Converging Dialogues #484 - Borderlands of Bukovina: A Dialogue with Cristina Florea
Mar 22, 2026
Cristina Florea, historian and Cornell professor specializing in Central and Eastern Europe, discusses Bukovina as a contested imperial borderland. She covers its Habsburg origins, multilingual and multiethnic makeup, shifting 20th-century borders and populations, the Orthodox Church’s role, wartime upheavals and postwar divisions, and contemporary debates over identity, migration, and regional politics.
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Bukovina Is An Imperially Created Borderland
- Bukovina is a created borderland that now straddles Romania and Ukraine after repeated imperial transfers.
- It was carved from Moldavia by the Habsburgs, administratively linked to Galicia, and split after Soviet annexation in 1940 and 1944.
Habsburg Policies Produced Intense Ethnic Diversity
- Late Habsburg policy turned Bukovina into a multilingual, multiethnic province with Romanians, Ukrainians (Ruthenians), Jews, Poles, Germans, Slovaks, and Armenians.
- Austrian colonization, migration from Galicia, and state-led settlement projects produced six-plus languages in towns like Chernivtsi.
Strategic Symbolism Beat Material Value For Empires
- The Habsburgs treated Bukovina as a civilizing frontier and strategic connector between Galicia and Transylvania.
- Joseph II prized it for military transit and symbolic reach rather than for natural resources.
