Page - 354 - in Der griechisch-orientalische Religionsfonds der Bukowina 1783–1949 - Kontinuitäten und Brüche einer prägenden Institution des Josephinismus

354 Die Institution: Struktur & Werte institution lost its flexibility and cooperative agency (dynamic factor). This also meant the deepening loss of its characteristic role as mediator of socio-political collective inter- ests in the Bukovina, a role it had played from its foundation.14 During the dictatorship of the monarch and the war, with just a short break of ultimately unsuccessful efforts by metropolitan V. Puiu, the process of political and economic disenfranchisement of the Fund resumed and intensified. This development culminated, when Romania left the war, in the occupation by the Red Army. A Soviet-Romanian timber company, Sov- romlemn, was established and issued coercive orders which amounted to the de facto expropriation of the Religious Fund and the Church and the definitive deprivation of the rights of their self-administration bodies. The dissolution in 1948 of the Bukovina Romanian-Orthodox Religious Fund by the People’s Republic of Romania was largely a formal last step. For more than 150 years the Religious Fund had shaped the economic and social devel- opment of the Bukovina  – especially from the mid-19th century onwards  – as a central player. Regardless of any obstacles they encountered, parts of the institution proved to be remarkably persistent. The orientation efforts of the Fund became more significant than the purely regulative tasks the state envisaged when the Fund was established. To the extent that the Religious Fund took on state values or brought them in line with its own vision and opened itself to the general political discourse on issues of the nation, its institutional credibility was subject to a process of permanent legitimation : vis-à-vis the Church as a whole, its representatives, against the Co-Nationals and the state. When the parameters of the state context changed markedly post-1918, the Religious Fund fell into a sustained crisis because of its characteristics and the values transported through them. The new, now bigger, Romanian state had been called for only by some of the ac- tors within Church and Fund, but both had opened themselves increasingly to the pub- lic debate about it since the turn of the century. The supposed congruence of national values with this state now unexpectedly turned into the death sentence of the institution. Its autonomy and room for manoeuvre soon shrank in the completely different structure of the political system of the monarchy. An essential part of the orientation provided by the Fund was linked to the emergence and day-to-day life of a regional awareness and the idea of a degree of decision-making power and agency. In terms of regulation and orientation, the existence and continuity of the Religious Fund as an institution depended on the functioning interaction, at roughly eye level, with the development of the state. 14 I owe these two references to Ao. Univ.-Prof. Dr. Harald Heppner and Priv.-Doz. Dr. Norbert Span- nenberger, given at the Innsbruck Workshops of 27/28 November 2014. Open Access © 2020 by BÖHLAU VERLAG GMBH & CO.KG, WIEN