BOOK REVIEWS IOAN BOLOVAN and RUDOLF GRÄF, eds. Istoria Banatului: Compendiu (A history of Banat: A compendium) 2 nd edition, rev. and enl. Commendation by Acad. IOAN-AUREL POP Foreword by Acad. DAN DUBINÃ Cluj-Napoca: Centrul de Studii Transilvane; Editura ªcoala Ardeleanã, 2023 In 2023, Timișoara held the honorable title of “European Capital of Culture,” which occasioned the organization of nu- merous artistic, cultural, musical, scientific- academic and spiritual-religious events in- tended specifically to illustrate and popula- rize the rich cultural heritage of Timișoara in particular and of the Banat region in general. The dynamics of this pursuit to rediscover and highlight the beauty of this European and local cultural capital would have been incomplete without the histori- ans and without specialized historiography in Romanian and German, representing two of the four great cultures that have left a fundamental mark on the historical de- velopment of the city on the Bega River and of the region between the Danube, the Tisza, the Mureș, and the Southern Carpathians. Thus, in the first half of the year 2023, the following volumes were issued by the Friedrich Pustet publishing house of Regensburg: Kleine Geschichte des Banats: Umkämpfte Grenzen im östli- chen Europa, by Irina Marin of Utrecht University, and Temeswar/Timișoara: Eine kleine Stadtgeschichte, by historians Konrad Gündisch and Tobias Weber, both aimed at the German-speaking general public ea- ger to (re)discover the history of Timișoara and of the border region of Banat, located at the confluence of several cultures, reli- gious denominations, ethnic groups and states in Southeast Europe. To their credit, contemporary historians from Banat and Transylvania did not fail to keep up with their abovementioned West- ern-European colleagues and, under the coordination of Professors Ioan Bolovan and Rudolf Gräf of Babeș-Bolyai Univer- sity of Cluj-Napoca, who are also direc- tors of the George Barițiu Institute of His- tory of Cluj-Napoca and of the Romanian Academy’s Institute of Social Sciences and Humanities in Sibiu, created the first com- pendium of its kind, i.e., a synthetic expo- sition of the history of Banat from Antiq- uity to contemporary times. It is precisely in this scholarly enterprise that the origi- nality or novelty of the historiographical- editorial project lies, namely, in the fact that it is the first synthetic, unitary presen- tation in Romanian of the history of Banat from ancient times up to the present, the compendium being mainly intended for the general public and less so for special- ists, whose representatives are very well acquainted with the rich and diverse his- torical literature, both old and new, avail- able in Latin, German, Romanian, Ser- bian, and Hungarian, which depicts well- defined and clearly outlined historical eras and periods, with a clear predilection for Roman Antiquity (thanks to the efforts of Banat archaeologists) and the Modern Era, marked by the major transformations