under Socialism. Identity and Cultural Politics in Ceauşescu’s Ro- mania, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1991, pp. 167-168. For an analysis of the Dacian discourse produced during the autarchic phase of the communist regime in Romania, see also Lucian Boia, History and Myth in Romanian Consciousness, tr. by James Christian Brown, Budapest, Central European University Press, 2001 pp. 102- 106 (essential info about protochronism at pp. 79-81). For more on protochronism in Romanian, see Alexandra Tomiță, O istorie „glorioasă”. Dosarul protocronismului românesc, București, Cartea Românească, 2007. 160 giuseppe tateo

Fig. 4. Planting crosses in the plot destined to the new mosque, October 2015. Personal archive of the author.

Both the man with the long beard and the old woman seemed eager to talk. When I asked them why they were there, two major topics soon came up : ecumenism and freemasonry. According to them, the ROC agreed on the construction of the mosque according to the ecumenical principle of welcoming other religions. Freemasons are those who planned this ecumenist drift in order to eradicate local confessions and replace them with their credo. Freemasons seem to fit perfectly into this picture in other two ways : the plans of the new national cathedral are allegedly full of masonic symbols and the plot of land destined for the mosque is adjacent to the one where a new masonic temple will be built. The man was happy to talk about this topic but, at the same time, very cautious, since he did not want to give too much confidence to a heretic like me (for radical Or- thodox believers, every non-Orthodox person is a heretic). The old woman, instead, talked to me for one hour almost non-stop, using apocalyptic terms without ever mentioning apocalypse itself : the third world war had already started, the antichrist is all over the place and acts by means of ecumenism and freemasonry, and this happens first of all on a political ground, where sly people oameni( vicleni) operate. She also explained how she became a « true Orthodox ». Her relationship with God was one of convenience, asking for help only when needed, until she became pregnant and decided to have an abortion. Right after that traumatic experience, she felt that God was not present anymore in her life. After she realised this, she completely changed her lifestyle and became a zealot : she now goes to church every day and wears a black head covering all the time, which gives her the feeling of having God close to her though the warmth the scarf emanates. Other people joined later in the morning : a retired Orthodox priest and a tall and muscled man, dressed in an elegant shirt, who came from Constanţa – 200 km east of the capital – by car for the sole purpose of helping the activists to place more crosses. anti-mosque ritual in bucharest, romania 161 Looking at the discourses and personal life trajectories of those who initiated and joined the anti-mosque ritual one may be surprised by the transversality of Islamopho- bic behaviour. Intolerant tendencies are not necessarily fostered by the less educated 1 and most disadvantaged people – as argued for the Polish case, for instance – but re- quire a certain amount of social and economic capital for gaining consensus and resonance. The entrepreneurial profile displayed by Berenghi and the well-dressed man driving all the way from Constanţa show that multi-religious and multi-ethnic integra- tion is at times hindered by members of the middle-class and does not always have to do with competition over resources between deprived subjects.

The role of the (far) past : a revanchist reading of history Following Maurice Bloch – and distancing myself from Tambiah’s definition of ritual – I have tried to show the complementarity of functional and symbolic action in a performance composed of two different moments : defilement (of the “other” or aimed at it) and re-consecration (for or aimed at the “self ”). Desecrating the land was a gesture of defiance against a Muslim other that is fabricated assembling the epic of Romanian warlords fighting the Ottomans with modern-day conspiracy theories on the Islamisation of the old continent. Beyond the symbolic re-appropriation of the land, the anti-mosque ritual contained a sort of preventive measure : building a mosque would be the first step of a Muslim invasion and thwarting its construction would thus save the local community from the foreign, imminent danger. Against this background, one cannot ignore the role of media in maliciously linking the contemporary migration crisis with (obviously Islamic) terrorism, which has set the ground for the exacerbation of Islamophobic sentiments in a country having, ironically, an extremely small Muslim minority. Those who actively opposed the new mosque hinted at different targets : they mixed up Erdogan’s Neo-Ottoman politics, the waves of Muslim migrants entering Europe since the Syrian war, and the illiberal attitudes of “Arabs”. If this plethora of xenophobic preoccupations finds a common element in the idea that all Muslims are fundamen- talists, it is Berenghi’s (and the other activists’) distinctive understanding of Romanian history that fuels the expression of nationalist and Islamophobic sentiments. Such relationship with national history is revanchist to the extent that it equates violent Otto- man policies to the modern-day project to build a mosque, and is intolerant towards Muslims’ rights because the fact that “Romanians suffered Ottoman domination in the 2 past” is not a good reason for impeding the construction of a house of worship. Previ- ously, I have mentioned Berenghi’s strong passion for Romanian military history, that brought him, for instance, to add the 1919 occupation of Budapest by Romanian troops to the inscriptions on the triumphal arch. But when patriotism turns into revanchism, the love for one’s own country becomes a pretext for expressing intolerance against Muslim, and a consecration ritual results in desecration. Placing crosses and performing a Christian blessing according to the Romanian Or- thodox tradition (sfeştanie) stood, at first, for a symbolical re-appropriation of the Ro- manian soil. In the mind of the leading activists – Berenghi and Gornic – it carried two

1 Michal Bukowski, Class and Xenophobia in Central Europe in the Era of Refugees Crisis, communication present- ed at Visegrád Belongings : Freedoms, Responsibilities and Everyday Dilemmas, Max Planck Institute for Social Anthro- pology, 7-8 June 2018. 2 Interview of the author with Cătălin Berenghi, 22nd August 2016. 162 giuseppe tateo further meanings : first, adding an ulterior defilement ; second, by definition Christian blessing has the purpose to ward off evil forces from the place where it is performed. Therefore, I argue that it should be considered as an apotropaic ritual in the strict sense of the term, as it is meant to keep away what is undesirable. However, what is undesirable for a certain group or society is contingent. If the way activists conceive their own national history fed Islamophobia, the process according to which people tend to identify enemies along ethnic lines has several origins : the recent socialist past – as the last section of this paper holds – is one of those.

The role of the (recent) past : Ceauşescu’s nationalist drift In order to read the rationale of anti-mosque activists, I have tried to show that intolerant behaviour is fostered by the convergence of nationalist ideologies, online-spread conspiracy theories, and revanchism. While highlighting the role of online media con- 1 sumption is important for understanding why certain ideas spread more than others, how does one explain the resurgence of xenophobic attitudes instantiated by the pig burial, cross-placing activities, and anti-mosque initiatives at large ? Competition conceived in ethnic and religious terms has a centuries-long history in the region (especially in highly multi-ethnic and multi-religious Transylvania), and the ethno-national one has been the main principle of identification since the spread of movements raising national awareness in the late 18th century. The same can be told for the attempts to ethnic homogenisation inaugurated by the new-born Romanian nation-state, both after the independence from the Ottomans (1878) and the acquisition of irredenta (the so-called Greater Romania, 1918-1940). Ex- cept for a first decade inspired by universalism and class-based identification, the social- 2 ist experiment as well ended up intensifying ethnic polarization. In the 1990s, the burst of inter-ethnic clash in Yugoslavia and throughout the former Soviet Union was inter- preted as a direct consequence of the demise of socialist regimes, which till then had allegedly curbed nationalist overtones. While it is true that, ideally, class-based identification was supposed to substitute ethnicity, in reality ethnic principles never stopped to orientate people in the perception of their self and the others. This is particularly evident for Romania under Ceauşescu, where the efforts to tailor a distinctive role as international mediator resulted in an outpouring of nationalist propaganda : Among that regime’s most notable consequences for personal identity was the dichotomizing of self against other. (…) The historiographical construction of national selves dovetailed nicely, then, with the practices and experiences of socialism, which rendered as “other” (class enemies, saboteurs or traitors) those seen as responsible for social problems. (…) Socialism produced a characteristic organization of the self-characterized by an internalized opposition to external 3 “aliens” seen as “them”. In the attempt to turn upside down the theory according to which the end of communist rule coincided with the outburst of nationalist sentiments, Verdery’s looks at post-1989 xenophobic attitudes and ethnic-based competition in Eastern Europe in

1 On the role of the internet in the spreading of conspiracy theories, see Michael Vine, Matthew Carey, Mimesis and Conspiracy : Bureaucracy, New Media and the Infrastructural Forms of Doubt, « The Cambridge Journal of Anthropology », 35 (2), 2017, pp. 47-64. 2 Katherine Verdery, Nationalism and National Sentiment in Post-socialist Romania, « Slavic Review », 52 (2), 1993, pp. 179-203. 3 Ivi, pp. 196-197. anti-mosque ritual in bucharest, romania 163 the light of the reification of national identities fostered by the Communist Party for decades. In Romania, Ceauşescu’s rise to power coincided with a nationalist drift that exasperated Romanianness and reinforced ethnic dichotomization. It thus should be no surprise that Berenghi himself looked at Ceauşescu with nostalgic eyes – a detail I could grasp from our conversations – appreciating his autarchic policies and, implicitly, the nationalist ideological bedrock on which those policies lied.

Conclusion In this paper, I analysed a specific ritual of defilement and re-consecration, showing its literally apotropaic function (as it is about warding off and keeping at distance) and a certain paradoxical usage of the cross as means of desecration. Most of all, the anti-mosque ritual is about the social importance of identifying aliens and marking the boundaries dividing « us » from « them », a topic social anthropologists have been 1 looking at with constant interest. However, the category of the « other » is historically contingent, and while Muslims during socialist times never became an enemy to oppose, they ended up in recent years assuming the role of the alien invading Ro- mania for the second time, after an oppression three-centuries long. This episode of mild – but worrying – religious and ethnic intolerance serves as an instance of how the victimization of one’s own historical past is deeply connected to the nationalist ideology promoted under Ceauşescu : both, together with a number of more recent elements – from the post Syrian conflict migratory crisis to the spread of online conspiracy theories – contribute to explain the activists’ Islamophobic expressions discussed here. The government resolution n° 372 that granted – for a period of three years – the piece of land to the Mufti in May 2015 has now expired. In order to start the project again, a new government resolution would be required and a whole new legislative process should be launched. Therefore, it seems that no mosque will be built in Bu- charest in the near future. Mufti Yusuf Murat explained the failure with financial reasons : the issue was not discussed anymore with the Diyanet and, without the help of 2 the Turkish government, the funds at his disposal would be insufficient. Other com- mentators linked the failure of the project to the internal conflicts within the Turkish community in Romania, mentioning the opposition of associations like Tuna Founda- 3 tion – which is believed to be close to Fetullah Gülen – to a project which was direct 4 expression of the Erdoğan government. Neither the Mufti nor an informant of mine who is a member of the SSRA gave any relevance to the protests (and the spoiling ritual) performed against the project and considered them not influential. On the other hand, the resonance of the anti-mosque movement worried the Turkish embassy in Bucharest. In fact, ambassador Osman Ko-

1 See for instance Frederik Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries : The Social Organization of Culture Difference, London, Allen and Unwin, 1969 ; Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger : An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966 ; Mary Douglas, Natural Symbols, New York, Vintage, 1970. 2 Mihnea-Petru Pârvu, mega-moschee de la Bucureşti nu se mai face. Musulmanii n-au bani să o construiască, « Evenimentul Zilei », 12 July 2018, available online at : https ://evz.ro/mega-moschee-de-la-bucuresti-nu-se-mai- face-musulmanii-n-au-bani.html, accessed on 10.09.2019. 3 Irina Vainovski-Mihai 2013, pp. 536-537. 4 Radu Cupcea, Moscheea din Bucureşti : despre cum va arăta cu adevărat, « Adevărul », 14 June 2017, accessible online at : https ://adevarul.ro/news/eveniment/moscheea-bucuresti-despre-arata-adevarat-1_5940f3b95ab6550- cb8211eeb/index.html, accessed on 12.09.2019. 164 giuseppe tateo ray Ertaș said in 2017 that « Turkey does not have the obsession to build a mosque in Bucharest (…) If we see that this project (…) sparks anti-Turkish and Islamophobic sen- 1 timents in society, we stop and make some steps backwards ». Eventually, the Turkish government indeed stepped backwards, but it is hard to say to what extent the protests and the ritual played an influential role in the failure of the mosque project.

1 Socoteala Turciei pentru marea moschee de la București, « Cotidianul », 14 July 2017, available at : https ://www.cotidianul.ro/socoteala-turciei-pentru-marea-moschee-de-la-bucuresti/, accessed on 10.09.2019. composto in carattere serra dante dalla fabrizio serra editore, pisa · roma. stampato e rilegato nella tipografia di agnano, agnano pisano (pisa). * Dicembre 2020

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