Research Colloquium | Cosmin Minea (Bucharest/ Brno) | Restorations of Architectural Monuments and the Politics of Heritage in Romania and Serbia in the Late 19th Century

Abstract:

Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the recent independent states of Serbia and Romania undertook a very similar restoration project that transformed in a visual and symbolic manner one of their most famous Orthodox churches. In Romania, the French architect André Lecomte du Noüy led the restoration of Curtea de Argeș church (sixteenth century), where he added frescoes, interior and exterior decorations, monastery buildings and a chapel, turning the site into a symbol of Romanian heritage and the resting place for Romanian kings. Similarly, in Serbia architect Petar J. Popović led the restoration of Lazarica Church (fourteenth century), incorporating new domes, exterior decorations, and towers. Starting from these projects, the talk will reflect on the role of architectural monuments for the state-building, national ideology, religion and local communities in the two former Ottoman regions. It will also emphasize the role of transnational network of architects and specialists together with ideas about Byzantine Art in fin-de-siecle Europe.

Bio:

Cosmin Minea is currently a visiting fellow at the Leibniz ScienceCampus. He arned his PhD from the University of Birmingham in 2019 with a dissertation titled Old Buildings for Modern Times: The Rise of Architectural Monuments as Symbols of the State in Late 19th-Century Romania. His MA thesis, completed at Central European University in Budapest in 2014, was awarded the Hanák Prize for the best dissertation in the Department of History. Currently, he is Czech Science Foundation (GAČR) postdoctoral researcher for the ERC project Art Historiographies in Central and Eastern Europe in the Art History Department at Masaryk University in Brno, and is associated with our partner institution the New Europe College in Bucharest.#

His research focuses on the transnational networks of architects and intellectuals who, in late 19th-century Romania, were instrumental in shaping, restoring, and promoting historical monuments and heritage sites as part of wider efforts to forge a national cultural identity. More broadly, his interests lie in the architectural history and historiography of modern Central and Eastern Europe (19th and 20th centuries), with particular emphasis on how the region’s material heritage has been mobilised to craft new identities and cultivate political and cultural allegiances.

He has held fellowships at several prestigious institutions, including the Bielefeld Graduate School in History and Sociology, the Institut national d’histoire de l’art in Paris, the Leibniz Institute for European History in Mainz, and the New Europe College in Bucharest.