Deadline: July 10, 2025
The Black Sea as a Literary and Cultural Space (3)
Ruins (Ancient and Modern) and Mobilities
20-22 November 2025
Ovidius University of Constanţa (Romania)
Co-organisers:
- Faculty of Letters, Ovidius University of Constanta
- Institute of Comparative Literature at Ilia State University (Tbilisi, Georgia)
- CIELAM (Centre Interdisciplinaire d’Étude des Littératures d’Aix-Marseille) of Aix-Marseille University (France)
- Sextil Puşcariu Institute of Romanian Academy (Cluj-Napoca)
- Institute for Literature at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (Sofia)
- Association “Transpontica” (Sofia)
- Department of Romance Studies at Sofia University
With the support of the Agence Universitaire de la Francophonie
Argument
Ruins are inseparable from habitats from (types of) experiencing a territory (and aquatory). Ruins mark the outer edges and midpoints of habitats brought about by rivers, wells, ponds, limans, peninsulas and coastal mountain ranges (on the one hand) and a wilderness beyond, on land and at sea alike (on the other hand). May they anchor discourses that are neither elegiac nor apocalyptic but re-domesticating? Or re-domestication takes place as a tacit (extra-literary) activity only? Where is the boundary between re-domestication and oblivion?
Ovidiac self-extolment (cf. McGowan 2009: 86, 166) at a conceived endpoint (cf. Knox, ed., 2009: 179, 459-461; “A deep poetic tradition linked the Black Sea passages to the world beyond and the ultimate limit traced by Okeanos.” (Gagné 2021: 243)), Ecclesiast-like aloofness from any point (as implied by the exo-pictogramme of the region as a Scythian bow, cf. Dan 2013), and Mithridatic migration/oscillation between relatively modest mid-points (“Regal authority was not focused in one place but distributed between a number of royal residences […]”, Mitchel 2002: 59) seem to be three powerful cultural archetypes in the area.
The archetype of self-extolment at a threshold has been replayed in numerous literary works, some or even many of which mirrored, that is, repeated-on-the-reverse, the becoming of the Ovidiac habitus: writers from the ‘barbaric’ hinterland came up to the enormous ‘window’/‘door’ of the seashore. Aloofness seems to have been recalled very rarely; landmark pieces of Bulgarian modernist and of Georgian postmodernist literature, On the Isle of the Blessed by Pencho Slaveikov and Santa Esperansa by Aka Morchiladze, which already started receiving attention from Anglophone scholarship, seem to revive it. May we pay more attention to the third one?
Seasonal movements between a(n inland) city, a maritime resort, a mountain or recreational inland resort, and a hinterland village linking to ancestors and to a plot for agricultural activity (half-leisure, half-out-of-economic-necessity) may be considered a late twentieth-century variant of the mentioned ‘Mithridatic’ oscillation. Despite that their internal logic seems to be the change of type of (micro)habitat (along two axes: urbanised – rural, and mountain – plain – sea), and not the monitoring of, or re-asserting a sovereignty over, a territory or macro-habitat. They characterised the life of many anonymous citizens of countries under accelerated modernisation like Bulgaria, Romania and Soviet Georgia, but also of famous writers – like Andrei Belyi of his late years, for example (see Magarotto 1985: 388-391; Frison 2021).
May ruins have been a focal point for individuals from both groups (destined-to-remain-anonymous and destined-to-become-famous, ‘consumers’ and ‘(re)creators’) beyond sightseeing and beyond individual(ist) mythologies of artists? May we go beyond the seemingly improvised pairing of royal mobility in the Kingdom of Pontos with the elites and non-elites of the late modern period? Is transhumance (seasonal movement of pastoralists with their livestock) the only form of mobility observed in the region that can serve as both the ‘starting point’ and the ‘end point’ of the proposed typology?
To begin with, the travels of famous writers were closer to the royal archetype than to those of the “ordinary people” of the late modern period. The aforementioned Belyi, when outside his particularly Russian places of residence, can be seen, in retrospect, as visiting the territories of his symbolical conquests or domains as a writer, meeting local writers (apparently or indeed) emulating his style and praising his works. A recent research on symbolic and physical displacement (Finnin 2022) has demonstrated the power of artistic literature to de-domesticate and re-domesticate, claim and re-claim ruins and especially ‘ruins-in-the-making’ – desolate sites not necessarily to be demolished but be un-inhabited through turning them to museums. It is noteworthy that (re)claiming might come from a third party, neither from the displacing nor from the displaced one, yet on the behalf of the latter. May we move beyond the Crimean case (with its focal point, the Fountain of Tears in Bakhchysarai) and discern other dramas of (un-, re-)domestication of ruins, actual potential or renovated, in the region?
A less dramatic option displays the old citadel of Sinope, the dungeon of which developed into a permanent prison proper over the centuries. Intramuros but outside the prison, it was temporarily complemented by a hotel (demolished to open a public space by the sea) and later evacuated for good to enter a long process of restoration with the intention of being transformed into a touristic site (Özveren 2022). In the summer of 2024, before the place was officially inaugurated, it hosted the “International Ancient Sinop Symposium: The World of Mithridates the Great” for archaeologists and ancient historians, accompanied by an exhibition titled “Mithridates through the ages”. The participants were the first to use it while it was still smelling fresh paint and given a tour of the facility (private communication). Maybe here we should question ourselves what turns a building into a ruin – visible dilapidation and disintegration or a change of function that neither hides the previous function nor admits/recognises/respects it.
To relink the subtopics of ruins and types of experiencing a territory: may it be that the third type implies an attitude to ruins that is less pathetic than the first type and more engaged than the second type?
The general objective of the conference “The Black Sea as a Literary and Cultural Space (3): Ruins (Ancient and Modern) and Mobilities” is to bring together the issue of remnants (ruins) with that of the different types of experiences of a territory through bodily, symbolic, and imaginary mobilities.
Against this context, we suggest focussing on one particular kind of the third type of mobility charted above (oscillation between relatively modest mid-points) – namely, tourism (and, even more particularly, seaside tourism).
While there is a whole bibliography on the subject of ruins, exploring its literary, aesthetic, historical or archaeological valences, what has been lacking until now is a systematic reflection on ruins in leisure contexts: an applied discussion on the ways in which historical leisure practices have produced ruin and on the way in which existing ruins are exploited in the organisation of holidays.
The specific aim of the conference is to bring together the issue of ruins and that of beaches in an approach that seeks, in a complementary way, a specific understanding of the Black Sea as a space of tourism that has (or could have) the ruin as a (secondary) object: a tourism that is not just about entertainment and rest. The ancient form of nomadism, specific to these places (multiple, mixed, superimposed populations throughout history), has been replaced in modern times, once holidays have been democratised, by a different kind of nomadism, justified by leisure. The populations that had settled in these territories since Antiquity had built up a material and cultural world, which modern ‘nomads’ consume as relics. If you don’t go to the Black Sea to see the ruins it has to offer, you discover them once you are there, and you are obliged to define a way of relating to them. These are ruins on the beach, underwater ruins, sunken or architecturally ‘commoditised’ ancient cities (Histria, Tomis, Callatis, Dioscurias, Apollonia/Sozopolis, Messembria); islands that have disappeared (Ada-Kaleh), are mysterious (Insula Șerpilor [Snake Island]/St Achilles/Leuke) or claim holy relics (as the one of St. Ivan since 2010); shipwrecks, ghost ships (in 2017, a major archaeological project, the Black Sea Maritime Archaeology Project expedition, discovered, at a depth of 1,800 metres, a spectacular cemetery of some sixty shipwrecks dating from Byzantine and Ottoman times).
The tourism of ruins is a kind of adjacent tourism, one that includes the ruin in an already existing holiday programme of beaches and baths, diving and museums. The paradox of ruins, which are always deserted and on which there are never any living or dead people, is that “the relationship to which their poverty and superbness condemn us is that of a definitive exteriority” (Scott, 2019: 21). In this case, we look at them as landscapes, in a ‘landscape’ framework, because it is effectively an absorption into the landscape that they had undergone, and thus a return of culture to nature (Simmel, 1958).
But this ‘ruin’ marine tourism also – and always – has a political dimension. It is also a tourism of memory, because in these cases there is a desire to remember that coexists with the forces of forgetting. The political dimension of ruins lies precisely in this tension between remembering and forgetting (Ricoeur, 2000). If, at least since the medieval Renaissances, there has been a category of people who, when confronted with ruins, adopt an attitude of pure desire to know (Momigliano, 1983), and if the patrimonialisation of classical ruins may today give the impression of a depoliticisedness of this attitude, there is another type of ruin whose visit/contemplation cannot dispense with the affirmation of a political identity or opposition to another. It is the ruins that memorialise the horrors of war and political regimes: those that become monuments to misfortune. Apart from Turkey, all the other countries bordering the Black Sea – Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria, Georgia, Moldavia, Russia– have experienced totalitarian regimes. While these regimes did not operate entirely according to a “law of ruins” (like the utopian project that Albert Speer proposed to Hitler, when he drew up the architectural plans for Berlin with monuments destined to become ruins for thousands of years (see Stead 2003: 51)), there are large architectural structures of the same type in all these countries, all of which have now been abandoned. Such are camps for teenagers and children, above all (in Romania: Năvodari, 2 Mai, Costinești), but also hotel and restaurant networks, reflecting in a unique way the holiday programme of the time. There is an ‘administration’ that manages these ruins in all these countries, and manages them as a political object too (it can decide to conserve/restore them or destroy them); but there is also an imagination that invests them as such (because, as Ricoeur said, memory needs imagination to form remembrance).
The shores of the Black Sea present a complex picture, superimposing the most diverse ruins: ancient ruins, medieval ruins, war ruins, communist ruins, industrial ruins and contemporary ruins. To speak in this case of “regimes of ruins”, linked to the same place, would allow us to problematise this object in a complex way, and to give it new meanings through its connection with leisure practices.
Our call is equally open to literary scholars, historians, art historians, sociologists, linguists, cultural anthropologists, human geographers and archaeologists. A discussion that involves pictorial representations/photographic archives would be warmly encouraged.
Proposed axes of inquiry:
– contemporary ruins (buildings abandoned before completion)
– industrial ruins (ports and other)
– communist ruins (children’s and teenagers’ camps)
– medieval ruins
– ancient ruins (roads, theatres, tombs, remains)
– interwar ruins (casinos, villas, specific entertainment industry)
– underwater ruins (shipwrecks, ghost ships, sunken cities, vanished islands)
– invisible groins (we know they exist, they are documented, but they are not visible)
Cross-cutting issues:
– The problem of exile (self-exile in its Ovidian “founding” model): how does it contribute to the contemporary configuration of a ruin?
– The problem of self-estrangement from a territory for the sake of constructing its generalised image: how have such stance and pursuit affected manmade landmarks along the Black Sea coasts and their near hinterlands?
– How has seasonal migration shaped perception and handling of manmade landmarks, their ruinisation and their renovation?
– What does it mean to inhabit the ruins of the Black Sea?
– How do ruins intersect with different types of discourse?
– How do different types of experience of a territory (and of a maritime territory) engage with ruins?
References and preliminary bibliography:
Athane Adrahane, Des lucioles et des ruines. Quatre récits pour un réveil écologique (Paris : Le Pommier/ Humensis, 2024).
Albrecht Burkardt, Jérôme Grévy (dir.), Ruines politiques (Rennes : Presses universitaires de Rennes, 2024), https://books.openedition.org/pur/194258?lang=fr.
Anca Dan, “The Black Sea as a Scythian bow”, in Exploring the Hospitable Sea: Proceedings of the International Workshop on the Black Sea in Antiquity held in Thessaloniki, 21–23 September 2012, ed. by Manolis Manoledakis (Oxford: Archaeopress, 2013), pp. 39-58.
Rorry Finnin, Stalin’s Crimean Atrocity and the Poetics of Solidarity (Toronto–Buffalo–London: University of Toronto Press, 2022).
Anita Frison, “Depicting the Landscape. Andrej Belyj’s A Wind from the Caucasus and Armenia”, Studi Slavistici, vol. 16 (2019), no. 2, pp. 55-75.
László Földényi, Les espaces de la mort vivante. Kafka, De Chirico et les autres, traduit du hongrois par Natalia Zaremba-Huzsvai et Charles Zarumba (Belval : Circé, 2023).
Renaud Gagné, Cosmography and the idea of Hyperborea in Ancient Greece: a philology of worlds (Cambridge: Cambridge UP).
Peter E. Knox, ed., A Companion to Ovid (Chichester: Blackwell, 2009).
Luigi Magarotto, “Andrey Bely in Georgia: Seven Letters from A. Bely to T. Tabidze” The Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 63 (1985), no. 3, pp. 388-416.
William Marx, Poétique des ruines, épisode 5/10, 23 decembrie 2023, https://www.radiofrance.fr/franceculture/podcasts/les-cours-du-college-de-france/poetique-des-ruines-6752044.
Matthew McGowan, Ovid in Exile: Power and Poetic Redress in the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto (Leiden–Boston: Brill, 2009).
Stephen Mitchel, “In search of the Pontic community in antiquity”, in Representations of empire: Rome and the Mediterranean world, ed. by Alan K. Bowman, Hannah M. Cotton, Martin Goodman & Simon Price (Oxford; New York: Oxford UP; British Academy), 2002, pp. 35-64.
Arnaldo Momigliano, « L’histoire ancienne et l’Antiquaire », in id., Problèmes d’historiographie ancienne et moderne (Paris, Gallimard : 1983), p. 244-293.
Eyüp Özveren, “Unearthing the native town of Diogenes in Nazlı Eray’s fiction: Sinop as gateway of a different kind to the Black Sea world?”, Transponticae, vol. 1 (2022)[, no. 4], pp. 507-576.
Harsha Ram, “Andrej Belyj and Georgia: Georgian Modernism and the ‘Peripheral’ Reception of the Petersburg Text”, Russian Literature, vol. 58 (2005), pp. 243-276.
Paul Ricoeur, La mémoire, l’histoire, l’oubli, Paris, Seuil, 2000.
Georg Simmel, « The Ruin », in The Hudson Review, vol. 11 (1958), no. 3 (Autumn), pp. 371-385, https://www.lma.lv/uploads/news/3653/files/simmel-the-ruin.pdf.
Diane Scott, Ruine. Invention d’un objet critique, Paris, Les Prairies Ordinaires, 2019.
Naomi Stead, “The Value of Ruins: Allegories of Destruction in Benjamin and Speer”, Form/Work: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the Built Environment, no. 6 (October 2003), pp. 51-64.
Proposal Submission Guidelines:
Prospective speakers are invited to submit proposals addressing the conference concept (see below) in English or French. Each speaker will be assigned 20 minutes, and extra 10 minutes for discussion.
Paper proposals should be approximately 2500 characters long and should be accompanied by a list of 5 to 7 selected references relevant to the content of the proposal.
Paper proposals in French have to be sent to lamernoire25@gmail.comand as open copy (cc) to: monicavlad@yahoo.fr and ligia.tudurachi@gmail.com
Paper proposals in English have to be sent to lamernoire25@gmail.comand as open copy (cc) to: alina.p.buzatu@gmail.com, yljuckanov@ilit.bas.bg and bela_tsipuria@iliauni.edu.ge
Calendar:
Deadline for paper proposals: 10 July 2025
Notification of acceptance/non-acceptance: 1 September 2025