Harald Heppner
Capital city as national vision at the Serbs, Bulgarians and RomaniansThe category “Capital City” bases on two different ideas: it means to be a
demand of order and a central locality for a politico-territorial organisation
placed in a bigger urban context, and it seems to be an irreplaceable stipulation
for a nation. While the need of a state centre as a system of territorial power has
got a tradition of millenniums, the nation in its modern sense and its believe to
need a capital city goes back to not more than about one and a half centuries.
For understanding that a capital city becomes a national project the process of
nation building has not got so much priority than the question of the life system
of a pre-national society and why the capital city was taken as a vision and from
where? The main subject for explaining how the capital city was growing up
at the Serbs, the Bulgarians and the Romanians concern the questions which
were the preconditions for the vision: how long did it take time for realizing
the project and which problems existed from the beginning by establishing the
capital city?
When we study the situation of the Serbs, the Bulgarians and the Romanians,
we must take in consideration that the preconditions of these three ‘national
areas’ for designing capital cities were quite different, although for all them,
there were no chances to build an own capital city till the 19th century. In the
long period from the late middle ages to the ‘national era’ these three groups
had to live in front of two types of capital cities – the residences of empires
or global authorities, like Constantinople, Vienna, Venice, Rome, Moscow and
then St. Petersburg, and the centres of half nationally organized more or less
colonial states or/and empires, like London, Paris, Madrid, Lisbon or Amsterdam.
The ‘national areas’ were divided between the different politico-cultural zones
of the Austrian, Ottoman Empire and Venetian Empires where other people
dominated and where a modern city centre did exist only partly: Venice and
Vienna were outside of South Eastern Europe and their political systems were
aristocratic respectively dynastic, Vienna remained till the middle of the 19th
century as a large fortress, during Constantinople although representing a
metropolis missed main elements of modernity at least since the 16th century.
Therefore the Serbs and the Bulgarians had to ‘invent’ their own capital cities,
while the Romanians living in Wallachia and Moldavia had not only to decide if
they should modernize their regional centres Bucarest and Jassy, but also unify
to a common national state.