TOLERANCE AND PREJUDICE IN BELGRADE:  YOUNG PEOPLE’S CONSTRUCTIONS OF SELVES AND OTHERS


 
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LAYERED ENCOUNTERS: PERFORMING MULTICULTURALISM AND 
THE URBAN PALIMPSEST AT THE ‘GATEWAY OF EUROPE’ 

Kristof Van Assche, Minnesota State Universities – St. Cloud State 
Petruţa Teampău, Babeş-Bolyai University, Cluj Napoca 

Introduction 
In this paper, we will explore the 

performance of multiculturalism in Sulina, a 
small town on the eastern edge of the Romanian 
Danube Delta. Similar to places such as Odessa 
(Richardson 2005, 2006) and Trieste (Magris 
1989, Ballinger 2003), Sulina has a cosmopolitan 
heritage and a nostalgia for empire – a nostalgia 
for the glory days of hustle and bustle in the port, 
economic prosperity, political relevance, 
international networks, and cultural 
sophistication. Sulina was the product of the 
European Danube Committee (CED), an 
international organization long defunct. Yet 
images of the glorious CED period (late 19th 
century and early 20th century) pervade both 
local discourses about place and cultural identity 
and discourses emanating elsewhere that 
promotes tourism and the project of European 
integration (Teampău and Van Assche 2007). A 
feature of the current imagery of cosmopolitan 
glory days under the CED is the peaceful 
coexistence of various ethnic groups –Turks, 
Greeks, Armenians, Brits, Jews, Romanians and 
others. This coexistence is not reflected upon and 
is unproblematically assimilated to present-day 
“European” ideals of multiculturalism.   

The local myth of cosmopolitanism long 
gone is, as usual, far removed from the historical 
realities of accommodations between various 
cultural groups (Ballinger 2003, Malcolmson 
1998). What interests us more in this paper is the 
function of that local myth in everyday life in 
Sulina, its appropriation in tourist and political 
discourses, and, finally, the response and re-
appropriation by the locals of a myth that is 
increasingly becoming an economic asset.  
During fieldwork conducted in 2003, 2006, 
2007, and 2008, in Sulina, and in Tulcea, the 
regional capital, we studied discourses on Sulina, 
its histories, and its cultural complexity. We 
attempted to unveil different versions of the local 
imagery of cosmopolitanism and contrast them 
with observed performances of multiculturalism, 
the present-day construction and use of 
ethnic/cultural categories, and categories of 
cooperation, coexistence, assimilation.i

Sulina’s modest size, its relatively 
modest stock of historical buildings, 

infrastructure and public space assist us in 
deconstructing the glorious CED narrative given 
that these things do not say much about the kind 
of multiculturalism that prevailed. Interviews 
establish that few ethnic “neighborhoods” 
existed. In general, first and second streets were 
more urban, more expensive, and more 
Greek/Armenian/Jewish. However, there were 
exceptions to this general pattern. Older people 
who still acknowledge their Lipovan (Old 
Believer) roots ascribe their quick assimilation to 
their scattering throughout the city, including the 
more urban streets (where some houses were 
vacated by the other groups).  

   

What emerged from our investigations 
was a highly complex picture. Local identity (“I 
am from Sulina”) was more relevant in self-
identification than ethnic/cultural identity while 
the unifying myth of cosmopolitanism, 
reinvigorated under tourism and under the 
European Union, underlies this apparent 
homogeneity. Simultaneously, ethnic identity 
still exists, and different versions of the myth 
together with other legacies from the past 
produce patterns of social interaction and 
performances of multiculturalism, where, 
depending on the occasion fragments of a 
multitude of discourses are actualized and 
integrated. It is, we argue, in the variety of 
everyday encounters that one can study the 
functioning of the local discourses on self, other, 
and cosmopolis, and, simultaneously, map out 
the diversity in discourses. While we did not 
originally envisage the use of the metaphor of 
the palimpsest, it emerged as an appropriate tool 
to analyze the layered and fragmentary 
potentiality of identity discourse in Sulina  (Van 
Assche and Teampau 2008).       

 
Palimpsest Revisited 

According to recent developments in the 
fields of urban anthropology, postmodern human 
geography, and cultural studies, places, as 
objects of study, are no longer considered 
innocent, stable settings, but should be analyzed 
as social and political products and contexts of 
social interactions, always embedded in relations 
of power. This perspective upholds a new social 
“reading” of urban space, emphasizing its unique 



 
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polymorphy, as well as the plurivocality of city-
stories and, consequently, the richness of 
potential inquiry into the most “familiar” and 
closed spaces. Urban places, as dynamic contexts 
of social interaction and memory, are not only 
ideology-informed, but also have the power to 
coalesce and sustain a community. Recent 
discussions in urban studies and social sciences 
focus on the diversity of urban life, in viewing 
cities as “encounters, as spatial formations 
resulting from dense networks of interaction and 
as places of meeting with ‘the stranger’” and 
with his/her “difference” (Simonsen 2008: 145).   

Sulina, our site of observation, is 
located at the mouth of the Danube, a region that 
has always been of political and economic 
interest. Sulina covers a small limb of land in-
between the Danube and the Black Sea. It can be 
argued that the landscapes of most Romanian 
post-socialist cities are palimpsests with different 
layers of meaning, where stories and discourses 
collide to establish a new reading of the city that 
puts the communist past out of sight. New 
business networks, new places, new power 
relations, are being inscribed on pre-existing 
spaces, while abandoned industrial landscapes 
are being reinterpreted. In the case of Sulina, 
memory plays a vital role in (re) inscribing the 
landscape with fresh meanings, erasing or 
obliterating other (and others’) denotations, and 
in giving a sense to “our” city. Drawing on 
anthropological fieldwork (interviews with local 
people, authorities, decision makers, tourists, and 
extended participant observation) our paper 
describes the official strategies for marketing 
diversity and multiculturalism – an important 
local resource crucial for forging a local/global 
(European) identity. We also describe the gaps 
between, on the one hand, the official discourse 
on history and the urban palimpsest of the city, 
and, on the other hand, between the former and 
the day-to-day intercultural experience, as 
recalled by elderly people as part of their 
personal biographies (Teampau and Van Assche 
2009). 

“Palimpsest” thus acquires a double 
meaning in our analyses. Whereas the 
geographical literature of the 1990s (indebted to 
the investigations of Swiss geographer Claude 
Raffestin in the 1970s) usually sees the physical 
landscape as the palimpsest, the manuscript with 
older layers of text shimmering through in 
fragmentary fashion, we also want to consider 
the landscape of social encounters as a 
palimpsest in Sulina: a palimpsest of 

multiculturalism. In geography, the metaphor of 
the landscape as palimpsest is traditionally 
embedded in the metaphor of landscape as text, a 
metaphor that has generated an impressive 
amount of research (Daniels 1988, Barnes and 
Duncan 1992). However, due to the limitations 
of the underlying semiotic model (interpretation 
as reading of text, discourse as text), the 
resulting palimpsest metaphor does not capture 
much of the complexity brought forth by the 
discursive construction of reality, as understood 
by Foucault (as exemplified by Foucault 1968).  

If we understand reality as discursively 
constructed, then every observable aspect of 
reality, including human actions and interactions, 
can be interpreted as discursively articulated 
(Foucault 1968, Barnes and Duncan 1992, 
Bowers and Iwi 1992). This in turn implies that 
both communication and action can be the locus 
of observation for competing discourses, 
dissonant voices, for traces of older discourses 
shimmering through. In other words, the 
landscape of social interaction, consisting of 
communication and action, can be interpreted as 
a palimpsest, offering glimpses of the genealogy 
of concepts (like multiculturalism, ethnic 
categories) and glimpses of competing 
discourses, just like a physical landscape, or city 
space, shows us traces of older orders and 
competing orders. For the people in Sulina, 
urban space and the urban palimpsest is always 
available as a source of identity discourses. For 
them, and not just for the researcher, as is often 
assumed in geographical research, city space 
functions as a palimpsest. For us, as researchers, 
this function of urban space as palimpsest for the 
locals was an integral part of everyday 
multiculturalism we were interested in. In our 
reading and reconstruction of the palimpsest of 
social interaction, the situational interpretation of 
the spatial palimpsest by the locals offered us 
valuable clues. Urban space provides an 
indispensable substratum for the reproduction of 
the local myth of cosmopolitanism in all its 
variations.        

Learning (from) the past of one’s city is 
part of the process of building an identity and of 
self-positioning in one’s environment, that 
“complex mental map or significance by which 
the city might be recognized as ‘home’” (Bridge 
and Watson 2002: 4). Admittedly, this is not to 
say that there is a perfect coherence and 
integration of the individual in the texture and 
life of the city. On the contrary, there is no single 
city, nor one unitary narrative of it. People and 



 
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groups “live” differently the space of the city, 
they imagine and construct urban places in 
diverse manners, and in this process, memory 
and nostalgia have a special role in inscribing the 
city with certain meanings while concealing 
others.  
 
The Narrative City: Stories and the Urban 
Palimpsest 

Stories people tell about places serve 
not only to position them in a desired location, 
but also, to delineate social boundaries, to assert 
who “belongs” and who doesn’t, to clarify who 
we are (Bird 2002). In other words, “narratives 
make places habitable and believable, […] they 
organize the invisible meanings of the city” 
(Simonsen 2008: 146). If we look at the 
discursive makeup of landscape, we can notice 
that contesting meanings of urban belonging and 
divergent stories and memories are crucial for 
local identity and for articulating the future of 
the city. Since every city is a privileged space of 
diversity and heterogeneity, “collective memory” 
is just a rhetorical construction, while in fact 
“there is a plurality of social memories in every 
city – each particular to a different group and 
routed in the material and mental spaces it has 
experienced” (Bélanger 2002: 78).  

Sulina was originally built following a 
grid pattern of six streets paralleling the flow of 
the Danube. Its architectural mix of nineteenth 
century buildings (most of Turkish and Greek 
design), interwar buildings, modern terraces and 
socialist blocks of flats testify to different 
historical epochs and functionalities. Passing 
from Street I to the other five parallel streets of 
the city entails a unique gradual translation from 
urban to rural, each with specific architecture 
and routines. However, in Sulina the urban 
palimpsest currently speaks the language of 
decay and transformation. Yet it also stands as a 
witness to the city’s better epochs and to 
subsequent political upheavals. The ruins in the 
urban scenery of Sulina (old damaged houses, 
sometimes just a façade still standing while on 
the inside vegetation has literally consumed the 
walls; abandoned shops still bearing 
“communist” inscriptions) speak different 
memories and evoke different stories and ghosts. 
They comprise a contradictory and 
heterogeneous urban landscape with restaurants 
full of lights and voices adjacent to a silent and 
dim empty house; hidden behind the former 
communist market deserted for years and 
suddenly transformed into the most fashionable 

open air restaurant for tourists are the 
unpretentious local taverns mostly frequented by 
Lipoveni.   

This first street, paralleling the Danube 
and full of sounds and lights in the warm 
summer evenings, overlooks the old shipyard 
and the Prospect fishermen neighborhood across 
the Danube, where life has a different rhythm, 
prices are lower and there are hardly any lights at 
night. This heterogeneous physical landscape is 
wrapped in multiple overlapping semiotic strata: 
stories of people born in Sulina, whose lives are 
intimately intricate with its history; stories of 
people who came “to the city” from the deep of 
the swamp, for whom the space of the urban is a 
collection of ill-fated places and magical spots, 
of supernatural interdictions and witchcraft; 
stories of people who try to find the stories of the 
city; and the mainstream narrative about “how 
this city used to be,” a narrative that feeds the 
local pride and substantiates the identity of the 
place. 

Stories people tell about place and their 
memories about it are neither innocent nor 
without consequences. The city is cut through by 
ethnic/group differences that sometimes translate 
into spatial differences; imagining the city 
involves also visualizing and enforcing 
boundaries, whether practical or discursive, 
material or symbolic and always delineate 
networks of inclusion/exclusion. This “politics of 
belonging” as Daniel Trudeau calls it, pertains to 
“the discourses and practices that establish and 
maintain discursive and material boundaries that 
correspond to the imagined geographies of a 
polity and to the spaces that normatively embody 
the polity” (Trudeau 2006: 422).  

However, the imaginary map of the city 
and its symbolic construction does not only 
comprise boundaries between its communities, 
but also bears witness to another type of 
encounters. In the case of Sulina, the constant 
influx of tourists (at least during the summer) has 
had an impact on re-inventing local identity and 
on re-enforcing local pride. As Fiona Allon 
argues, in such encounters, “the city is produced 
as a distinctive and marketable place with a 
particular myth of identity at the same time as it 
is being rewritten by global economic forces 
operating above and beyond its boundaries” 
(Allon 2004: 55).  
 
Sulina: Diversity and Local Narratives  

For most of its history, Sulina was a 



 
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pirates’ nest and a humble rural settlement. 
However, Sulina’s golden age began with the 
establishment here of the European Commission 
of Danube (CED) in 1856. CED was a 
supranational organization composed of 
representatives of France, England, Austria, 
Prussia, Russia, Sardinia, and Turkey (See 
Teampau and Van Assche 2007 for more 
historical background). In addition to its role in 
dredging the Danube and improving navigation, 
the Commission was actively involved in the life 
of the town in a kind of beneficial colonization 
which included sponsoring all churches and 
building confessional cemeteries, hospitals and 
schools. By 1939, CED had transformed Sulina 
into a modern city, a fashionable resort, and a 
flourishing Porto Franco of over 10, 000 
inhabitants. Proudly presented in the media as 
“the most cosmopolitan city in the country”, 
until the Second World War Sulina was the main 
Romanian harbor on the Danube and home to 
consulates of all the important European 
countries.  

Before World War II, the social and 
political landscape of Sulina changed 
dramatically. Most “Europeans” disappeared 
with the dissolution of CED in 1939, while Jews, 
Armenians, and most Greeks left shortly after 
World War II. During the communist period, the 
population was heavily “Romanianised” and 
efforts were made to erase all signs of 
“imperialist” prosperity in the urban landscape. 
While Sulina possessed a prosperous local 
industry during communism, today it is 
characterized by decay like of many of 
Romania’s small cities. In addition, Sulina is 
only accessible by water; the local favorite 
catchphrase, “we are the first to see the light and 
the last to see justice” speaks both of the 
geographical and political marginality. Local 
authorities try to conceal this disadvantage by 
arguing that Sulina, the most Eastern city of the 
European Union, is not some long-forgotten 
place, but the very “gateway of Europe.” This 
argument visibly follows from a nostalgic vision 
in which Sulina, and the whole region, played a 
vital role in European trade and communication.  
However, they seem to ignore the fact that the 
political and geo-strategical relevance of the 
lower Danube region has changed dramatically 
over the past century, and a more appropriate 
understanding of Sulina’s role and place on the 
map of Europe would have to look more closely 
at the interplay of global-local identities and 
interactions, in which the European Union is just 
one actor (Van Assche and Teampau 2009).       

According to the official website of 
Sulina’s town hall, “The city of Sulina has been 
characterized as a multiethnic settlement from its 
earliest documents, a ‘Europolis’ in which 
inhabitants of different origins have lived 
together in a perfect harmony, a fact which has 
been passed down through centuries until today.” 
Moreover, “the inhabitants of the city, whose 
geographical, cultural and especially financial 
isolation did not always favour them, have 
always had the feeling of belonging to the big 
melting pot named DOBROGEA (where we can 
meet Greeks, Turks, Armenians, Italians, 
Aromanians, Megleno-Romanians, Ukrainians, 
Lipoveni Russians, Gypsies etc.). This was an 
internationally recognized example of peaceful 
multiethnic coexistence.” This self-presentation 
speaks, once again, about the complexity of local 
identification. While feeling alienated from a 
political system they do not really identify with 
(“the first to see the sun and the last to see 
justice”) and having changed, for that matter, 
several political-administrative authorities in the 
past two centuries (Turk, Russian, European, and 
finally Romanian), since 1939, most people of 
Sulina would rather identify themselves either as 
“European” (to which their unique history 
entitles them), or “Sulinean” (again, as symbol 
of their peculiarity and marginality). However, 
they seem reluctant to identify as “part of the 
Delta”, to which the urbanites refer as “the 
swamp” (and which is “out there”); this official 
presentation actually places Sulina as part of the 
historical region of Dobrogea, between the Delta, 
the Black Sea and the Danube, a region 
recognized as a multicultural area.         

After the communist demise in 1989, 
local authorities began recuperating the 
previously forbidden pre-World War II history of 
the city and emphasized its multiculturalism and 
prosperity as part of the new “European” 
discourse. They presented a mythologized 
general narrative of urban history in which the 
city’s residents participated optimistically in 
constructing a city of incredible affluence with 
“over 40,000 inhabitants” (compared to 5,000 
today), “27 ethnicities”, several confessions and 
ethnic schools. While the remaining buildings 
are a testament to this past and while the official 
discourse is attractive on tourist brochures and 
sometimes “sells” to uninformed visitors, there is 
clearly a gap between this official narrative and 
the local urban landscape. With a Romanian 
majority, a minority of Lipoveni (Russian Old 
Believers) and less than two percent Greeks left 
(not to mention only two Armenians), local 



 
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authorities still try to present Sulina as a city of 
diversity with a unique history and destiny as 
“the gateway of Europe.” 

However, the historical Sulina of 
official discourse does not match up with the 
urban landscape of the present. While history 
visibly lingers in the decayed walls of old houses 
we are not presented with information about 
those buildings but rather an abstract narrative of 
a once prosperous city that does not need “proof” 
or material remains to hold true. A local museum 
in a former lighthouse is primarily focused on 
the local hero and writer Jean Bart and the 
activities of CED, but does not portray the 
multicultural life of the prewar city.  Further, 
prewar multicultural life is reflected in neither 
the annual Festival of Minorities which attempts 
to showcase the ethnic diversity of the region 
(Greeks, Lipoveni, Turks, Tatars, Armenians 
etc.) and retains the overtone of propaganda, nor 
the widely advertised “maritime cemetery” with 
its separate sections for Christians, Jews, 
Muslims and Lipoveni Old Believers. All these 
mnemonic places seem to be isolated items in the 
complex web of local history. There are almost 
no narrative links between the existence of this 
unique cemetery and the peculiar urban life of 
multicultural Sulina that enabled it. One notable 
exception is the local legend of “the 
princess/dancer and her lover buried together” 
which is netted around two graves in the 
cemetery. While most nineteenth century 
tombstones with English, Italian, French names 
on them offer no explanation and no inquiry in 
the collective imaginary; this local legend is in 
fact largely based on the fictional plot of the 
“Europolis” novel by local writer Jean Bart.     

Nonetheless, narrative interviews with 
elderly people can bring us a little closer to the 
specificities of everyday multicultural life in 
Sulina. Thus, some accounts indicate that while 
the city flourished, it was split symbolically, and 
even physically, between the spaces of the 
European employees of CED – usually 
temporary residents of western European origin 
– and local workers and merchants. What 
seemed to be a “big happy family” could have 
been a city in which symbolic and material 
boundaries delimited spaces of interethnic 
community life. 

Baumann cautioned us about the peril of 
reification of cultures in discussions of 
multiculturalism, arguing “multicultural society 
is not a patchwork of five or ten cultural 
identities, but an elastic web of crosscutting and 

always mutually situational identification” (apud 
Simonsen 2008: 152). Developing this idea, 
Simonsen advocates a “practical orientalism”, 
one that can “grasp how hegemonic ideas 
translate into everyday practices and infiltrate the 
‘banal’ spaces of ordinary life, including 
everyday sociality and sensual experience” 
(Simonsen 2008: 153). A number of analyses of 
the multicultural city connect the narratives of 
difference to “banal” everyday experiences, to 
everyday embodied practices and particularly to 
meals and food. In Sulina, most biographical 
narratives are accounts of people growing up and 
playing together, learning each other’s language, 
participating in ethnic ceremonies and life course 
rituals (weddings, funerals), even attending the 
other’s church, mixed with anecdotes of daily 
interaction with so many “others”, all of which 
reconstruct a grassroots vision of intercultural 
city life. 
 
“Well, the old ones are gone, now there are 
only Lipoveni and haholi”: Memory, 
Nostalgia and Community  

In Sulina, people tend to recollect the 
past in the frame of two main intertwining 
narratives: that of prosperity and that of 
intercultural tolerance. In a forthcoming article 
(Teampau and Van Assche 2009) we investigate 
the mutual relationship between collective 
remembering and personal memories by looking 
at how individual – autobiographical – accounts 
are socially and politically framed and shaped, 
and how the unique and particular context of 
each personal account is negotiated – through 
narrative – to comply with the official version of 
collective memory. Sulina was a Porto Franco 
and a harbor where people came and went. There 
was indeed a unique blend of ethnicities, 
religious confessions and languages. 
Nevertheless, nostalgia tends to even out the 
rough edges, facilitate the “forgetting” of 
conflicts and present the past through rose-
coloured spectacles.  

The very ethnic groups that made Sulina 
the “most cosmopolitan city in the country” are 
no longer there. The functioning of CED with its 
many representatives and employees of different 
ethnicities who worked together and 
communicated on a daily basis likely had an 
important role in generating the “cosmopolitan” 
outlook of the city. However, the French, the 
British, the Dutch, Italians, Germans etc. are not 
“remembered” by contemporary residents 
(except for few cases where the informants’ 



 
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family had personal connections to them), 
perhaps due to the boundaries mentioned above. 
Ethnic groups that remain in the collective 
memory are people who were part of the 
multicultural day-to-day life of the city and 
involved in its social networks and in the fabric 
of urban co-existence. Jews, Armenians, Turks, 
and Greeks were traditionally urban populations 
involved in commerce and trade (Van Assche 
and Teampau 2009). Their involvement in these 
professions had a significant influence on the 
built environment and forms of urban sociality in 
the city. Similar to what Amy Mills has noted in 
the case of Istanbul “the Greeks, Jews and 
Armenians took the character of the city with 
them when they departed” (Mills 2006: 371).  

Most of the contemporary inhabitants of 
Sulina are either Romanians or Lipoveni who 
came to “to the city” from neighboring villages. 
According to the last census, of a total 
population of 5140, 82.5% are Romanians, 
10.6% Lipoveni, 2.14% Ukrainians, 1.3% 
Greeks, and 0.2% Turks. Very few are old 
enough to actually remember Sulina before the 
war. Since many of them learn anew about 
Sulina’s glorious past, one would think that they 
would be less likely to long for a past they have 
no connection to (biographical and/or affective). 
Nonetheless, as Pine, Kaneff and Haukanes have 
made clear, conflicts over memory are not only 
about the historical truth, but also about identity 
claims and power (Pine, Kaneff and Haukanes 
2004: 3-4). In this case, divergence over memory 
can hide an underlying, tacit divergence between 
groups, who develop loyalties and memories of 
different times. After all, many of the Lipoveni 
and Romanians used to work for the Greeks and 
Armenians – the main characters in the nostalgic 
narratives – not infrequently as domestic 
servants. Even when they participate in a 
common mnemonic account of Sulina’s “good 
times,” details of their own biography locate 
them in different social strata and places.  

Writing about a certain melancholy of 
remembering the mahalle in Istanbul, Amy Mills 
argues that “the narrative of peace and tolerance 
embedded in the landscape of social memory 
obscures other, untold stories of the mahalle’s 
past: the traumatic events that pushed out the 
minority communities” (Mills 2006: 379). Very 
few people in Sulina actually remember that 
Greeks were forced to leave during the Second 
World War, even without papers, while the 
absence of Armenians from collective memory 
and the urban landscape has a peculiar 

explanation: “they left and took their tombstones 
with them.” In Sulina, remembering “the old 
ones” and their absence in the contemporary life 
of the city is performed in a special frame: the 
narrative of the peculiar “ethnic” personality (as 
the quintessence of an entire community now 
gone).  Although there are some exceptions such 
as Mr. Zachis who has detailed knowledge of the 
cosmopolitan life of the interwar city, most 
respondents remember interesting characters. 
One example of such a character is Mr. Ardaşe, 
an Armenian who owned a soda and lemonade 
shop and who married a former prostitute from 
Bessarabia, a very beautiful woman. Another 
example is Zadik Ervant, the uncle of the last 
Armenian of Sulina who was homeless and was 
the origin of the local saying about vagrants: “he 
is like Zadik.” A third character is the Greek 
Camberis, the rich owner of an elegant hotel, still 
remembered as a man of his habits. A final 
individual is the Armenian dentist, formerly a 
housepainter, who was a short fat man who 
smoked a lot and walked around with his 
dentists’ instruments, a pipe, and a little bag of 
tobacco.  
 
Trauma  

Historical trauma can mark a 
community long after the most affected groups 
have departed (Antze and Lambek 1996).  In the 
community left traumatized, the coping 
mechanisms can be complex and manifold. 
Sulina narratives speak of a strong desire for 
unity and harmony, for an absence of difference, 
in this case disguised as an unproblematic 
coexistence of difference. Reconstructions of the 
narratives of group identity and place history 
imply systematic forgetting. A Freudian 
therapeutic anamnesis in Sulina is all the more 
difficult because the present inhabitants, even if 
they assimilated into older narratives of place, 
are so radically different. The Halbwachsian 
“social frames,” conceptual spaces from which to 
remember, have vanished; the vantage points are 
gone.  

In referring to the absent Armenians so 
prominent in prewar Sulina, residents often said, 
“they even took their graves with them” which 
implies ungratefulness or even guilt. What 
remains of the Armenians are characters like Mr. 
Ervant and Mr. Ardaşe. They figure in the 
dominant narrative of the prosperous CED 
Sulina as sidekicks in a story that is driven by 
very generic characters and episodes: “the 
Europeans” came; they developed the town; 



 
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Sulina became prosperous;  “everyone” lived 
together peacefully in close proximity without 
real tensions. In the stories of elderly residents, 
“The Europeans” are not specified and the other 
groups are reduced to cartoonish individual 
characters while stories’ development and 
harmony are systematically embellished.  

After the Second World War, groups 
that had previously worked for the now-vanished 
urban elites (Greeks, Armenians, Jews) became 
the dominant groups in the city. Despite this, it is 
still possible to trace the embellishment of these 
narratives, some old tensions, and some counter-
narratives. In longer interviews, Sulina’s elderly 
residents refer to significant hardships, distrust, 
and class inequality partly tied to ethnic 
distinctions. Autobiographical narratives that do 
not hide the negative aspects of pre-war life, 
dramatic family histories stretching back to the 
CED period, do clash frequently with the 
positive Sulina myth of prosperous, tolerant 
cosmopolitanism. The tensions between the rosy 
Sulina myth and more gritty stories are often not 
observed by the local storytellers who switch 
effortlessly from one register to another. 
Anecdotes about the tragedies of the war reveal 
the quick dissolution of the social fabric of the 
CED period, a fabric that had been deteriorating 
earlier. As in many other places, the war brought 
simmering tensions, envy, and distrust to the 
surface. The sheer quantity of stories about the 
riches of the urban elites, their fate, and the 
enduring suspicions among Sulinese regarding 
the appropriation of that old wealth betray, on 
the one hand, the power of the glorified CED-
narrative, and on the other hand, fissures in that 
same narrative. Longer interviews reveal that 
few people had any objection to the departure of 
other ethnic groups. What happened to their 
assets was far more important. Few stories 
acknowledged the role of the networks and 
geopolitics of Western Europeans, Greeks, 
Armenians and Jews in the rise and functioning 
of Sulina.  

As mentioned earlier, most of the 
present residents identify themselves as “from 
Sulina” or “Romanian” even though family 
histories reveal strong Lipovan or Ukrainian 
roots. The majority of the current residents 
moved to Sulina from villages in the Delta after 
the war or were resettled from other regions in 
Romania. They did adopt the story of the 
glorious prewar Sulina as part of their identity. 
We have noted only fragmentary and indirect 
resistance to the dominant narrative derived from 

CED self-representations, which portray the 
CED as a benevolent ruler that brought 
civilization, European values and prosperity. 
Older counter-narratives to the CED self-
presentations, possibly held by under-privileged 
groups or their descendants, can hardly be traced.  
A historical anthropology of multiculturalism in 
prewar Sulina would prove extremely hard 
because of lack of sources (the CED does have 
extensive archives but most of the archives of the 
other groups have disappeared together with the 
people) and the memories of the present do not 
allow for a reconstruction of the old 
positionalities or the complexity of the old 
encounters.  

 
Historic Ruptures and the Legibility of the 
Palimpsest: Communism  
  As stated before, we have scrutinized 
contemporary multiculturalism as a palimpsest 
where old patterns of encounters and localized 
identity constructions shimmer through in 
present relations and identifications. In order to 
understand contemporary forms of 
multiculturalism and its spatial forms, it is 
important to attend to the traces of communist 
histories and ethnic policies. The transformations 
and permutations of CED-era narratives and 
counter- narratives might be extremely hard to 
trace (the re- appropriation of CED propaganda 
is about the only clear issue) but much more is 
known about the communist narratives. 
Consequently, the palimpsest of multiculturalism 
will more easily yield fragments of the 
communist narrative. The festival of minorities 
we observed from 2006-2008 still bears the mark 
of communist conceptions of ethnic identity – 
the notion of the peaceful coexistence of 
different groups that have entered a new era, 
leaving irrelevant differences and quarrels 
behind. Ethnicities were reified and reduced to 
costume, dance, food, and music to be displayed 
on certain occasions (festivals) and in certain 
places (folklore museums). Power differentials 
and differences in groups’ position within the 
Romanian communist state were systematically 
ignored. More complex patterns of identification, 
and by implication, of multiculturalism, were not 
acknowledged or analyzed. In accordance with 
these ideas, the inscription of identity in urban 
space was either ignored or actively opposed. 
Ethnic neighborhoods were ignored in scholarly 
analysis and policy-making or simply torn down.  

In Sulina, the construction of 
communist apartment blocks deliberately 



 
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defaced the “imperialist” and “foreign” first and 
second streets, while simultaneously signaling 
the efforts of the regime to bring progress, order 
and rationality to this remote corner of the state. 
The policy of Romanization minimized the 
presence of “minorities” effectively and 
propagated a folklorized concept of minority 
culture. Local (Sulina) and regional (Tulcea) 
policy-makers continue to operate with very 
similar assumptions about culture, ethnicity, and 
multiculturalism. Events such as the festival are 
meant to prove that the Greeks and the Roma 
have a place and that their rights are protected.  
However, although communist discourse may 
have transformed social relations and urban 
space, it did not replace other types of 
encounters, identifications, and spatial 
inscriptions in postwar Sulina as if it were a 
blank slate.  People like Mr. Zachis preserved 
and transmitted memories of cosmopolitan 
Sulina.  Lipoveni, Ukrainians and Romanians 
from other regions brought their own memories 
to the city. Therefore, the particular ecological 
location and material character of Sulina 
produced patterns of interaction and 
identification that are far richer than the official 
communist discourse on identity and 
multiculturalism.  

In part due to Sulina’s isolation, 
memories, and the urban palimpsest, people very 
quickly became “from Sulina.” A local identity 
was revived. Despite ongoing contact with the 
villages in the Delta, the Lipoveni and 
Ukrainians, came to identify themselves as 
coming from the city. The “Sulina” identity 
calmed lingering tensions and was used both 
externally (to distinguish oneself from “the 
villages” and from “Bucharest”) and internally 
(occasionally overriding other categorizations). 
With its latent references to a more cosmopolitan 
and multicultural past, “Sulina” served as a 
powerful synthetic image of successful 
multiculturalism. Such an image, which is 
assumed to be shared by all participants in a 
social encounter, frequently simplifies the 
positioning in everyday interactions. This 
mechanism is still very strong today.  

At the same time, the synthetic image 
cannot replace all the complexity of identity 
construction in the presence of other identities. 
Old labels, old prejudices, and old expectations 
return in certain situations while new ones are 
produced. Although Lipoveni were “from 
Sulina” in a bar after a lot of drinking, people 
would still say “hey, Lipovan” or “how’s your 

Russian wife?” At weddings, fissures in the 
“Sulina” identity come to the surface and 
accusation of witchcraft seem connected to 
perceived differences based on one’s former 
ethnic identity. Language is still a marker but not 
in a monolithic manner. Residents commonly 
refer to “the old Sulina where everyone spoke 
four or five languages,” which stresses unity in 
diversity, peaceful communication and 
cohabitation, and the flexibility of ethnic 
boundaries.  

Now few people speak more than two 
languages and non-Romanian languages are 
largely confined to private spaces or one 
neighborhood, which is the liminal zone between 
city and swamp where Sulina fades into a narrow 
strip of higher land – the location of a Lipoveni 
neighborhood. The dominance of Romanian 
operates as a sign of unity and practices at a 
different level, a nationalist unity also reinforced 
under communism. However, other languages 
are still present and do present barriers. Minority 
languages are signs of otherness that cannot be 
completely reinterpreted under the banner of 
cosmopolitanism. Under the CED people 
probably did not speak four or five languages 
except for the multilingual CED-administration 
(to which their archives bear witness) and some 
of the more cosmopolitan merchants (who had at 
the very least a working knowledge of the 
languages of various customers). Yet many 
people did speak more languages than they do 
today while the fluidity and complexity of group 
boundaries was clearly greater.  
 
Forces Shaping Contemporary Performances 
of Multiculturalism  

We argue that in Sulina, the local 
performance of multiculturalism is shaped by 
communist policies and practices and the 
“Sulina” synthetic image – the local myth of 
cosmopolitanism. The catastrophic episodes of 
war and dismantling of CED allowed for the 
present functioning of the Sulina myth, since the 
systematic loss of connections with the CED 
past, its networks, and its people made it possible 
to alter the image of the CED era more freely. 
More recently, democratization, conversion to a 
market economy, tourism, and European 
integration have further transformed the 
performance of multiculturalism. These 
processes continue to influence how images of 
place, self, and other invoked and marketed.   

The rupture caused by the disintegration 
of the CED and by World War II allowed for the 



 
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appropriation and transformation of the CED 
myth underground in postwar communist Sulina 
and later in the open after the end of socialism. 
After the end of communist rule, Romanians 
decided they wanted to be European again and 
join the European Union. The marginal city of 
Sulina represented an opportunity to construct 
and market a European past as a key to the 
European future. Europe pushed actively for 
institutional reform, for the cultivation of 
democratic values including multiculturalism, 
and the protection of the heritage of various 
communities. In Sulina, European grants and 
subsidies have been pursued by invoking a 
multicultural past and present that is based on a 
reified conception of cultural identity. The 
promotion of Sulina in the city and region 
consistently refers to the CED myth, and 
contemporary multiculturalism, which is 
assumed to be similar to earlier forms.  The city 
is presented as an example of modern European 
multiculturalism.  

One could say that the myth of CED 
Sulina feeds off the modern European 
mythologies (including their version of culture 
and multiculturalism) and vice versa.  Both the 
localized myth of the past of Sulina and the myth 
of a European common destiny in diversity 
reinforce each other locally. Local and regional 
governments try to market the city in those 
terms. The local palimpsest of multiculturalism 
is therefore connected not only to images of a 
cosmopolitan past, but also images of a 
cosmopolitan future. CED and EU are conflated, 
and the local and temporal features of 
cosmopolitanism forgotten.    

The local tourist industry has been 
growing in recent years, and particularly in 2008. 
However, tourists do not seem particularly 
interested in local cultural diversity or the 
architectural heritage of the CED. Rather, the 
remote location of the town and curiosity about 
its location in a place surrounded by sea, swamp 
and Danube seems to be what attracts tourists. 
They were only secondarily drawn by the town’s 
special history and identity. The landscape 
attracts visitors more for the beach and the 
fishing opportunities than for its unique ecology. 
Cooperation among people in Sulina was 
traditionally fraught with challenges and 
suspicion was rampant. This continues to be the 
case. The more tourists come, the more they will 
reveal the limitations of the local tourist industry 
which is still deliberately marginal due to tax 
evasion, minimal investment, non- cooperation, 

and which is marked by short-term thinking.   
 

Marginality and Multiculturalism 
The multicultural past and present that 

attracted some tourists also functioned as a sign 
of Sulina’s marginality. We argue that the 
reading of the palimpsest of multiculturalism 
should be informed by the local history of 
marginality. An event like the festival of 
minorities does not reflect the everyday practices 
of multiculturalism in Sulina, but it does reflect a 
feature of local culture that stems from a history 
of marginality: an us-them distinction that 
opposes “all this” (all these minorities, us) to the 
rest of the world (seen as homogeneous and in 
largely negative terms). The festival thus 
functions as a sign of the unity of the community 
in a world that does not understand them and is 
not well understood itself.     

  We also argue that the success of other 
boundary-maintaining mechanisms such as the 
CED myth can be partly attributed to residents’ 
perception of isolation, neglect, and opaque, 
poorly enforced rules emanating from the center. 
The collective perception of being in the margin 
is fertile ground for the production of new signs 
of difference from the outside world as well as 
local unity. A similar attitude can also be 
observed in the dealings of local government in 
Sulina with the regional (and national) 
governments. City hall prefers to develop plans 
and policies with minimal communication with 
the other levels of government because these 
other levels cannot be trusted and it is better to 
rely on oneself.  Policies developed at other 
levels are rarely implemented in Sulina.  

Older layers of the palimpsest of 
multiculturalism are fading quickly. The impact 
of recently intensified official rhetoric of unity 
and of diversity is high; discourse with locals 
and on locals is pervaded by standardized and 
repeatedly appropriated images of unity and 
diversity (provoking each other, provoking new 
images of unity and diversity) which makes it 
extremely difficult to observe other patterns of 
cultural encounters or multiculturalism. It is clear 
that although other more subtle and complex 
patterns that exist under the radar are not very 
old, they are nevertheless real.  

Many local residents were ambivalent 
about the “revival” of the idea of a monolithic 
ethnicity, minority ethnic identity, as a result of 
the development of tourism, political and 
economic transition, and the influence of EU 



 
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policies and subsidies.  Residents often wanted 
to understand our intentions better before 
addressing the “minority” theme more than 
superficially. Trust is scarce in Sulina and is 
necessary in order to discuss ethnic and cultural 
identity and multiculturalism in everyday life. In 
our view, the political history of ethnic 
categories and the term “minority” has had a 
major influence on how residents speak about 
multiculturalism in the present. Although being 
identified as a member of a distinctive group was 
of some interest and could bring rewards, many 
still felt it to be unsafe. When people do speak 
up, the official “Sulina” narrative offers safe 
ground on which to talk about multiculturalism.  

Belonging can be expressed and 
experienced through various senses. When 
experienced, it can be articulated or not 
articulated. Sulina residents have many concerns; 
their ethnic belonging and interethnic encounters 
are not high on their agendas. This is partly the 
consequence of tragic histories, some of which 
are remembered and others of which are not. It is 
also the consequences of short-term thinking and 
short-term concerns in this harsh marginal 
environment, which means there is little place 
for excessive ethnic pride. It is also the result of 
a history of the mixing of identities through 
marriage, assimilation, and forgetting, however 
the “original” identities are conceived.  

 
Conclusion: The Palimpsest of 
Multiculturalism and Hybridism of the 
Margin  

We believe that the reasons discussed 
above are behind the current, often-observed 
confusion on cultural identity. In positive terms, 
the hybridism of the margin produced blurred 
boundaries in most everyday situations. The 
groups that were clearly identifiable under the 
CED have either gone or merged in complex 
patterns with “Romanian” emerging as the 
dominant identity. In prewar Sulina, interactions 
between those groups and the patterns of 
interactions could be studied as performances of 
multiculturalism. Today, both the discourses 
from above (tourism, policy, etc) and the truly 
hybrid/confused character of ethnic identity 
make the palimpsest of multiculturalism 
extremely hard to read. In the case of the 
Lipoveni, the largest group that was identified as 
non-Romanian, most young people are turning 
away from their religion, and no longer grow 
beards or speak Russian. Often they move to 
Tulcea, Bucharest, Italy or Spain. Spanish is 

more popular in the Danube Delta (schools) than 
Russian nowadays and the keepers of Lipoveni 
traditions feel they are fighting a rising tide.  

In the case of the Lipoveni, their long 
history of flight and self-styled marginality 
(being adherents of an ostracized faith in Russia) 
makes it difficult to write their history. Many of 
the villages in the Delta where they lived before 
coming to Sulina had short histories and an 
ephemeral existence. The variety of groups that 
filtered into the Delta area all had different 
histories and reasons to move. The result is a 
confused history and a social memory that is 
extremely simplified (“we came when Peter cut 
the beards”) and, for many Lipoveni themselves, 
not entirely convincing. Individuals often 
expressed their doubts after relating the story or 
told it with some hesitation.  

In this marginal hybridism, any clear-
cut representation of physical space and social 
space marketed as multicultural is bound to be 
remote from the experiences of most locals. At 
the same time, the new or re- emerging 
discourses can be easily manipulated because of 
this distance from actual practice. Moreover, 
those discourses might in time reshape the 
identities and the practices of people in Sulina. 
Revivals can be artificial at first and 
wholeheartedly felt and embraced later. Our 
analyses might evoke cynicism among readers 
expecting a narrative of stable groups working 
together in a stable community, threatened by 
alien bureaucratic and economic discourses.  We 
would like to counter that the patterns of 
multiculturalism were hard to read, not always 
important for the people themselves, and highly 
disrupted despite tales of continuity. Yet we 
argue that “community” can be a remarkably 
resilient concept, that “Sulina” is remarkably 
strong as a unifying myth, and that community 
ties can be present even if they are unarticulated 
adaptations to difference, visible in everyday 
encounters and unreflected practices.  

In the layered encounters we observed, 
reading the layers in the palimpsest of 
multiculturalism was difficult because of the 
hybridism of the margin and because of the 
ruptures and discontinuities in local history. The 
unifying myth of Sulina brought continuity and 
structure to the palimpsest. Our attempt to 
reconstruct the palimpsest of multiculturalism 
often had to take slight variations of the Sulina 
myth as starting point. By dissecting variations 
of the prevalent myth, conducting a contextual 
analysis of its use, and juxtaposing the CED 



 
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myth with other circulating narratives, we were 
able to map out part of the terrain. A 
continuously reinterpreted Sulina myth glosses 
over some difference and creates new differences 
in advocating a simplified ethnic identity 
marketable for tourism under the banner of the 
European future.  

Sulinese interpretations of urban space 
in their readings of the urban palimpsest 
informed our interpretation of the palimpsest of 
multiculturalism. For most contemporary 
residents, the myth of Sulina is anchored in 
urban space only in a very general sense.  “The 
harbor,” “the Danube,” “First Street,” and the 
churches are markers of cosmopolitan Sulina. 
Other than that, few memories exist of the 
symbolic topography of CED-Sulina. City space 
– the urban palimpsest – is interpreted freely, 
following the fleeting categorizations of 
marginal hybridism. It is thanks to this loose 
coupling of the urban palimpsest and the 
performance of multiculturalism that the 
reinterpreted CED myth can shape new 
encounters so profoundly. 

    
Endnotes 
1This research was part of a larger research 
project under the title ‘Nature, culture, planning 
in the Danube Delta’, a cooperation of 
Minnesota State Universities- St Cloud, Babes 
Bolyai University, Cluj- Napoca, Leuven 
University, and Wageningen University, 
investigating cultural and ecological complexity 
in the Danube Delta, and the potential for spatial 
planning to accommodate humans and nature.  
 
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