The issue of mental mapping of Eastern Europe (Wolff 1994), posed during the Enlightenment, and the similar problem of the image of the Balkans as a periphery of Europe (Todorova 1997), are both multifaceted. This paper is dealing with just one of their various aspects – the image of the Balkans as seen from certain typical European view-points and reactions to that image in Bulgaria. The reactions to the images forged somewhere in “Europe” stem from two opposed attitudes, of acceptance and of rejection.
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The paper argues that historic myths and myths of origin, being an essential part of national mythology, are neither the first to emerge nor the only one. Furthermore, as a general rule, there are often several variations of the narration about the past of a nation that are evolving and compete for the dominant position.In an attempt to evade the polemics the author analyses some Bulgarian aspects of the crucial problem about the evolution and competition among these variations of national mythology comparing them with analogical Balkan phenomena. In all these countries there are mythical narrations about the ancient times, about Christian Middle Ages and Byzantium, about the struggle for an independent state, etc. They were arguing for primacy in the beginning; later some ideologists of the nation managed to build one relatively stable synthesis.
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Stephen Greenblatt tells the story of how Poggio Bracciolini, a 15th-century papal emissary, and obsessive book hunter, saved the last copy of the Roman poet Lucretius‘s On the Nature of Things from near-terminal neglect in a German monastery, thus reintroducing important ideas that sparked the modern age. The author analyzes this development in a very broad cultural and philosophical scale. This review presents the monograph of the so-called New Historicism and its possible applications in Bulgarian scholarship.
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This paper examines the dynamics of ideas on the beginnings of Bulgaria, such as were developed by early nationalism in the 18th and 19th centuries. Surveys show that there were different theses which competed tacitly. It is immediately noticeable that the figure of the Founder was imposed with difficulty and relatively late – in fact not until the 20th century. Paisius of Hilendar and the other authors of early histories presented Bulgarians in the context of Biblical history, and thus the beginning of Bulgarian time was associated with Noah and his sons. This idea was not openly attacked by successive generations, but they alternatively associated Bulgarian time and Bulgaria with the medieval kingdom, and especially with the baptism and deeds of Saints Cyril and Methodius. Among pre-Christian rulers, Khan emerges as significant, presented as Law-Maker and great Warrior, but not as Founder. It is typical for the nationalism of any ideological (and not only ideological) structure to strive for extension – in this case to seek its starting point at an ever earlier date. This proces can also be observed in the structures of Bulgarian nationalism: in the second half of the 20th and early 21st centuries there was a clear focus on the time before the Founder Khan Asparukh (7th century), and scholars and journalists still take pleasure in finding older Bulgarian states. However, before the founding of the Principality of Bulgaria (1878), the opposite was true. (Some) representatives of the revolutionary movement in fact rejected the medieval period and preferred to focus on more recent periods, if not on their time itself and even on the immediate future. More or less unexpectedly, this idea was re-vitalised in the late 20th century with the catch-phrase “the most Bulgarian time” associated with the 1870s.
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Barbara Reeves-Ellington, Domestic Frontiers. Gender, Reform, and American Interventions in the Ottoman Balkans and the Near East. Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2013, 214 р. ISBN 978‑1‑55849-981-2
Women in the protestant missions and modernisation in the Balkans.
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The Ottoman legacy is a curious topic in Bulgarian cultural studies. Despite the overall quest for prestigious legacies and heritages (Antique, Thracian, even Byzantine, not to mention Slav and Proto-Bulgarian), it is still neglected and even rejected. Mass consciousness admits some traces and influences in the field of material culture, in cuisine, rarely in traditional costumes and even more rarely in customs. The Ottoman legacy is often seen as a “legacy of shame” from which modern Bulgarians should deliberate themselves. The paper is trying to deal with some aspects of the complex problem of interferences, border phenomena, mechanisms and arguments that deny the Ottoman legacy. It focuses on some cases in which rejection in fact appears to be confirmation, like when one’s own identity is based on the rejection of some other identity (Ottoman, Turk, Muslim) using its proper matrix. Not infrequently own “high” traditions are succeeded by foreign “low” traditions in a text and a situation. In other instances one could trace curious coexistence of rejection and glorification of the alien and Turk in particular. This was typical for some canonical literary works, dedicated to the struggle for national independence (such as the memoirs of Zachari Stoyanov), and for modern text of culture too. The author attempts to see these phenomena in the context of national mythology. All of us are inclined to think of national mythology as built mainly on the basis of narrations of the great ancestors’ glorious deeds. The narrations of suffering and traumatic events that consolidate the community through other mechanism supplement the general picture. It is not so obvious that some important events in which “ours” overcome “enemies” are either missing, or appear later, or are presented modestly. Other victories, either real or easy to imagine, do not have the place we expect them to have. The present paper points at some similar cases in Bulgarian context and some possible explanations. Bulgarian national mythology’s main plot is the abducted treasure narrative – Bulgarians were first and foremost victims and then liberators and avengers. This plot has its inverted mirror image variations in which heroic Bulgarians abducted “other’s” women, books, faith. It had its ground in history, but its presence in national mythology is limited, the reasons for that being rather complex and not so clear. In certain cases they have to do with so called ressentiment. One of these inverted mirror image variations of the abducted treasure plot unexpectedly became actual in the late 20th century in connection with the name change of the Muslims in Bulgaria. These events have enormous myth-generating capacity that can go in diametrically opposed directions and have not yet fully shown its potential.
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