Ştefan Petrescu, The Greeks and Romania’s minority policy
The aim of this article is to analyse the dynamics of the Greek immigrants’ integration in Romania during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the context of the nationstate building, the Greek emigration in Romania was institutionalized. The communities wanted to obtain full autonomy in relation to the authorities of the Romanian State. The official documents of the Romanian State used the term of ‘Greek communities’, although they were not treated like legal entities.
The Greeks feared not only the interference of the Romanian or Greek authorities in their domestic problems, but also any conflicts within the community that could have caused legal problems related to the ownership right over real estate goods. The matter of acknowledging the legal person capacity of the Greek communities was not only an issue of legal nature, but rather a political one. In 1900 and 1931, the Romanian government signed the bilateral commercial conventions and the attached protocols to acknowledge the legal status of the Greek communities in Romania.