Urban and military configurations in the province of Scythia (“Configurațiile urbane și militare din provincia Scythia”, in original, Romanian). PhD diss.

Executor: Alexandra Teodor, architect

Scientific direction: 

Supervisors: Prof. arch., PhD Anca Brătuleanu (UAUIM), Prof., PhD Alexandru Barnea (FIB-UB)

Public defence committee (official reviewers): Prof. arch. habil., PhD Hanna Derer (UAUIM), 

Scientific Researcher I PhD Crișan Mușețeanu (MNIR), and Assist. Prof. PhD Ioan Carol Opriș (FIB-UB)

The thesis covers a recurrent theme in the field of post-classical history, the city of Late Antiquity, seen from a perspective quite rarely approached on systematic basis: the spatial configuration. The theme has been analysed for an administrative unit of the Roman Empire in the above-mentioned period, respectively the province of Scythia[1]. Not only that there is a considerable amount of local scientific literature, practically unexploited in this direction, but only a small part of it is also integrated to the international scientific network.

The ancient urban history in this region began during the Greek colonization on the Western Black Sea shore (mainly in the 6th Century BCE) and it spread towards the end of what is conventionally named Late Antiquity (here, at the beginning of the 7th CE). Some of the former centres are even today the core of modern cities. 

Fifteen sites were selected and analysed according to a template structure focused mainly on the built stock, but not exclusively. The timelines of the analysed ancient urban centres vary between two and twelve centuries of history; thus, although the period of interest focuses on the about three centuries between the end of the 3rd to the beginning of the 7th CE, the general chronology of the study often spans backwards, and sometimes onwards, depending on the local context.
 
[1] Today, the Romanian Dobruja (Tulcea and Constanța counties) and a part of the Bulgarian Dobruja (approximately, Dobrici district).