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The Ignominious Slavs, an Imaginary Founder, the Benedictines and a Wild Boar. A Foundation Tradition of the Cistercian Monastery at Pforta to the End of the Fifteenth Century.
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Paweł Rogowski had undertaken a difficult and important task to comprehensively analyse the question of the use of oath in the medieval Polish laws. He discusses the forms and functions of the old oath against its historical and cultural background. His approach, however, is not free of errors and oversimplifications. This review article presents some polemic remarks upon the functioning of the oath in the old Polish laws.
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The paper analyzes the discourse of the so-called „spiritual revival“ in Bulgaria in the interwar period, tracing back the history of various periodicals and organizations with non-material and non-secular aims. The latter are compared and opposed on the base of (non)belonging to the orthodox faith and the institutional basis of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and respectively are seen as two different responses to the increased search for moral and existential alternatives. Thus the orthodox charity promoted by parish confraternities and journals is presented as a platform for legitimizing the intervention of the Church in the social sphere after WWI, while the varied and complex networks of Tolstoists, theosophers, Dunovists, Masons among others, are discussed as blending the individual mystic transformation with a return to the centuries-old folk traditions and to the practices of Christian neo-gnostic sects such as Bogomilism. The paper, however, outlined the common discursive environment of these two branches of the Bulgarian spiritual revival movement, growing from the postwar anti-liberal attitudes and projecting the development and welfare of the society in retroactive, nationalistic terms.
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This article is a short presentation of Iosif Capotă’s biography. He was born on January 24, 1912, in Mărgău (Cluj County). During the Interwar period, he was an active member of the Romanian National Peasant Party. Once the Communist regime took over in Romania the authorities started to pursue him. He went into hiding between 1947 and 1957. Together with Doctor Alexandru Dejeu, he produced anti-communist manifestos that encouraged the population to resist the abuses provoked by the new regime. He was arrested on December 7, 1957, investigated, trialled and condemned to death. The sentence was carried out in Gherla Penitentiary, on September 2, 1958. Even if the group Capotă-Dejeu had a discreet, less provocative attitude, compared to other anti-communist groups active in that period, their actions were important as they kept the hope of change alive among the population.
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U radu se govori o jednom manje poznatom lokalitetu nadgrobnih spomenika „Staro mezarje“, na lokalitetu Babina Luka u općini Kalesija, posebno o „Babinom mezaru“, koji je u mnogo čemu epigrafski karakterističan. Autor ovo svoje istraživanje zasniva na značaju ovog lokaliteta kao dobra kulturnohistorijskog naslijeđa Bosne i Hercegovine, koji do sada nije istraživan pa otuda ni kategorisan kao kulturno-historijski spomenik. Nakon ukazivanja na značaj epigrafskih spomenika kao historijskih izvora, a koji su do sada nedovoljno istraživani, autor donosi nove podatke o ovom lokalitetu nišana, posebno o „Babinom mezaru“ koji je stavio u fokus svoga istraživanja. Dosadašnja uzgredna i površna osvrtanja na ovaj lokalitet nišana, autor mijenja i dopunjava svojim istraživanjima provedenim na samom lokalitetu. Otkriva da se radi o jednom od raritetnih nišana iz prvih decenija osmanske vladavine, sa ucrtanom šakom i sa uklesanim datumom izrade, a sve to potkrepljuje sa više priloga – karata, skica i fotografija, sve to sa osnovnom namjerom da stručnoj i naučnoj javnosti i čitaocima uopće pruži što realniju predstavu o ovom spomeniku kulture, kako bi nadležne institucije poduzele potrebne aktivnosti da se isti kategoriše i time adekvatno zaštiti.
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The historians who studied the historical sources on the Battle of Kosovo, from Ilarion Ruvarac and Ljubomir Kovačević, the founder of critical historiography in Serbia, to Sima Ćirković, who studied the relevant sources during the last decades of the 20th century, concluded that there existed few reliable sources on it. In other words, the critical verification of the reliability of the documents about the Battle of Kosovo has resulted in the fact that we have increasingly less reliable knowledge about it. “
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Stefan Żywotko’s oral history account is a story about almost one hundred years of Polish history from the perspective of a person who was a football player and coach. His account includes, among others, the themes of the interwar Lviv, the II World War, post-war Szczecin, the beginnings of football in Western Poland, and a story about Algeria in the 1970s and 1980s. It is also an interesting source about this person, who has been very successful in sport but is not widely known in Poland.
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Priča o Parryjevoj zbirci ima prethistoriju. Započinje 1923. godine, kada mladi dvadesetjednogodišnji Milman Parry dolazi na studije u Pariz i sluša predavanja kod poznatog lingviste Antoinea Meilleta. On ga nagovara da se ostavi ispraznoga teoretiziranja i zaroni u živu tradiciju usmenoga pjevanja. Meilletovi stavovi o homerskom pitanju, o formulaičnosti epskoga usmenoga izraza u Ilijadi i Odiseji najvjerovatnije su odigrali presudnu ulogu kod mladog američkog homerologa.
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The oral folk prose of Transcarpathia is a valuable source of history and culture of the region. Supplementing the written sources, it has maintained popular attitudes towards events, giving assessments and interpretations that are often different from the official one. In the Ukrainian oral tradition, we find many words borrowed from other languages, in particular Hungarian, which reflects the long period of cohabitation as well as shared historical events and contacts. They also occur in local toponymic legends, which in their own way explain the origin of the local names and are closely linked with the life and culture of the region, contain a lot of ethnographic, historical, mythological, and other information. They are represented mainly by lexical borrowings, Hungarian proper names and realities, which were transformed, absorbed and modified in another system, and, among other things, has served the originality of the Transcarpathian folklore. The process of borrowing the Hungarianisms is marked by heterochronology and a significant degree of assimilation in the receiving environment. It is known about the long-lasting contacts of the Hungarians with Rus at the time of birth of the homeland – the Honfoglalás, as evidenced by the current geographical names associated with the heroes of the events of that time – the leaders of uprisings Attila, Almash, Prince Latorets (the legends Almashivka, About the Laborets and the White Horse Mukachevo Castle). In the names of toponymic legends and writings there are mentions of the famous Hungarian leaders, the leaders of the uprisings – King Matthias Corvinus, Prince Ferenc Rákóczi II, Lajos Kossuth (the legends Matyashivka, Bovtsar, Koshutova riberiya). Many names of villages, castles and rivers originate from Hungarian lexemes and are their derivatives, explaining the name itself (narratives Sevlyuskyy castle, Gotar, village Gedfork). The times of the Tatar invasion were reflected in the legends The Great Ravine Bovdogovanya and The village Goronda. Sometimes, the nomination is made up of two words – Ukrainian and Hungarian (Mount Goverla, Canyon Grobtedie). In legends, one can find mythological and legendary elements. The process of borrowing Hungarianisms into Ukrainian is marked by heterochronology, meanwhile borrowings remain unchanged only partially, and in general, they are assimilated in accordance with the phonetic and morphological rules of the Ukrainian language. Consequently, this is a creative process, caused by a number of different factors –social, ethnocultural, aesthetic, etc. In the course of time, events and characters in oral narratives are erased from human memory, so they can be mixed, modified and updated, adapting to new realities.
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This paper is not properly an extensive historiographical study, but an attempt to sketch the profile of the post-communist Romanian historiography highly influenced by a sort of ethnic nationalism combined with anti-Semitism which affected also the perspective on the history of Interwar Romanian Jewish community. I have reviewed only a few of the works that came out after 1989, selecting especially those that one considered relevant both generating significant debates, disputes, and representing inflection points in the post-communist historical writing. This field of academic study was decisively changed only by Truth Commissions such as the International Commission for the Study of the Holocaust in Romania and by translations into Romanian of relevant Western secondary literature.
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During the first half of the 19th century, mainly due to political and economic reasons, the process of settlement of Bulgarians in Ottoman Salonica intensified and a Bulgarian national community was formed there. This article aims to present the sea through the eyes of the Bulgarians who lived or visited Salonica in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The text analyzes the different points of view presented in the Bulgarian memoir and fiction.
More...The 6th ‘Vânători’ Regiment – A Case Study (II)
This article continues to follow the 6th ‘Vânători’ Regiment’s itinerary from the summer of 1941, after the slaughtering of the Jews in Sculeni. Its advancing in Bessarabia meant the crossing of a territory where large Jewish communities lived. The entire edifice of ideology and propaganda that equated the Jewish identity with the affiliation to communism, one that the military supported earnestly, was used to bring the Romanian troops to and keep them in the right state of mind. The article aims at describing in detail the operating mode, the criminal actions, and the subordination and coordination relationships from within one of the units of the 14th Infantry Division, that committed mass murders during the first few months after the launching of Operation ‘Barbarossa’.
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Local communities function as dynamic living organisms. Their existence is in balanced forms; therefore, the local names, along with the ancient language forms and nominations reveal also the modern dimensions of space. Toponyms contain the historical memory of Oryahovo and its area and of the people living there. They contain real and imagined events and remain therefore important for the people here regardless of the time that has passed and the changes that have happened. The toponyms that were collected have a distinct presence of Turkish and Wallachian names that were mostly inherited. The names given in modern times are on the basis of the Bulgarian language. The local names describe a situation that should be recorded because it reflects an earlier way of life the names in which represent its spatial delineation. Today, part of what has been preserved and recorded can be recognized only in the present publication; that is the reason why the registered onyms tell the history of the area. Part of that history is the locality named Stalbat (The Pole), a 30 m iron pole transferring electricity from the Kozloduy Nuclear Power Station to Romania. There are no electrical wires across the river any longer, and the poles are part of the memory of a period in the past. “The Romanians take care of their pole. They repainted it last year, while ours is all rust, forgotten” (St. M.). That peculiar token of the era manifests its capacity to use familiar shapes and places to construct the inhabited place. Similar functions can be seen in Esperanto Island on the Danube. It is not that much because of its exotic name but rather because of the practiced models of everyday life and entertainment well known to everybody in the area. In the socialist era, there was a restaurant on the island where they organized parties and Neptune celebration events. That made it a local emblem, related at the same time with modernization practices and active life on the Danube. The young Chateau Bugrozone winery is a significant element of the modern economy. The establishment has even marked its territory with signs showing the beginning and the end of the place where it is. Making unquestionable quality wine, it is nearly invisible in the life of the town. The vineyards are referred to as “the old fame of Oryahovo” (MM); nevertheless, the winery is not mentioned in any of the interviews with the local people. Most probably, that indicates non-matching audiences and a failure in assigning meaning to the local products. Fish and fishermen are an essential component of the culture of this area, and there are a relatively large number of people and places related to the river and the fishing in it. Their stories describe surroundings and a lifestyle showing intangible cultural heritage elements. The present research dwells on the fishing community, with a comprehensive examination of the multitude of components that build the community, and its links with the town and the area. The examination includes the shape of the gravestones in the area as well as the images of the heritage specific to Oryahovo. Field ethnographic studies of particular areas normally evolve in efforts to identify the special ethno-cultural traits of the local population. The former administrative structures, known as counties, are often used to mark the scope of a research. In the Post-Liberation period, counties were formed largely on the basis of the logic of the natural pre-modern life of the local communities forming their own market centers, or towns that turned into their centers. Oryahovo was also a county centre that encompassed territories of the contemporary municipalities of Oryahovo and Kozloduy. The strategic development of the town was promoted by the inauguration of the Cherven Bryag-Oryahovo railway. Although narrow-gauge, that line was sufficient to link the area to the central section of Northern Bulgaria, hence to the capital city and other cities. Oryahovo does not have a direct communication with a large urban centre because there is none at a small distance, not even on the northern side of the river. Its existence therefore has been related to the traditional communication with the neighboring settlements with which it built a joint nomination system, as seen in the toponym research made by Ivalina Vasileva. The Danube River, along with land farming, has been and still is the main business potential of the area where the port and the fishing are the livelihood of many of the local people. We will add here a number of ship mills built by Hungarian migrants; knowing the technology of setting up such facilities on the Middle Danube, they transferred them to the Bulgarian section of the river. Their presence was impressive for the local population. Therefore, the ship mills have remained in the toponym picture of the area despite the fact that nobody remembers them any longer. Territory-based research today is just one of the approaches to research work today. Today, we have a variety of approaches to choose from. We will also include the story of the cultural landscape and the ideas of what heritage is for the local communities in order to outline past and modern cultural tradition forms, and the system of transferring knowledge and values revealing the unity between man and nature. In this particular case there is a specific cultural space; reading it through the “Locus and Universum” (Zhivkova, Zhivkov 2001) will enable us to see what unites people rather than what separates people. The progress of our exploration – along with the recorded names of localities and sites, and those mentioned in the numerous interviews – will reveal the local names that everybody knows, shared spaces and topoi that have become visual memory markers, parts of the town and segments of the river related to the local knowledge, cultural practices, fishing skills or local cuisine. That way, the simultaneous existence of elements will be outlined, and the territory markers – characters, heroes, places of memory, market places and roads – will stand out. We will see, in its full variety of colors, the ethnological picture of the area. The research of the area toponyms and the fishing communities on the Danube does not present images of the daily life and the culture of the constellation of town-dominated settlements that make the area of Oryahovo. The research aims at focusing on the cultural heritage of this area, on the valorized forms of the past systematic realization of pre-modern culture linked to folklore beliefs and Christian ideas that are equally known in by village and town people. They are the factors that help today's residents in Oryahovo area to recognize their own local nature and individuality in the places they live in, the food they eat, the celebrations with which they want to show they are different from everybody else, or in their skills and knowledge about the river and the wild life in it. These places of memory and forms of inherited knowledge, emblematic in their manifestation, have become today local heritage that can be found in the daily life and the celebrations of the people in the Oryahovo area; that is what they need in order to distinguish their identity in the dynamic changes in our modern world. SOURCES: Zhivkova, Zhivkov 2001: Zhivkova, V., T. Iv. Zhivkov. Lokus i universum. Dobrodan, planinata – mitologia i .... Pub. “Alya”, Sofia.
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The list of memoirs and diary materials concerning prisoners of German camps and forced labourers in East Prussia, located in the library of the North Institute of W. Kętrzyński in Olsztyn was drawn up on the basis of the current library catalogue based on the study of Zbigniew Fras – Diary materials in the collection of the W. Kętrzyński Scientific Research Centre in Olsztyn. Which are an addition information collected mainly on special harvest located in library of North Institute after year 1985. The purpose of this thematic summary was primarily to collect and update the documentation to the current state of knowledge, to explain the differences between the study of Fras, the catalogue and the facts, and to correct the noted errors.
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The present article offers a new framework for understanding the early East European post-war that introduces and conceptualizes the idea of “Void Communities.” The core of the argument is that the disappearance of various groups of Others—ethnic, religious, and class—was one of the most important consequences of the Second World War for Central and Eastern Europe, and particularly for Poland and Ukraine. The Void left by those who had disappeared could be described on several levels, such as physical absence, social and economical dysfunctionality, transformation of the social structure and stratification, property transfer, decline of moral values and norms, and changes in local culture and traditions. Based on an extensive oral history research (of more than 150 interviews) and in-depth reading of ego documents, the article prioritizes the first-hand perspective of witnesses and centres on those who remained in the post-war Void Communities after their neighbours had been murdered, deported, resettled, or encouraged to leave semi-voluntarily. While the paper primarily focuses on the historical region of Galicia, now divided between Poland and Ukraine, the source material used to analyze the framework for Void Communities includes documents associated with the entire pre-war Polish Second Republic.
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Review of: Илья Утехин - Otto Boele, Boris Noordenbos, and Ksenia Robbe, eds. Post-Soviet Nostalgia: Confronting the Empire’s Legacies. New York: Routledge, 2019. 244 pp. ISBN 978-0-36733-265-5.
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The article is based on oral historical sources and oral memories and examines the historical experience of the professional activities of Soviet women who worked in the train control service of the Belgorod Branch of the Southern Railway (Ministry of Railways of the USSR) in the late 1960s and 1980s, as a form of women’s leadership and gender equality formation (the erosion of male dominance) in the manufacturing sector. Specifically, the influence of the profession (working conditions, content of daily work practices, working rhythm, professional self-awareness) on the formation of a particular gender identity among women railway workers is investigated. An analysis of historical material makes it possible to supplement and significantly expand our understanding of how the “new type” of Soviet women, with an independent economic and social status, was formed in the late Soviet period. The materials constitute the informational basis for preserving information about the labor feats of women working at the railroad in the historical memory of Russian people; they open up new heroines, whose personal and professional lives are the subject of the formation in modern society of a positive attitude towards the female presence in the managerial segment of the engineering and technical sphere.
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The paper problematizes the ways in which the performative speech act of the verses twelve and thirteen in the Bosniak ballad “Hasanaginica” has been interpreted and translated in its English target texts. The performative speech act is analyzed in the light of J. Austin’s Speech Act Theory, along with certain rules in Sharia law regarding irrevocable divorce (al-baynuna al-kubra). Aiming to raise awareness of the importance of style in translation, the paper further confirms the value of the results obtained through linguo-stylistic analysis of the texts involved.
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In the first half of the twentieth century, immigrants left oral and written testimonies of their experience in the United States, many of them housed in various ethnic-American archives or published by ethnic historical societies. In 1942, the Yiddish Scientific Institute in New York City encouraged Jewish-American immigrants to share their life stories as part of a written essay contest. In 2006, several of these autobiographical accounts were translated and published by Jocelyn Cohen and Daniel Soyer in a volume entitled My Future Is in America. Thus, this essay examines the autobiographies of two Jewish-American immigrant women, Minnie Goldstein and Rose Schoenfeld, with a view to comparing how their gendered identity (as women and as members of their families) has impacted their choices and lives in their home countries and in the United States in the first part of the twentieth century.
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