The region of
\nDobrogea, in the south east of today’s Romania, was in antiquity home to big
\nGreek colonies. Later it was integrated into the Roman Empire and the Byzantine
\nworld, to be then become part of the Ottoman Empire in the Middle Ages.
\nTherefore, Dobrogea was a meeting place of major cultures, civilizations and
\npeoples. Dobrogea was a realm of multiculturalism long before the emergence of
\nthe concept as such and traces of that coexistence are still visible today.
\nMany such traces can be found in cemeteries, places that tell of the history of
\nthe community that buried its ancestors there. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Such a place has been studied
\nrecently in the village of Balabancea, in northern Dobrogea, in the Taita River
\nValley, not far from the Macin Mountains. Back in the day, the place was home
\nto a Turkish community, which is said to have actually established the
\nsettlement there. The history of this special community can now be read with
\nthe help of the unusual tombstones found there. Tiberiu Cazacioc, whose
\npaternal roots are in the village of Balabancea, has studied the history of the
\nplace as part of a cultural tourism project funded by the National Cultural
\nFund Administration. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Here is Tiberiu Cazacioc with more:<\/p>\n
A
\nlong time ago, in the 19th Century, and even earlier, the village,
\nlike the entire region of Dobrogea in fact, was a melting pot of ethnic groups.
\nThe whole region was like that under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. It was
\nhome to Jews, Ukrainians, Russians, Turks, Romanians, immigrating from
\nBessarabia, which was incorporated into the Russian Empire in the 19th
\nCentury. Part of the localities in northern Dobrogea, but also those in the
\nsouth were established by the Turkish population coming from the Ottoman
\nEmpire, and also Tartars, brought there and colonized. The same happened in the
\nvillage of Balabancea. Balaban is the name of a bird in Turkish, and probably
\nin the beginning the name of the village was Balabanca, but it became
\nBalabancea because of how the letter C was pronounced in Turkish.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n
<\/p>\n
By looking at
\nthe tombstones in the cemetery, one can easily guess the specificity of the
\nMuslim community in Balabancea. They are not refined pieces of sculpture, just
\nraw stone blocks, which seem to have just been cut from the millennia-old
\nmountains and taken to the cemetery.
\nApparently, this type of funerary monument is typical of a certain group
\nof Muslim Turks, Kazalbasi, settled there in the 19th Century.
\nOriginating from Anatolia, they were banished to this periphery of the Ottoman
\nEmpire, probably because they where Shiites, a minority among the Sunni Turks,
\nas Tiberiu Cazacioc told us:<\/p>\n
\n
<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Evidence I’ve collected myself and talks with Mr. Kemal Karpat, a renowned
\nTurkish studies specialist born in Romania but living in the US, it seems that
\nthey had been banished. Documents mentioning this people and their religion
\nwere also found in Iran, Afghanistan and Albania. To differentiate themselves
\nfrom the other Muslims, they were wearing a red fez. They were thus recognized
\nas Kazalbasi Turks, known to have their own faith. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n
<\/p>\n
Kazalbasi, easy
\nto recognize thanks to their red fezes – hence the nicknames red heads or
\nred turbans – lived in Dobrogea and in the village of Balabancea until the 20th
\nCentury. Still, the Turkish-Muslim community in Dobrogea started to gradually
\ndiminish, especially after 1878, along with the Romanian Principalities’
\ngaining their independence from the Ottoman Empire and Dobrogea’s becoming part
\nof the Romanian Kingdom. The community continued to downsize during the
\ncommunist regime, and today only memories of the elderly, the tombstones and
\nseveral toponyms still recall the presence of Turks in Balabancea. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Here is
\nTiberiu Cazacioc once more:<\/p>\n
\n
<\/p>\n
I
\nthink that the last Turks left in the 1960s. My uncle told me how he met with
\nthe very last one just as he was leaving Balabancea on the bus that was passing
\nthrough the village. The village has decayed in the meantime, and the mosque no
\nlonger exists, although the elderly still remember it. Near the central square
\nof the village, where there are a shop, the bus stop and a bar now, there is a
\nflat piece of ground. Talking once with my uncle who, just like any other
\nvillager, likes to talk about the past, I learnt that that was the place where
\nthe mosque used to stand.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
\n
<\/p>\n
Thanks to
\ndocumentaries and projects like the one developed by Tiberiu Cazacioc, the
\nMuslim tombstones and cemeteries in Dobrogea can be now capitalized on as part
\nof the national cultural heritage and integrated into a cultural-tourist
\nvision. <\/p>\n
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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