Historian Cristina Florea wants people to learn about Bukovina – in fact, she just published a book about this region in eastern Europe. But she does not advise trying to find it on a map. 

“If you try to go there, you won’t find it – at least not as a political or administrative entity,” said Florea, assistant professor of history in the College of Arts and Sciences. However, “mention the name ‘Bukovina’ to a Romanian or a Ukrainian and you will almost always get a sigh and a smile.” 

Now divided between Romania and Ukraine, the region is often associated with natural beauty and a rich, haunting past, Florea said, giving it a fairy-tale quality. But Bukovina never fit easily among its neighbors, as regimes including the Habsburg Empire, Romania (both independent and later Nazi-allied) and the Soviet Union tried to remake the region, one after the other.

In “Bukovina: The Life and Death of an East European Borderland,” Florea tells a 200-year history of a region shaped by the conflicting pulls of imperial legacies and national ambition. Here, modern states developed, competed and imitated one another, she said, “building new worlds out of inherited materials.”

Today, Bukovina is once again at the center of geopolitical realignment, Florea said: “It is home to refugees fleeing eastern Ukraine and shaped by the afterlife of yet another empire: the Soviet Union. The story I tell in this book, as it has become painfully clear, has not ended.:

The College of Arts and Sciences spoke with Florea about the book.

Question: Can you provide an overview of Bukovina’s history?

A: Bukovina existed as a distinct region only between the late 18th century, when the Habsburg Empire annexed it following a Russo-Turkish war, and World War II, when it was divided between Romania and Soviet Ukraine. What was once Bukovina now straddles the border between Romania and Ukraine, which also marks the boundary between the European Union and non-EU Europe.

Readers of German literature may know Bukovina as the birthplace of Paul Celan, now widely regarded as the greatest German-language poet of the 20th century, who was born in multilingual Czernowitz (interwar Romania’s Cernăuți). Others may have encountered the region through the writings of Gregor von Rezzori, whose “Snows of Yesteryear” and “Memoirs of an Anti-Semite” offer a magnificent introduction to Bukovina’s multicultural world.

Outside Romania and Ukraine, Bukovina is perhaps best known in Jewish circles. It was once home to a large Jewish population (some Yiddish-speaking, others German-speaking) who lived through the Holocaust and whose descendants are now scattered across the globe. They have produced a large body of memoirs documenting life in the region during the interwar years and World War II, when Bukovina came under Soviet occupation. Bukovina was later reclaimed by Romania and subjected to an intense campaign of Romanianization that included the destruction and deportation of its Jewish population.

Q: Were the repeated regime changes different for urban residents, particularly in Czernowitz, as in the rural areas? 

A: The book revolves in many ways around the tension between urban and rural Bukovina. I initially envisioned it as an urban history of Czernowitz, which remains its gravitational center. But archival research made clear that the city’s story could not be told without the countryside. States often struggled to penetrate rural areas. Many conflicts later cast as ethnic were deeply entangled with the fraught relationship between city and village. Antisemitism, too, was shaped by this dynamic. Yet there was no monolithic city or countryside. Both changed over time, and life in each looked very different under different regimes.

Q: What do you find so compelling about Bukovina and its history? 

A: What never ceases to amaze me about Bukovina is how much history is packed into such a short span of time. This was a place where one might be born under one regime, grow up under another, come of age under a third and die as a citizen of a completely different state. Within a single lifetime, people experienced multiple forms of government and were subjected to successive cultural and political projects.

Over time, Bukovina came to resemble a kind of Europe in miniature. I mean this not in the celebratory sense often invoked after the 1990s, when Bukovina was described as a paragon of interethnic harmony, but because it experienced, in compressed form, all the central processes that shaped modern European history. Enlightenment-era imperial projects, liberalism and its limits, competing nationalisms, two world wars, occupations and liberations, postwar reconstruction and the dilemmas of governing diversity all unfold here almost as if we were watching Europe’s history on fast-forward.

Kate Blackwood is a writer for the College of Arts and Sciences.