The talk will explore the tension between the architects seeking to redefine the urban texture of Romania’s major cities according to the modernist principles, and the archaeologists searching for new data on these cities’ early history. I analyze the urban modernization of socialist Romania during the 1950s and 1960s with an eye to understanding the reconfiguration of political alliances and the formation of transnational networks of technological expertise in post-1945 Europe. The urban modernization, I argue, was accompanied by a parallel process, whereby the socialist Romanian state relied on archaeologists to endorse a shift from a representation of “national heritage” as buildings to that of heritage as archaeological artifacts, which would be further collected and displayed in a national network of museums. A centralized heritage not only literally made room for a modern urban development of the Romanian cities, but also functioned as a cultural counterpart to the centralized economy. By hoarding archaeological artifacts and rearranging them into a temporally homogenous framework, the state could assert its agentive power in defining “national heritage” as a more mobile and porous form of materiality.
I focus on the debates over the meanings and urban remodeling of a central area of Bucharest, the Old Court area (Curtea Veche, in Romanian) circumscribed by the ruins of one palace built by a prince of Wallachia at the end of the 17th century and abandoned a century later. The area’s historical importance was resuscitated under the post-1945 socialist regime, when the Old Court came to occupy a central point in the network of archeological digs opened in the city center. The results of the successive excavations—the unearthing of the walls of the court and some rooms of the royal palace—led the archeologists to lay new claims over the site. The Old Court suddenly became a highly problematic case, because, instead of allowing the architects to close it down, the archeologists pursued its transformation into a “historical conservation area”—that is, a space to be taken out of the radical remodeling of the city’s center. We encounter in the case of the Old Court a dual project of radical re-ordering: whereas the architects aimed at producing a sense of social order via a spatial remaking of the city’s form, the archeologists working in the area aimed at reordering the site’s own history. The struggle over the meanings of the Old Court—ranging from representing a historical site of national importance for archeologists, to being dismissed as ruins buried underground by the architects working on the remodeling of the area—points out the more complex mechanisms of the struggle for resources through diverging disciplinary visions on what the past was and where could it be found in Romania of the 1950s and 1960s.