Category: Activities

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27-29 January 2026

Silvia Marton, PI, presented the paper “Voting and Electoral Fraud in Nineteenth Century Romania. A Contribution to the History of Corruption” at the international conference “Electoral Fraud and Political Distrust: Entanglements and New Perspectives of Study in Modern Europe (c. 1750 – c. 1950),” organized at the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona on 28-29 January 2026. Her paper discussed the role of trust and distrust in electoral politics during the pre-democratic period of limited suffrage in Romania. Specifically, she examined the techniques for directing and influencing the vote, and the social dimension of voting in the electoral colleges. The paper’s main questions were: Was trust a variable to understand the electoral process? Why did certain electors vote constantly for the same candidates and were loyal to a specific party/faction’s candidates, while others voted ‘the government’, whoever that was out of the two political groups, the Liberals or the Conservatives? How to understand the volatile voters’ behavior? Her paper showed that the numerous mechanisms of vote control and influence denoted lack of trust, mainly of the candidates in the voters.

« Activities « TransCorr International Conferences « International Conference June 2026

Call for Papers

International Conference
New Europe College – Institute for Advanced Study
Bucharest, 15-16 June 2026

The Phanariots have long animated the historiography of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century Southeast Europe. These Grecophone, Orthodox Christians with ties to Istanbul’s Phanar district serviced the Ottoman state, occupying positions from princes of Wallachia, Moldavia, and Samos to the Grand Dragoman of the Sublime Porte. Phanariots worked in the tsarist administration as diplomats, state counselors, and military officers. They created thick webs of trade and credit that bound together economic interests across the Ottoman and Russian empires and connected them to commercial networks throughout the European continent. The outbreak of the Greek War of Independence in 1821 altered many of these configurations. The Porte ousted the Phanariots from positions of power and closed institutions associated with them. The conflict, and eventually Greek independence, followed later in the century by the creation of nation-states across the Balkans, reshaped patterns of trade and diplomacy in which the Phanariots had heretofore played a significant role.

These events brought an era of Phanariot prominence across Ottoman Southeast Europe to a close. They did not, however, erase the idea of the Phanariot from political debates in the region. Indeed, contemporary political commentators, as well as historians seeking to construct national(ist) narratives, branded the Phanariots with critiques of corruption, foreign interests, and the legacies of the Ottoman past. In the Principalities these rhetorical moves became associated with the notion of “Phanariotism,” in an independent Greece they often manifested as condemnations of heterochtones — or elites born outside the confines of the new state.

Since the start of the twentieth century, some scholars have worked to rehabilitate the Phanariots. Historians and literary specialists from Constantin Dimaras to Pompiliu Eliade have cast the Phanariots as conduits of modernity across Southeast Europe, rather than as sources of political and economic corruption. More recently, researchers have attempted to rethink what (and who) the Phanariots were. Christine Philliou, for example, stresses that no separate Phanariot dossier exists in the Ottoman archives. Romanian historians, including Bogdan Murgescu and Andrei Pippidi emphasize the fallibility of the long-standing distinction drawn between “Phanariots” and “native” boyars in the Danubian lands. They also note that the term “Phanariot” had little, if any, currency in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth-century. Their work suggests that the Phanariot “caste,” as well-defined social, economic, cultural, and political group apart from other regional notables, was a later invention. Yet, scholars have conducted scant research on how and why “Phanariots” and “Phanariotism” came to signify corruption, bad governance, and a seemingly inescapable Ottoman past after 1821.

This workshop tends to this gap in historiography. Through studies grounded in both conceptual history as well as social and political history, participants are invited to explore how diverse historical actors linked the concept of the Phanariots/Phanariotism to notions of individual and systemic “corruption” as well as forms of retrograde governance. The speakers are invited to investigate which historical actors mobilized the specter of the Phanariot from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century and why they did so, by locating these articulations in the regional rise of nation-states, processes of political democratization, and economic modernization. The workshop’s overall aim is to historicize and contextualize these concepts, tropes, and discursive practices associated with the Phanariots and “Phanariotism.”

This collective study of the Phanariot legacy, as both politicised cultural practice and scholarly conundrum, has relevance across the region’s national borders. To varying degrees, Phanariot rule and post-Phanariot memory constitute part of the histories of Wallachia, Moldavia (including Bukovina and Bessarabia), Bulgaria, Albania, North Macedonia, Serbia, Turkey, and Greece. At present, however, research integrating these disparate historiographies, transnational in method, concepts and substance, is still very much needed.

The workshop invites contributions on the following and related themes:

1. The Phanariots and their era. What and who were the Phanariots? What was their understanding of bad governance, administration, or institutional-political design? Conversely, what notions of good governance and reform did the Phanariots promote as individuals or a group? How did they mobilize and construct their trans-imperial political and cultural connections, networks?

2. Transition: 1821 and its aftermath. How were the events of 1821 perceived in relation to (and by) the Phanariots? What effect did 1821, the Greek War of Independence, and Greek statehood have on Phanariotes as elites in the region, and how patterns differ between imperial contexts and emerging national ones? What actors remained in positions of power or prominence, how, and where? What strategies of identity reinvention did they use? Who took up positions once occupied by Phanariots and what new posts came into existence? How and why did a cleavage between a Phanariot past and a post-Phanariote present first appear and how did actors politicised it?

3. The afterlives of the Phanariots: national(ist) narratives, political polemics. How, by whom, and why was “Phanariotism” coined as a pejorative “-ism”? How did an “ancien régime,” allegedly characterized by multiple forms of “corruption” become synonymous with the Phanariots? What kind of legal-institutional, ethical, individual, or systemic discursive variations can we identify in denunciations of “Phanariotism” and the Phanariot past? How, when and where the “Phanariotes” themselves became floating signifier with xenophobic considerations? How and why did actors deploy these concepts in a populist register in an era before the rise of mass politics? And how did these rhetorical strategies evolve into the twentieth century?

To submit your paper proposal, please provide a title, an abstract of 250-300 words, and a brief biographical statement, to be sent to Gențiana Avrigeanu, [email protected] . The deadline for submissions is February 15, 2026. The final decision on the received proposals will be announced by early March 2026. For any inquiries, please contact Silvia Marton, PI, [email protected]

We ask that participants plan on pre-circulating their papers by June 1st, 2026.

We anticipate publishing selected papers in an edited volume.

The organizers will reimburse travel costs and provide accommodation.

The organizing committee consists of Constantin Ardeleanu, Gențiana Avrigeanu, Silvia Marton, Andrei-Dan Sorescu, and Alex R. Tipei.

This workshop is part of the research agenda of “Transnational histories of ‘corruption’ in Central-South-East Europe (1750-1850)”, funded by the European Union (ERC, TransCorr, ERC-2022-ADG no. 101098095) and hosted by the New Europe College – Institute for Advanced Study in Bucharest.

Download the Call as PDF.

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« Activities « Strategic Meetings

All team members except for Andrei Sorescu who was travelling to Romania were present either physically or online. Gábor Egry, Head of the Research Department and Senior Research Fellow at Institute of Political History in Budapest, was also present.

Silvia Marton led the meeting and began by announcing that two more events were proposed to be introduced in the TransCorr agenda for 2026.

The Workshop on July 2^nd, 2026 to take place at NEC, Bucharest will focus on the status of the volume Old Practices, New Interactions? Favoritism, Interests, Patronage in Central-South-East Europe (1750-1850), Silvia Marton and Constantin Ardeleanu (eds.).

The June 7-8, 2027 international conference will allow for the final peer review of the chapters. Besides team members, 2-3 contributors will also be invited. By then, all its chapters will be finalized.

In parallel, the work on Phanariots will focus on the Romanian principalities. An intermediate working group on principalities will be organized within the larger group on the phanariotism.

The volume on the phanariotism – The Phanariot Past and its Multiple Afterlives: Historicizing “Corruption” in Central-South-East Europe (1750s-1920s), Silvia Marton, Andrei Sorescu and Alex Tipei (eds.) – will be the third one produced by the TransCorr team and will be finalized by mid-2027.

It will be presented at the International Workshop organized by the team at NEC Conference Hall, during June 15-16, 2026.Contributors and guests will be soon invited, the organization work is in progress. The deadline for submitting the abstracts is set for Feb. 15, 2026.

« Activities « Conference Papers

Convened by Silvia Marton and Andrei Sorescu, and chaired by Silvia Marton, the panel ”Reframing the Phanariot Past, Historicizing ‘Corruption’ in the Danubian Principalities / Romania (1750s-1900s)” was part of the 2025 ICCEES XI World Congress held at University College London from July 21 to July 25, 2025. Team members Constanța Vintilă, Mária Pakucs, Alex Tipei and Andrei Sorescu presented papers, and Constantin Ardeleanu was the discussant. The session explored the historical semantics and the social history of the concept “phanariotism” as a basic historical and disruptive concept that was crucial for conceptualizing political life, state, and society in the Danubian Principalities/ Romania from the eighteenth century and into the 1900s. Panelists offered both synchronic and diachronic analyses in order to explore the evolving meanings of the term. This covered a period beginning with the waning years of the so-called “Phanariot” rule, by the Istanbul-appointed elites in Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, as client states of the Ottoman Empire. The panel also studied the discursive afterlife of “Phanariot” as a term of abuse, with its evolving range of meanings and applications after the demise of the Phanariot regime itself and the return of autochthonous rulers (in 1821), within the framework of post-imperial nation-and state-building.

TransCorr team member Oana Sorescu-Iudean presented the paper entitled “Subtle and entrenched ways”: Networks of public debt and private credit in Transylvania, 1750-1800 at the first edition of the Central European History Convention in Vienna, organized by the University of Vienna between the 17^th and the 19^th of July, 2025.

The paper surveyed the intertwined networks of public debt and private credit in Transylvania, focusing on those nodes who readily provided capital in both segments, their affiliations, ties to the plurality of administrations present in the province, and what “benefits” they might have derived from reaching central positions in the network.

The paper began its enquiry by discussing a highly problematic situation that was first noted around mid-eighteenth century in Transylvania, namely the staggering amount of public debt that had accumulated towards the Habsburg state in Transylvanian Saxon villages, cities, and Seats. By the time Joseph II first visited the province in 1773, voices from the Habsburg administration would identify the cause of this ever-growing indebtedness in “self-interested office-holding” (eigennützige Amtirung der Officianten). Complaints during the 1770s mentioned the Saxon estate’s “subtle ways of […] making individuals indebted to itself, a procedure that seemed to have been entrenched a long time ago.” In fact, financing a significant share of the public debts incurred by the nation was the capital advanced by none other than its political and economic elites, leading to a paradoxical situation. Paralleling this development, urban Transylvanian Saxon society had become strongly indebted itself, as evidenced by probate records: half of those who passed away in the 1790s owed more than half of their wealth to creditors. The insidiousness of debt, mirrored by the strength of credit networks linking province and empire, and fueling the fiscal-military state, suggested that a parallel examination of these two issues might shed light on how private interests and state building intersected in nefarious, if not outright corrupt ways, during the second half of the eighteenth century. 

« Activities « Strategic Meetings

All team members met for the TransCorr recurrent strategic meeting on the premises of the Babes-Bolyai University in Cluj-Napoca, prior to the Society for Romanian Studies 2025 International Conference they also attended.

During the strategic meeting, postdoctoral team members Boriana ANTONOVA-GOLEVA, Oana SORESCU-IUDEAN and Michał Wasiucionek presented their research questions and methodology, and the initial results of their archival findings. Team members peer-reviewed the precirculated chapters they drafted for the first edited volume in the framework of TransCorr, edited by Silvia Marton and Alex. R. Tipei and titled Conceptualizing Corruption: Between Old Regimes and New Orders in East-Central-South Europe (1750s-1850s) [forthcoming by Bloomsbury academic publisher].

« Activities « Conference Papers

TransCorr team member Constantin Ardeleanu presented the paper titled “International Shipping, Russian Control, and Allegations of “Corruption” in Sulina (1830s–1850s)” at the international conference Transnational Trade Networks and the Development of the Black Sea Port Cities during the Modern Age: a Comparative Analysis organised at the New Europe College in Bucharest on June 19, 2025. His paper examined the transformation of Sulina, a small settlement at the mouth of the Danube, into a flashpoint of international controversy in the decades preceding the Crimean War. Following the Treaty of Adrianople/Edirne (1829), the Danube Delta was integrated into the Russian Empire, making Sulina a strategic node in the empire’s quarantine regime and a key artery for international grain trade from Wallachia and Moldavia. As Western commercial interests surged, Sulina’s centrality to Black Sea shipping heightened tensions between Russian administrators and foreign merchants. Allegations of corruption, infrastructural neglect, and discriminatory practices proliferated. Core disputes revolved around quarantine restrictions, navigational hazards at the Sulina bar, monopolized lighterage operations, and the unregulated use of river pilots. Western diplomats and consuls portrayed Sulina as a symbol of Russian despotism and dysfunction, where opaque administration, extortionate practices, and deliberate obstructionism curtailed free trade.

While some of these critiques reflected genuine administrative challenges in managing a volatile deltaic environment, they also served broader geopolitical and ideological purposes nourished by Western Russophobia. The Sulina question, far from being a local matter, became a site of overlapping imperial rivalries, environmental constraints, and normative expectations of “civilized” rule. By tracing these entangled disputes, the paper shed light on the politicization of infrastructure and public health in a contested maritime zone and anticipates the later internationalization of Danube navigation under the European Commission of the Danube.

« Activities « Strategic Meetings

Team members, along with Gábor Egry, member of the International Advisory Board, were all present at the New Europe College. This strategic meeting took place in the aftermath of the first International Conference organized within the framework of the project.

Discussions focused on the variety of words historical actors used to name and / or to denounce what they perceived to be problematic and ‘corrupt’ transgressions. Each of the papers team members presented during the International Conference did include such historical semantics analysis. Discussions also focused on the novelty and continuity the meanings of ‘corruption’, of its normative core, its vocabulary, and its usages. What was new, if at all and in what ways, during the crucial transition period from the 1750s to the 1850s: these questions are at the core of TransCorr’s scientific concerns, and they were the focus elements of the International Conference as well. Team members also discussed the scientific rationale of the first edited volume, and they planned its content and structure, and they also deliberated on the topics of the future publications within the project.

« Activities

« Activities « Conference Papers

TransCorr team member Constantin Ardeleanu presented his research on the origins and subsequent manifestations of Russophobia in nineteenth century Romania. His paper analysed several episodes that marked the genesis of nineteenth century Russophobia among Romanian elites. In the 1830s, the formation of a national party in Wallachia was the result of a complete distrust of imperial Russia’s annexationist plans in the Principalities.

Western-educated elites had Russophobic prejudices similar to those of Western European public opinion, clearly visible in various polemical pamphlets and especially during the 1848-1849 revolution. During the Crimean War, elites supported the anti-Russian military actions, also regarded as a sort of national liberation. Complete distrust was visible during Russian-Romanian military cooperation in 1877, while the outburst of public Russophobia followed in 1878, with the annexation of South Bessarabia. His talk contextualised several such episodes that shaped Romanian elites’ views of neighbouring imperial Russia as an abusive and corrupting power, a risk for their country’s sovereignty and for the peace of the larger region.

Team member Constanţa Vintilă presented the paper “Wealth and corruption in Moldova during Mihail Sturdza’s Rule” at the Annual Convention of the “A.D. Xenopol” History Institute of the Romanian Academy (held in Iasi, May 30—June 1, 2024). Her paper investigated how society positioned itself in relation to wealth constructed through abusive means and how it reacted by publicly disavowing grand boyar Iorgu Hartulari, her case study. Iorgu Hartulari was a Greek who settled in Moldova around 1820 and managed to build a huge fortune and an important career by skillfully exploiting his linguistic knowledge, native intelligence, dowry and wife’s networks. The sources, many of them still unpublished, are very generous and reveal his relations with the patriarchates of Jerusalem, Constantinople, Alexandria, with the prince Mihail Sturza (1834-1848), with the Jews and Armenians of Moldavia, with the aristocratic elite of Iasi, with metropolitans, bishops, paschal and other officials.