The Institute for South-East European Studies (ISEES) of the Romanian Academy has obtained one of the prestigious ERC Advanced Grant – the first of its kind in Romania – within the program Horizon 2020 of the European Research Council. The European grant financially supports the Romanian project Early Arabic Printing for the Arab Christians. Cultural Transfers between Eastern Europe and the Ottoman Near-East in the 18^th Century (TYPARABIC), conducted by Ioana Feodorov, PhD, Senior Researcher with the ISEES. The Project is developed by an international team comprising 12 researchers of Romanian and other countries: France, Lebanon, Turkey, Ukraine, and the USA.

The members of the Project Core Team are researching the context and the outcomes of printing liturgical, patristic, and polemical works in Arabic, in the 18^th century, in the Ottoman provinces of the Eastern Mediterranean, for the Christian Arabs who followed the Byzantine rite and for the Catholics. They are achieving an in-depth analysis of the connections between the Romanian Principalities and other East-European states, on one hand, and the Arabic-speaking Christians of the Ottoman Empire, on the other, in the perspective of the social progress brought to the Near East by the printing culture, to which the Romanians essentially contributed. First, the research focuses on the printing-technology transfer from Wallachia and Moldavia to the Eastern lands governed by the Sublime Porte, for the benefit of the Arabic-speaking Christians. Second, a systematic, commented catalog will be prepared for the Arabic books printed between 1701 and 1800 in the Romanian Principalities, in present-day Syria and Lebanon, and the neighboring countries.

Other connected topics of the Project are: the context of the foundation and functioning of the Arabic-type presses in the territories under the Ottoman rule or suzerainty; connections between the faithful of the Byzantine-rite Church of Antioch with Moldavia and Wallachia through travelers and the circulation of the early Greek printed books and manuscripts; the function of printing in preserving the Christian tradition and the penetration of Arabic in the church services, a process contemporary with the penetration of Romanian in the church books of the Romanian lands; contribution of the foundation of the first Aleppo and Beirut presses to the rise of the Renaissance movement of the Christian Arabic culture towards 1820.

The Host Institution, Institutul de Studii Sud-Est Europene, ISSEE (Institute for South-East European Studies in Bucharest, ISEES), is dedicated to multidisciplinary research areas, focusing on the study of South-Eastern Europe and the Ottoman East: history, society, languages, literatures, minorities, arts, the religious and confessional landscape.

The Institute for South-East European Studies has developed for more than a decade and a half, under the supervision of dr. habil. Ioana Feodorov, programs dedicated to the cultural relations of the Romanians with the Arabic-speaking Christians of the East-Mediterranean Ottoman provinces (Greater Syria). The Principal Investigator of the ERC AdG TYPARABIC Project, dr. Ioana Feodorov, has been devoted to the Arabic Christian culture for more than two decades. In the footsteps of the precursors who distinguished themselves in this field (Nicolae Iorga, Marcu Beza, Virgil Cândea e.a.), several research projects in progress, with the contribution of Romanian and foreign experts, focus on the edition and translation of Arabic manuscripts concerning the Romanians’ history and descriptive catalogs of the Oriental manuscript collections of the Romanian Academy Libraries in Bucharest and the Cluj Branch.