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This article proposes the notion of ‘the Polish dream’ as it appears in Polish literature at the end of the eighteenth century. The Romantic period saw the development of this unique phenomenon and its symbolic meanings. ‘The Polish dream’ thrives until this day. At its centre lies the traumatic experience of Polish history (or, rather, a variety of such experiences). The dream makes it possible to relive this experience and at the same time to construct a symbolic field through which it can be understood; this symbolic field also defines the horizon of activities. In Romantic literature, this field is associated with messianism. What emerges as a result is the oneiric depressive-compensatory position, which is essential to Polish identity, and which can be found in the works of Mickiewicz, Słowacki and Krasiński.
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V marci 1530 Alexej Thurzo takto spomínal na rozhodujúce obdobie po bitke pri Moháči: „Potom, ako sa vznešenému pánovi dostalo na vedomie, že kráľ Ľudovít blahej pamäti zahynul, pokúsili sa ma tak poľský kráľ [Žigmund I. Jagelovský], ako aj vojvoda Ján [Zápoľský] ponukami mnohých odmien nahovoriť na to, aby som sa pripojil k nim, ale vznešená pani kráľovná Mária, sestra jeho veličenstva, ma stále naliehavejšie prosila a žiadala, aby som sa pridal na stranu jeho veličenstva, pričom mi naznačovala, že ak sa záležitosť bude šťastne vyvíjať pre jeho veličenstvo, nik sa nebude tešiť väčšej priazni a nebude viac odmenený, ako ja. Tak som sa, nevšímajúc si iných, pridal k jeho veličenstvu“. O rok neskôr zase napísal kráľovi Ferdinandovi I. nasledujúce: „Verte mi, vaše Veličenstvo, že ak by som sa nebol tak verne držal vášho Veličenstva, záležitosti vášho Veličenstva by boli v Uhorskom kráľovstve nabrali už viackrát iný smer“.
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People in the Middle Ages and in the early modern period suffered from various diseases, injuries, pandemics and older age consequences to a considerably greater extent than nowadays. Many publicists were intrigued by physical and mental health problems of well-known historical figures, though frequently these problems were just unfounded and fabricated tales. Nevertheless, sources of the period contain a lot of information on health issues, diseases and methods of healing. Unwritten, but usual commitment of a noble woman was to attend to health not only of her immediate family, especially children, but also of other people at their court. In many cases detailed descriptions of problems, relatively accurate diagnostics and therapy based on empirical experiences are available. Only few aristocratic women could pride themselves on having their own family doctor in the 16th and 17th centuries. Therefore many noble women considered healing as their hobby and not just as one of their duties.The most popular were obviously midwifery and gynecology. The first exceptionally detailed and well documented treatment of doctor Gaspar Fraxin was performed on his patient Ursula Kanizsay, the wife of palatine. Paleopathological analyses of remains of Elisabeth (Alžbeta) Czobor give us interesting information on her health condition. Secret cures and treatments were handed down for generations and guarded as the most precious family jewels. Every medicine was meticulously recorded into a recipe book. Books of recipes were more a collection of recipes for a particular member of the family and his or her specific health problems rather than a universal collection of medicines and treatments. Also, there were several men who were interested in medical knowledge. Concerns with health issues and curing is one of the many demonstrations of humanistic orientation of Hungarian nobility in the 16th and 17th centuries and attest to general interest in education and inclination to secular way of life.
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The Institute of National Remembrance realized a program "Index of Poles, repressed and killed for assisting Jews during the Second World War". The aim of the program is to identify the names of Polish citizens who lived in the territory of the Republic of Poland before September 1, 1939 and were opressed by the Third Reich military and civilian authorities, its officers and members of the Nazi Party; by the collaborative organizations, for assisting Jewish population.
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The article analyzes the ideas of Nayden Gerov (1823–1900) – Bulgarian public figure and Russian diplomat during the third quarter of the 19th century – about the publishing of a Bulgarian newspaper (in the documents from the mentioned period called ‘gazeta’, ‘journal’ or ‘vestnik’) during the 50s and in the beginning of the 60s. The review of the known data from the sources, which show how Gerov’s ideas are born and how they change, is made in a close relation to the concrete circumstances of the Bulgarian social development during those times – the expansion of the church-national movement after the end of the Crimean war (1853–1856) and after the issuing of the latest reform edict – Hatt-i Hümayun (1856), with which the Sultan guarantees all of his subjects equal religious and civil rights. Because of the similarity between the environment and the circumstances, in which Gerov’s ideas are born, and those, in which the issuing of the ‘Suvetnik’ newspaper in Tsarigrad (Istanbul) occurred in March 1863, a special place in the article is dedicated to the pre-history and the first steps of this Bulgarian newspaper, based on newly discovered archive and published sources. An attempt is made to shed light on Evlogi and Hristo Georgievi’s participation with financial assistance in its issuing, based on the clues, which point to the role of the two Bulgarian merchants in Gerov’s ideas from the second half of the 50s. By the way, the topic about the financing of a periodical issue is a main point in Gerov’s ideas and together with the question about the persona of the editor makes the core of Gerov’s concept about the functions and the meaning of the pre-liberation Bulgarian journalism.
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The centre of this study is the topic of the melting in the Ottoman “cauldron” of those captive aliens who, after their enslavement, filled the ranks of the so-called domestic slaves. In the development of this issue, a more special approach was chosen, with emphasis not on the role of the Ottoman state as a regulator of integration-assimilation processes, but on the slave integration “from below”. The aim is to reveal those specific relationships and interactions between the two sides of the “master-slave” dyad which contributed most to the effective incorporation of the enslaved in the Ottoman society. Regarding the territories included, the study covers the Central Balkan region. It is based on diverse sources, including unpublished Ottoman documents from the Sijiles of the cities of Sofia, Russe and Vidin from the middle of the 16th to the beginning of the 18th century. In the course of her work, the author analyses, in a Central Balkan context, some well-known mechanisms for slave integration (such as Islamization, for example) and a number of others that have been either undeservedly underestimated or completely neglected in specialized studies such as: labour and linguistic integration, marriage, assimilation of the Ottoman style and way of living, creation of a network of contacts in the host society, etc. The socialization of slaves is outlined as a process not only gradual but also lengthy. Starting in the first days of the slave’s stay in Ottoman territory, this process continued to evolve with varying degrees of intensity, defined by a number of factors, including the formal legal status of each individual slave (e.g. mazun, mucatib, mudebber, „ordinary” slave, etc.) The process of socialization was far from ending neither with the Islamization of the slave nor with their emancipation. The article emphasizes the active participation of the slave-owner and his family in all stages of the slave socialization, especially in the post-emancipatory phase when, under Islamic law, the relationship between a former slave and a former master grew into a patron-client relationship. The practical dimensions of these patron-client relationships are revealed through several “case studies”, made on the basis of hereditary inventories of six freed women slaves, died in Sofia in the 1670s.
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In this article, the text of the protocol on the acceptance of the preliminary Bases of Peace, signed by representatives of Russia and the Ottoman Empire on January 19, 1878 in Adrianople, was published in Bulgarian. The analysis of the document shows that this is the first inter-state agreement at the end of the Russian-Turkish War of 1877 – 1878, which envisages the establishment of an autonomous Bulgarian state (Principality of Bulgaria). The boundaries of the Principality are determined according to the principle of the majority of the Bulgarian population, but cannot be less than the limits set by the Constantinople Conference of the Great Powers in 1876.
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The article discusses the main indicators for perceiving Hristo Botev in the public space, by eliciting some of the debates and the attempts for appropriation of his figure. The ideas about the personality, which has in different periods been an occasion for diverse opinions and interpretations, are presented from the perspective of their significance in the culture of memory and of their role in explicating time and identity (Assmann 2001: 20). These notions diverge the figures of correlation to national parameters, but also to unrelated to the initial ideas trends, which is presented in the text with the theme about the appropriations and the popular uses of this character. Separate attention in the article is paid to the monuments dedicated to Hristo Botev in different periods and parts of the country and to the changing emphases in the commemorations to the national hero. The discussed examples outline a comprehensive presentation of different studies on the topic and raise new questions, which are important in view of future research.
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The study mainly examined formal diversity of expressing perfect tense in the system of one west Bulgarian speech outside the Western frontiers of Bulgaria - the speech of ethnic Bulgarians in Golo Brdo, Albania.
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Discussed by his contemporaries through the opposition „own or foreign“, identified by the next generations as a writer from the so-called „Balkanist“ literary line, in his short satirical stories, the Romanian writer Ion Luca Caragiale (1852-1912) demonstrates his sense for the oriental backwardness of the mores from the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Even though Caragiale’s critics attack him for his supposed foreign origin and claimed that made him overly critical of Romanian society, he was not afraid to expose the falsity and to ridicule the Bucharest self-proclaimed elite with their pretentions standing in stark contrast to their trickster approach to life and their nationalist disposition. The „foreign“ Caragiale, with his sense of the peculiarities of the Romanian world, has created remarkable humorous and satirical images of „his own” compatriots and of life in the small Paris.
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The article focuses on the problems of religious and national identity, as well as on the ways and means of their formation through periodic printing in the 1850s and 1860s. The analysis is influenced by Eric Erisson’s ideas of identity-building and typology proposed by Manuel Castells. The majority of the empirical textual material concerns issues of the struggle for an autocephalous Bulgarian church during the Revival, which implies a wider involvement of the problems and conceptual tools of theology and church history. The author uses the theoretical basis of literary history and the history of journalism. The conclusion is that the cultural attributes of confessional identity are based mostly on the idea of equality
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This article examines the Kalmyk Buddhists’ attempt to accommodate themselves to Russia’s imperial setting, where the state religion comprised the Russian Orthodox Church. I address the role of Dambo Ul’ianov, a Buddhist monk from the Don Kalmyk community, and his publication entitled Predskazaniia Buddy o Dome Romanovykh i kratkii ocherk moi puteshestvii v Tibet v 1904–1905 gg (The Prophecies of Buddha on the House of Romanov and a short essay of my journey toward Tibet in 1904–1905) (St. Petersburg, 1913). The Don Kalmyks, one of a number of small groups of Kalmyks in the Caucasian foreland steppe, belonged to the province of the Don Cossack Host. Here, I explore Ul’ianov’s interpretation of a Russian tsar as a Buddhist comparable to a Qing emperor, whom the Buddhists in Tibet, Mongolia, and Manchuria regarded as a Chakravartin, an incarnation of the Bodhisattva, particularly of Manjusri. Although recent works have revealed the multi-confessional nature of the Russian Empire, Buddhism has not been taken seriously as one among the official religions of the empire. When mentioned, Russia’s Buddhism is often seen as a monolithic entity across the country. Scholars tend to ignore regional diversities within Russia’s Buddhism and to presume a uniformity in religious practice between the Buriats in Siberia and the Kalmyk Buddhist followers in the Caucasian foreland. Moreover, they have not paid attention to differences between the Don Kalmyks and the Volga Kalmyks in Astrakhan Province. All these gaps have prevented previous studies from properly contextualizing Ul’ianov’s Prophecies of Buddha within contemporaneous Don Kalmyk society and thus from grasping the message of the writing. The re-initiation of pilgrimages to Mongolia and Tibet was a critical turning point in the process of writing the Prophecies of Buddha. The last pilgrimage of the Kalmyks to Lhasa was in the 1750s. The resurgence of pilgrimages after a century’s interval had a dramatic impact on various aspects of the entire Kalmyk society. Above all, there was a huge intellectual impact, as the Kalmyks had been deprived of the Tibetan Buddhist canon (Kangyur and Tengyur) until this time. In 1877, Don Kalmyk monks first re-attempted a pilgrimage to Tibet: these monks were Roman Manzhikov, Prin Tsedenov, Sharab Lubsan, and Dambo Ul’ianov, the hero of this article. The Russian border control’s blockade of their departure through Kyakhta led their first attempt to end in failure. In their second attempt in 1878, Ul’ianov successfully reached Ikh Khüree (or Urga in Russian) in Mongolia, which became possible as the Don Kalmyks began to flourish in breeding war-horses and had considerable connections with the Russian military. In subsequent years, the isolation of the Kalmyk Buddhist community from the Tibetan Buddhist world remarkably diminished owing to increasing Kalmyk pilgrimages to Ikh Khüree. The pilgrimage movement spread among both the Don and the Volga Kalmyks. Dambo Ul’ianov’s text, Prophecies of Buddha, was a product of his pilgrimage to Lhasa. In 1904, Naran Ulanov, a Don Kalmyk Cosssack captain, along with Ul’ianov, conducted a military mission to open new routes to Lhasa through Russian Central Asia. Although Ul’ianov successfully completed this difficult task, this was also accompanied by Ulanov’s tragic death. In Lhasa Ul’ianov attempted to retrieve numerous valuable Buddhist texts, among which he “discovered” four incredible prophecies of the Buddha and Padmasambhava related to the House of Romanov. The key to interpreting Ul’ianov’s book is the story of two merchant brothers, Tapussa and Bhallika, as noted in the biography of Buddha. The story goes that Tapussa and Bhallika met Buddha under the Rajayatana tree after his Enlightenment. These two merchant brothers became the first lay followers (upāsaka) of Buddhism. As a result of his discovery of the four prophecies, Ul’ianov was convinced that the legendary state of Shambhala was located in the European part of the Russian Empire. According to Ul’ianov, previous Russian tsars were incarnations of Bodhisattva and Chakravartin, ideal universal rulers from the lineage of the King of Shambhala. The Russian emperor and Qing emperor were thus fraternal incarnations of the Bodhisattva. Ul’ianov’s Prophecies of Buddha indicates the difficulties and needs that the Don Kalmyk Buddhists tackled in the Russian Orthodox state. Compared with Buddhist ideology in the Buriat community, it also attests to diversity in Russian Buddhist thinking. Thus, in the second half of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, the re-initiation of pilgrimages shaped numerous Russian Buddhist reformist movements in a decisive way, as represented by the writings of Dambo Ul’ianov.
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