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Excerpt of the novel Der Weltensammler (The Collector of Worlds), Munich, 2006
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Excerpt of the novel "Prawiek i inne czasy" (translated by Zsuzsa Mihályi)
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Excerpt of the novel On September 1, 1938, at a fashionable swimming pool in Levice in the centre of Europe, three thirteen-year-old adolescents – Hungarian, Czech and Jewish – decided to compete in a swimming competition to win a claim over a Slovak blonde, Mária. The three friends’ contest for love is repeated in virtually every year of the novel’s progress, but the race never ends in victory. The novel rushes its characters onward through political tribulations, but never allows them to finish the fateful race. Even though the characters’ lives are filled with incredible events, they are never filled with the most sacred emotion of them all – love. Nobody wins Mária and Mária, the most innocent, loses all
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Excerpt from the novel Deixem Passar o Homem Invisível” (Let the Invisible Man Go Through, Dom Quixote, 2009) narrates the story of a blindman and a child who get washed down the Lisbon sewage system during a flood.
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Belarus experts look in vain for a Rosetta Stone to decipher the enigma of Alyaksandr the Great.
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Serbs who want to use the country’s Freedom of Information Act are finding that a law is only as good as its application.
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Whether struggling to find educational materials for children or teaching adults how to read, the Lezgi of Azerbaijan are trying to keep their identity alive.
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Why, unlike their predecessors, are Russia's student extremists targeting the powerless rather than the powers-that-be?
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A new, unified EU Balkan aid package is in the cards. It's simpler than the existing five programs, but some argue it's less phare.
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This article addresses neumatic signs in the Chrysantine system of musical notation (from 1814), which are part of the class of aphona neumes (great hypostasis), according to late Byzantine neumatic classification. In the neumatic system created by Chrysantos of Madytos, the reformer of Byzantine notation during the Balkan National Revival, out of the nearly 60 aphona neumes only seven were preserved, which functioned as “decorative” signs. They showed “how to ornament the voice and what variations to make in order to introduce beauty into singing” (according to Petur Dinev in his “Handbook for Modern Byzantine Neumatic Notation,” published in Sofia in 1964). Definitions by Bulgarian and Greek publishers from the 19th and 20th centuries are studied regarding the meaning of neumatic signs such as bareia, psefiston, homalon, antikenoma, heteron, entophonon, and stavros. The author concludes that the performative aspect of monophonic liturgical singing from the Revival period onward was not precisely defined, but rather varied according to knowledge about the oral chant tradition. In the author’s opinion, the publications consulted represent only a small fraction of performative possibilities, with the remainder being filled in by Psaltes themselves according to the singing school where there were educated or according to their personal knowledge and preference with regards to tradition. It is this that constitutes the richness and beauty of that “unique art form inspired by God in its very essence,” which has been preserved in Balkan Eastern Orthodox churches.
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This paper traces the understanding of the concept “singing schools” during the Bulgarian Revival Period, taking into account the definition offered by the prominent Bulgarian authority on liturgical singing Petur Dinev (1889-1980). According to his definition, a liturgical singing school refers to a clearly local but Churchill song practice that can be distinguished by its particular manner of interpretation. The author traces the development of the Balkan liturgical singing tradition from the second half of the 17th century, when the process of so-called “musical exegesis”, which was, in the author’s opinion, a process of decoding the previously encoded system of knowledge within the realm of a turtle music. The goal of this decoding was to preserve the tradition. The major schools are identified, i.e. the centers of Bulgarian Orthodox music: Rila Monastery, which played a fundamental role in the founding of contemporary Bulgarian monophonic but Churchill singing in the Church Slavic language; Bachkovo Monastery; and the Zograf and Hilendar monasteries on Mount Athas. The author also adds to the list of monasterial schools for Bulgarian singing the Ukrainian Great Skit monastery (in the village of Manyavsky, Lvov Region) in eastern Carpathians, which was the center of a song style called “Bolgarskij rospev”.Urban liturgical singing schools are also examined, including those in Veliko Tumovo, Sliven, Koprivshtitsa, Ohrid, Struga, Thessaloniki, and Odrin. He also lists the names of the most prominent figures in the singing schools and briefly outlines their activities. The author concludes that despite the tendency toward stylistic unification in liturgical singing after the appearance of printed songbooks, even in the 20th century individual performances of specific regional musical expressions still have a place. This conclusion reinforces the basic principle that the strength of national unity is founded on the richness of regional variety.
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Bulgaria’s acceptance of Christianity in 864 marked the beginning of its monasteries, which are a basic form of the organization ofreligious life. After the advent of Slavic literacy, they became centers and active distributors of medieval culture. During the Ottoman period and up until the beginning of the 19th century, they were the only cultural institutions that had libraries and that preserved Bulgarian linguistic and spiritual traditions. In a number of monasteries literary and Damaskin homily schools arose, creating conditions conducive to the development of various types of art, including wood carving, icon painting, fresco painting and miniatures. Music as a specific kind of art, in that it is temporal rather than spatial, was primarily developed inland the large monastic centers. Over the centuries the rich usual life and vigorous literary activity of Rila Monastery led to the formation of an impressive manuscript collection, which also eventually included printed books. The monasteries singing school adapted late Byzantine musical models, judging from the numerous Greek musical manuscripts from the second half of the 18th century that are preserved in the library and which are notable for their rich song repertoire. Church Slavic musical manuscripts are important evidence of the historical role played by monks at Rila, as well as being a valuable source of information about the Revival-era musico-historical process. The carefully selected collection of printed Greek anthologies bears witness to the fact that the acceptance of new elements in the development of Eastern Orthodox church music (the New Method system) led to specialized and deliberately selected musical activity. During the 19th century the Rila song school was an important musical and creative center which gave rise to chance that is notable for its unique characteristics.
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This article observes fundamental problems linked to the liturgical, musical and hymnographical tradition of Saints Cyril and Methodius, as they have reflected in a number of musical and hymnographical codices. An analysis is undertaken of the most important medieval theological and liturgical evidences from the 9th to the 12th centuries when the liturgical practice of the Eastern Slavs became established as part of the practice of the Byzantine Church. It was time when the new liturgical language-the Old-Bulgarian evolved and disseminated due to the prestige of the Holy brothers Saints Cyril and Methodius and their disciples.
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Intrigued by the thematic motif in the Vita of St. John Koukouzeles telling about the creation of the work Polyeleos of the Bulgarian Woman, which is said to have been inspired by his mother’s lamentations, Professor M. Velimirovich discovered in the Polyeleos repertory of late Byzantine manuscripts three melodies whose headings are connected with Bulgaria: the melody “e boulgara” (The Bulgarian Woman) in the first authentic mode (in the repertoire associated with Psalm 134) and two melodies called “boulgarikon” (Bulgarian) in the fourth and the second plagal modes (between the melodies for Psalm 135). In the first half of this report the melody “e boulgara” is traced in manuscripts from the 14th and 15th to the 17th 18th centuries, with comments about its various attributions: it was originally attributed to John Glykys, but from the end of the 16th century on was attributed to John Koukouzeles. The phonetic variants of the headings are also discussed. The melody used to sing various verses from Psalm 134, and it is especially frequently connected with verse 13b. The analysis in the context of the late Byzantine polyeleos repertoire reveals the periodic repetition of melodic sections in both of its parts. Special attention is given to development of the repeating melodic episode that modulates within the second authentic mode (through a corresponding sign for modal change phtora). The hypothesis is suggested that the appearance of the heading “The Bulgarian Woman” is due to this unusual episode in melodic development that adds a crying intonation and most probably “imitates Bulgarian lament” (which corresponds to Dokeian’s heading written above a kratema): thus, the “e boulgara” melody falls under the practice of intonational mimesis, characteristic for the period when musical manuscripts included headings connected with intonational realia (such as instrumental sounds or natural sounds). On the basis of this analysis, a melodic connection is sought between the Renaissance version Polyeleos of the Bulgarian Woman by John Koukouzeles (which underwentthe changes of musical “exegesis” in the post-Byzantine period) and the medieval melody “e boulgara.” The existence of a link between the heading and the thematic motif in the life of St. loan Kukuzel is accepted. The second half of this report traces in manuscripts from the same time the two others “Bulgarian” (boulgarikon) melodies. An analysis of these melodies in the context of polyeleos repertoire of Psalm 135 once again reveals the same compositional peculiarity: the existence of periodic repetition in the ordering of combined melodic episodes; this repetition is particularly clear in the “boulgarikon” melody in the second plagal mode, in which the series of melodic episodes is repeated four times. The definitions that also frequently accompanied these two melodies, dysikon “western” are also analyzed, as they also most probably refer to the region of the Balkans. The hypothesis is suggested..
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This article presents connections between palaeography of the textual ductus (stylistic tendencies) and the writing of the notation in the 12th and 13th centuries. A number of identifications of the sources that are the work of only one scribe are discussed, and the links between groups of manuscripts are established. In the first part of the paper the connections between several groups of manuscripts are pointed out: the sticherarion Rizov F1650k/op4/3 and the heirmologion Lavra Beta 32; the catenas on Paul’s Epistles Oxford Magd. MS. Gr. 7 and the praxapostol Dujcev gr. 369; the sticherarion Sinai gr. 1218, the psaltikon Patmos 201 and the tipikon Patmos 265. The newly discovered source (Sticherarion Rizov F 1650k/op4/3) containing the earliest stages of both types of Palaeo Byzantine notation (Coislin I and Chartres I) is presented. A hypothesis uniting the sources on the basis of the medieval scribe’s notion to prepare a standardized service corpus is suggested.
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