The ancient geographical names Pontos Axeinos and Pontos Euxeinos – conventionally rendered as the “Inhospitable” and the “Hospitable Sea” – capture a tension that has remained central to the history of the Black Sea region. For centuries, the sea facilitated mobility, commerce and cultural exchange, linking communities situated along its shores and far beyond them. At the same time, it constituted a contested political space marked by imperial expansion, warfare, displacement and changing regimes of inclusion and exclusion. The Black Sea thus functioned simultaneously as a zone of connectivity and as a frontier shaped by violence and asymmetrical power.
This historical tension has acquired renewed relevance as the region has once again become a central arena of war, forced migration and competing imperial projects. The present situation also underscores the limitations of narratives that interpret the Black Sea primarily through geopolitics, interstate rivalry or decisions taken in imperial and national capitals. Such approaches risk reducing the region’s diverse societies to objects of external policy and overlooking the local actors, institutions and practices through which power was mediated, negotiated and sometimes resisted. A more differentiated history must therefore account for both the structures imposed by empires and the capacity of communities to reshape those structures through mobility, brokerage, economic exchange and everyday interaction.
These problems formed the conceptual point of departure for the international workshop Decentering Empires: Local Communities and Cross-Cultural Interaction in the Black Sea Region (17th–Early 20th Centuries), hosted by the Oriental Institute of the Czech Academy of Sciences on 27–28 August 2026. Bringing together more than thirty researchers working on the premodern and modern Black Sea region, the workshop examined what happens to imperial history when its analytical focus shifts from administrative centres and geopolitical competition to local communities, households, ports, borderlands and cross-cultural encounters.
The workshop was organized by the BridgeBSR (Bridging Histories and Cultures in the Black Sea Region) Working Group, comprising Vladyslav Hrybovs’kyi, Svitlana Kaiuk, Julia Malitska, Volodymyr Poltorak and Nataliya Sureva. It represented an important stage in the development of BridgeBSR as an international scholarly network designed to connect researchers across national, institutional and historiographical boundaries. The event was supported by the Oriental Institute CAS, the Center for Governance and Culture in Europe at the University of St. Gallen, the Canadian Institute of Ukrainian Studies at the University of Alberta, and the Max Weber Network Eastern Europe.
The principle of “decentering” served not simply as a general theme but as a shared analytical framework linking papers devoted to different periods, empires and social groups. Rather than treating the Black Sea as a peripheral space divided among competing states, participants approached it as an interconnected historical region shaped by mobility, negotiation and overlapping forms of authority. Local actors emerged not merely as recipients of imperial policies but as intermediaries, translators, petitioners, merchants, migrants and political agents who participated in producing imperial institutions and adapting them to local circumstances. Six thematic panels, a keynote lecture and a special roundtable demonstrated how this perspective can contribute to rethinking established narratives of Ottoman, Russian, Habsburg and East European history.
The opening panel, “Imperial Frontiers in Practice: Intelligence, Patronage, and Brokerage,” examined the people and informal mechanisms through which frontiers functioned. Kahraman Şakul analysed Ottoman intelligence gathering along the empire’s northern frontiers in the premodern era, drawing attention to the circulation of information and to the intermediaries who made distant territories legible to decision-makers. Alexandr Osipian showed the permeability of political borders for Armenian merchants and brokers, whose commercial knowledge and trans-imperial connections enabled them to move between jurisdictions. Oleksandr Sereda used Khodzhabey as a lens through which to examine interactions among Cossacks, Nogais and Ottomans. Alper Başer, in turn, traced the emergence of the Nekrasov Cossack community under Ottoman and Crimean patronage. Together, these papers presented the frontier not as a fixed dividing line, but as a zone continuously produced through intelligence, exchange, patronage and local accommodation.
The second panel shifted attention to bureaucracy and the making of collective categories. Contributions by Olena Bachynska, Oleksandr Kravchuk and Vladyslav Hrybovs’kyi explored the relationship between local communities, imperial classification and missionary or administrative knowledge in the northern Black Sea region. A recurring point in the discussion was that labels used for mobile or frontier populations were neither neutral nor stable. They could be imposed by administrations, adopted strategically by communities or renegotiated through petitions and everyday dealings with officials. Imperial categories therefore did not simply describe social realities: they participated in creating them. At the same time, local actors could appropriate official vocabularies to defend privileges, articulate belonging or pursue alternative futures.
Panel 3, “Households, Bodies, Care, and Regimes of Dependency,” brought the imperial scale into intimate and domestic settings. Turkana Allahverdiyeva discussed violence, patronage and household slavery in the early modern Crimean Khanate. Olena Uvarova examined Greek refugees in Odesa, revealing the connections between displacement, assistance and community formation. Cansu Çakır traced the professionalization of midwifery in the late Ottoman Empire and the changing relationship among local practice, expertise and state regulation. Volodymyr Poltorak analysed Lower Danubian Cossacks who settled in nineteenth-century Istanbul, asking how migration transformed community structures and everyday life in the Ottoman capital and its surroundings. The panel demonstrated that empires were sustained not only through armies and bureaucracies but also through households, bodily practices, care, coercion and unequal relations of dependence.
The second day opened with “Everyday Multiculturalism, Local Communities, and Informal Networks of Survival.” Svitlana Kaiuk explored local intermediaries who translated not only languages but also social realities into forms comprehensible to imperial authorities. Her paper showed how mobility and administrative or religious vocabularies could become practical strategies of survival in the northern Black Sea borderlands. Polina Trifonova presented a historical and ethnographic study of the Crimean Tatar community of Tsarev Brod in Bulgaria, focusing on cross-cultural dynamics in a local setting. Murat Hatip discussed local agency and intercommunal relations in the exceptionally diverse society of Düzce, while Hakan Kırımlı approached the social history of the Crimean Khanate through the kitchens and foodways of the khans’ court. The panel illustrated everyday multiculturalism not as an abstract condition of peaceful coexistence, but as a set of practices involving translation, memory, food, neighbourly relations and informal networks.
The fifth panel, “Commercial Infrastructures and Urban Transformation across the Black Sea,” turned to the ports of Mariupol and Batumi. Papers by Svitlana Arabadzhy, Irina Seits and Irakli Iremadze examined the ways in which trade, investment, transport infrastructure and new forms of urban development reshaped port cities and their hinterlands. The ensuing discussion, led by Constantin Ardeleanu, emphasized that these transformations cannot be understood solely as consequences of imperial modernization projects. They also reflected the expansion of capitalism, the interests of merchants and investors, and the capacity of local actors to redirect broader economic forces. The comparative format revealed both shared patterns of Black Sea urbanization and the highly specific social configurations of individual ports.
The final panel explored migration, informal exchange and political cooperation during the age of nationalism and imperial collapse. Gülnur Demirci compared colonial and anti-colonial interpretations of North Caucasian migration across the Russian and Ottoman worlds. Malvin Grippon reconstructed smuggling networks that supplied essential goods across the Caucasian borderlands during the First World War, showing how informal exchange responded to scarcity and the disruption of established infrastructures. Stanislav Tumis and Radomyr Mokryk analysed Ukrainian–Caucasian attempts at political cooperation against Russian imperial power in 1918–1921. These papers highlighted the coexistence of coercion and agency in mass migration, wartime survival and post-imperial political experimentation.
The keynote lecture by Constantin Ardeleanu, “Dobrudja in the Long Nineteenth Century as a Case Study for Black Sea Mobility and Diversity,” drew together many of the workshop’s central concerns. Dobrudja’s changing borders, mobile populations and dense intercommunal contacts made it possible to examine the Black Sea beyond conventional national narratives. The lecture demonstrated how a regional approach can connect political history with the histories of transport, migration, infrastructure and cultural diversity, while still attending to the unequal distribution of power.
A special roundtable, “Black Sea Archives, Archival Infrastructures, and Knowledge Production,” organized in cooperation with the Max Weber Network Eastern Europe, addressed the material foundations of scholarship itself. Chaired by Nataliya Sureva, the discussion included contributions from Dmitri Frolov, Yurii Zazuliak, Alexandr Osipian and Stefan Rohdewald. Participants considered how the organization, accessibility and displacement of archives shape the questions historians are able to ask. The conversation was especially significant at a time when war threatens collections, researchers and institutional continuity across the region. Decentering Black Sea history, the roundtable suggested, also requires critical reflection on where sources are preserved, how they are catalogued, which languages and institutional traditions structure access to them, and whose experiences remain difficult to recover.
The workshop concluded with a walk through “Oriental Prague,” guided by Volodymyr Poltorak. Moving from the Czech Academy of Sciences through Prague’s historic centre and across the Vltava, the walk connected the city’s institutions, architecture and collections with a longer history of encounters between Central Europe, the Ottoman world and the Black Sea region. This final element extended the workshop’s method into urban space: Prague itself could be read not as a distant observer of the Black Sea, but as one of the places where knowledge about the region was collected, translated and institutionalized.
Across two intensive days, several common insights emerged. Borders appeared as social processes rather than self-evident lines; mobility was shown to be both an effect of coercion and a resource used by historical actors; and imperial knowledge depended on local mediation. The workshop also demonstrated the value of bringing Ottoman, East European, Caucasian and maritime histories into a single conversation. Topics often divided among national historiographies – Cossack communities, Crimean Tatar mobility, Armenian commerce, Greek displacement, Caucasian migration and the development of Black Sea ports – became parts of a connected regional history.
Equally important was the form of the meeting. Detailed papers were followed by substantive comments and extended discussion, allowing comparison across periods and case studies. The gathering strengthened cooperation among scholars based in Ukraine, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania and several European countries at a moment when sustaining transnational academic ties is both difficult and necessary. For BridgeBSR, the Prague workshop was therefore not only a successful conference but also a working demonstration of the network’s purpose: to bridge separated historiographies, create space for collaborative research and develop a more plural and locally grounded history of the Black Sea region.
Volodymyr Poltorak
