ABSTRACT
When its town theatre was completed in 1810, Odessa was in its infancy. It had been founded by an edict of Catherine II in 1794 and was designed to be the showpiece of Novorossiya and, along with Sevastopol and Mykolayiv, an important Russian outlet to the Black Sea. Tbilisi was certainly the most sizeable and influential city within the eastern hinterland of the sea during the 19th century. Both Europeanisation and nationalism were in turn supported and strengthened by a Paris-orientated intelligentsia in both Iasi and Bucharest. During the first half of the 19th century, the aristocratic audiences at the Romanian theatres invariably presented themselves as modern and European, and the theatres relied heavily on the higher boyars for financial support.
