Hello all! I’m Bora, a rising senior in the Dietrich School of Arts & Sciences alongside the Frederick Honors College. I’m kicking off this summer by spending 5 weeks traveling around Romania and Brussels, Belgium as part of the Identity and Global Politics in Romania study abroad program. My choice to participate in this program perfectly illustrates the utility of such study abroad programs to Pitt students, as doing so allows me to graduate a semester early. However, I would be remiss if I didn’t underline that Romania’s relative obscurity from the American point of view also drew me to this program. Romania, after all, is a country that has long been on the periphery of European affairs, relegated to footnote status in the midst of administrative developments in Brussels, Frankfurt, Strasbourg, and Luxembourg and conflict in Ukraine. This is exactly why I wanted to go: to immerse myself in a place that I would have no reason to go to otherwise, and to find excitement and diversity in seemingly mundane, prosaic places.

I’m very glad to say that Bucharest has indeed proven to be such an exciting place. What first struck me about the city is its varied architechture. Sure, you do often find very drab, grey, even run-down looking apartment blocks or office buildings from the communist era. But they’re nestled in between Baroque, Neo-Classical, and even Art Deco buildings that look more like they’d belong in Paris or New York City than in the middle of Eastern Europe. All of these styles are mixed together, creating a medley of very different types of buildings that I have never seen the likes of anywhere else. This ties well into my main takeaway from Bucharest: that the city is indeed very European, far from the (admittedly manufactured and exaggerated) image one might have of a city behind the Iron Curtain. It’s incredibly clean, its streets are lined with leafy green trees, and it even has its own Arc de Triomphe (spelled “Arcul de Triumf” in Romanian). As someone who has never before been to continental Europe, it’s been incredible to get this taste of it right off the bat.

As far as what I wish to get out of this program is concerned, I want to be able to further understand how Romania came to adopt its communist system, what that system was like in practice, and how it ended up falling, all in relation to similar governments throughout Eastern Europe. As someone who’s very interest in global political history following WWII, I’m curious to see Romania’s place in it all. I think that using Romania as a case study of the administration and relations of the Eastern Bloc governments will be really interesting. Furthermore, I’m interested to see how historical social cleavages between the various ethnic groups in Transylvania are experienced by young Romanians today. There are many such ethnic tensions around the world, but in my experience, most of them are being rejected by the younger generations as time goes on. I wonder if the same is the case in Romania’s most ethnically diverse regions.

I’m looking forward to discussing my experiences further with all of you as we leave Bucharest and head into Transylvania, and eventually to Brussels. Thanks for reading, I’ll see you in the next one!