Fondul religionar greco-oriental din Bucovina – bătălie culturală şi construct naţional în lumina unei instituţii
The Greek-Oriental religious fund – cultural struggle and national construct as seen in the fate of one institution

Summary/Abstract: The purpose of this article is to correlate the situation of Ruthenian- Ukrainian identity struggles in Austrian Bukovina to similar Romanian struggles in the context of a common religious fund and Church. Starting from this situation of Bukovinian society at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, the author formulates the following questions: What was the cause of this tendency towards separate national identities of Ruthenians and Romanians in Bukovina, despite their predominantly Orthodox heritage? Did the Greek-Oriental religious estate of Bukovina and the Bukovina Orthodox Church of the second half of the nineteenth century become an “instrument” in the cultural-national struggle? Who influenced the discourse of the time dealing with the religious estate, and with the Church, respectively? What spheres and levels of influence were involved? One of the major conclusions of the author is that the Greek-Oriental Religious Fund, its value and the access to it became, starting with 1849, one of the stakes of the “cultural struggle” between the Ruthenians and the Romanians in the province; that struggle inexorably led to an ethnically motivated fragmentation of the formerly unifying Orthodox faith, even before World War I.

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