"'The students are coming': Rumour and Violence during the 1907 Peasant Uprising"

(Ștefan Luchian, La împărțitul porumbului, 1897)

The Salon on the 8th December will be the first of our work in progress discussions. The paper will be given by Irina Marin, who is Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at University of Leicester in the UK. Her history of the Banat, Contested Frontiers in the Balkans: Ottoman, Habsburg and Communist Rivalries in Eastern Europe was published in 2012

She will discuss her new project with the group which she outlines below:


This presentation is part of a wider project on social and ethnic violence and its propagation across the triple border between Tsarist Russia, Romania and Austria-Hungary between 1880 and 1918. This project seeks to examine how news of violence (peasant uprisings and pogroms) seeped through borders into the neighbouring states, how it percolated through the social and ethnic strata of these states and what effect this refracted information had on local social dynamics. The project focuses on the way in which various social groups negotiated and interpreted this flow of information and how they acted on it.

Taking as a case study the Romanian peasant uprising of 1907, the proposed presentation charts the circulation and refraction of rumour and news of violence within Romanian rural communities and their contribution to the propagation of the uprising. Of particular interest are in this context the mythologies created around official announcements, the fusion between fact and fiction and the
performative function of language.

(Apcar Baltazar Țărani)

(The Illustrated London News, April 1907 A cavalry patrol sabring the rioters in the streets of Comanesti)