Gagauz 'Orthodoxism' in Interwar Romania: Mihail Cakir and the Gagauz National Movement

This paper is concerned with the agency of the Gagauz clerical elite in the interwar period and its ability, through acts initiated in the religious sphere, to shape broader political and social changes. The Gagauz clergy, and specifically Archpriest Mihail Çakir, through religiously motivated and religiously formulated interventions, helped mould the ethno-national consciousness of the Gagauz and acted as a catalyst for political mobilisation. I argue here that Çakir’s formulations of a Gagauz Orthodox nation mirrored Romanian national and, more specifically, Orthodoxist discourses. That is to say, the Gagauz elite formulated their representations and imaginings of a Gagauz nation in order to both accommodate, rather than confront, and to mimic, rather than deviate from, the dominant discourses of the majority nation in Greater Romania.