Skyscapes and Sky Events – Geography of Uncertainties in the Balkans (17th–18th centuries)
Skyscapes and Sky Events – Geography of Uncertainties in the Balkans (17th–18th centuries)

Summary/Abstract: This paper presents narrative sources from the Balkans, in order to supplement and confirm the established chronology of astronomical phenomena during the 17th and 18th centuries. Leaving aside the history of physics, this reconstruction is more about social and cultural history of this region. Chroniclers, known and anonymous, either copied these records from older authors or they wrote as eyewitnesses of the sky events. The effort is made to contextualize them into their cultural and social background, detecting the connections – historical, empirical, conceptual, theoretical, symbolic, and experiential, between the natural phenomena they witnessed and described, and their living and working circumstances. Without the wide use of the printing press, the data from these manuscripts were seeded much slower than in the rest of Europe, and while the impact of the observed phenomena remains largely unknown, comparison of sentiments with the European contemporaries is possible.

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