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The Dobrudjan Question: Constitutional Nationalism and the Assimilation of a Border Region, 1878–1914

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The Dobrudjan Question: Constitutional Nationalism and the Assimilation of a Border Region, 1878–1914 Chapter 11 The Dobrudjan Question: Constitutional Nationalism and the Assimilation of a Border Region, 1878–1914 Another major legal category excluded from full citizenship rights in Romania were the inhabitants of Northern and Southern Dobrudja. Their status was closely linked to the Ottoman imperial legacy in the Balkans and the interven- tion of the Great Powers. The province was occupied by the Ottoman Empire in the fifteenth century and was then subject to intense military colonization by Turks and Tatars from South Crimea and Asia Minor, which transformed it into an Islamic area. During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Dobrudja was demographically linked with larger surrounding territories, attracting Romanian peasants from the Wallachian plains, Bulgarian peasants from the Balkan Mountains and southern Bessarabia, Cossacks from the Dnieper Delta, Lipovans from central Russia, and German colonists from southern Russia. Consequently, the province acquired a highly complex ethnic composition: the Danube Delta was populated by Slavic fishermen; the cities were largely inhabited by Italian, Jewish, Greek and Armenian merchants; the north was dominated by Bulgarians; the center and south by Turks and Tatars; and the right bank of the Danube was inhabited by Romanians. Military events further increased this ethnic diversity. Due to its strategic importance, Dobrudja served as a constant battlefield during the recurrent Russo-Turkish wars (1768–1878). These conflagrations triggered great fluctua- tions in the province’s population: reduced to 40,000 inhabitants as a conse- quence of the devastating 1828–1829 war, it rose to 100,000 by 1850.1 After the Crimean War (1853–1856), the province was populated with over 100,000 Tatars from Crimea, along with Circassians from Kuban and the Caucasus who fled persecution from the Russian authorities. They sought refuge in Dobrudja, where they were assigned military tasks and acted as a privileged Ottoman legal category of border warriors. Conversely, the 1877–1878 war led to a con- siderable Muslim emigration from the province, estimated at around 90,000 people.2 The figures regarding the Muslim population thus differ substantially: 1 Halil Inalcik, “Dobrudja,” The Encyclopedia of Islam, ed. B. Lewis, Ch. Pellat, J. Schacht (Leiden: Brill, 1991), vol. 2, 613. 2 Inalcik, “Dobrudja,” The Encyclopedia of Islam, vol. 2, 613. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004401112_013 458 Chapter 11 the highest estimate for the Dobrudjan population in 1879 included 134,662 Muslims and 87,900 Christians, while conservative estimates were as low as 56,000 Muslims and 54,726 Christians.3 According to official Romanian sources, in 1879 the three main ethnic groups in the province were Turks and Tatars, amounting to 32,033 persons; Romanians, totaling 31,177; and Bulgarians, num- bering 28,715, out of a total population of 106,943.4 After 1878, Dobrudja transitioned abruptly from its multicultural imperial heritage to the homogenizing order of the nation-state. By a decision of the July 1878 Treaty of Berlin, this former Ottoman province was divided between Romania, which acquired the larger Northern Dobrudja (15,536 km2, alterna- tively named Old Dobrudja), and Bulgaria, which incorporated the smaller Southern Dobrudja (7,609 km2, alternatively named New Dobrudja or the Quadrilateral) (see Map 3). In the ensuing period, Dobrudja became the object of an acute Romanian-Bulgarian territorial conflict: both states engaged in as- siduous and competing processes of national expansion and border-making in the province. At the same time, both countries aimed to unify Dobrudja under their rule. This territorial conflict generated a ‘Dobrudjan Question’ (Dobrudzhanski văpros in Bulgarian, Chestiunea dobrogeană in Romanian), which, mutatis mutandis, was not dissimilar to the question of Alsace and Lorraine in French-German relations.5 The 1878 annexation of Northern Dobrudja challenged Romania’s estab- lished regime of constitutional nationalism in several respects. First, it gen- erated a new category of citizens by annexation. Neither the country’s own legislation nor emerging international law provided specific provisions or 3 Abdolonyme Ubicini, “La Dobroudja et le Delta du Danube,” Revue géographique (1879): 246; A. Lorenz, “Diefenbach,” Völkerkunde Osteuropas (Darmstadt, 1880) 1: 18, cited in Dobrogea, cincizeci de ani de viață românească (Bucharest: Cultura națională, 1928), 224–225. 4 Statistica din România (Bucharest: 1879), 3. 5 On the geopolitical construction of the ‘Dobrudjan Question’ as a derivate of the larger Eastern Question, see Constantin Iordachi, “Diplomacy and the Making of a Geopolitical Question: The Romanian-Bulgarian Conflict over Dobrudja, 1878–1947,” in Roumen Daskalov, Diana Mishkova, Tchavdar Marinov, and Alexander Vezenkov, eds., Entangled Histories of the Balkans, vol. 4: Concepts, Approaches, and (Self-) Representations (Leiden: Brill, 2017), 291–393. On the link between the Eastern Question and territorial issues in the Balkans, see Edmund Hornby, The Eastern Question: A Scheme for the Future Government of Bulgaria (London: Eastern Question Association, 1878); Vladimir Yovanovitch, The Serbian Nation and the Eastern Question (London: Bell and Daldy, 1863); and Robert Machray, The Eastern Question Revived: Bulgar Claims on Rumania (London: G. Allen & Unwin, 1939). On Dobrudja as the “Alsace and Lorraine of the Balkans,” see Joseph V. Poppov, La Dobroudja et les relations bulgaro-roumaines (Liège: Impr. Georges Thone, 1935)..
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