‘Eminescu is everywhere:’ charting the memorial spatialization of a national icon

ABSTRACTMihai Eminescu features prominently at the core of Romania's pantheon of cultural heroes. Soon after his death in 1889, Eminescu was canonized as the 'national poet.' Drawing on several strands of scholarship, this article examines the spatial politics of Eminescu's memorial cult in Romania. In particular, integrating four complete datasets of commemorative artefacts dedicated to Romania's national poet (public monuments, street names, school nomenclature, and the toponymy of cultural centres), this study charts the regional spatialization of Eminescu's memorial posterity. In accounting for the spatial differences underpinning this geography of public memory, the paper outlines two main factors: (1) Eminescu's bio-topic presence, i.e., the memorialization of his journeys within the current day territory of Romania, and (2) the cultural politics of spatial appropriation, which implied the memorialization of Eminescu in the provinces incorporated in the Romanian Kingdom after the WWI (e.g., Transylvania) as a symbolic means of Romanianizing the landscape.KEYWORDS: Politics of memorycultural landscapepolitical geographymemory studiesRomania Disclosure statementNo potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.Additional informationFundingThe work was supported by the Project financed by Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu (Knowledge Transfer Center) & Hasso Plattner Foundation research grants LBUS-HPI-ERG-2023-08 [LBUS-HPI-ERG-2023-08].Notes on contributorsMihai S. RusuMihai S. Rusu is Associate Professor in Sociology at Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania. He holds a PhD in Sociology from Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, from 2014. In his research, he explores the politics of memory during Romania's period of postsocialist transformation, the politics of death as expressed in national days of mourning across Europe, and the politics of postsocialist place-name changes in Romania. He authored two books in Romanian and has published on these topics in Political Geography, Cities, Journal of Historical Geography, PLoS ONE, International Review for the Sociology of Sport, European Societies, Death Studies, Omega–Journal of Death and Dying, Mortality, and Nationalities Papers, Southeast European and Black Sea Studies, Europe-Asia Studies etc. He was a visiting researcher at Georg-Eckert Institute (Germany), Oxford Brookes University (UK), European University Institute (Italy), University of Bologna (Italy), and University of Palermo (Italy).