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For the first time in human history during the First World War (1914–1918) a military conflict affected with equal intensity the military and non-combatant population. This study presents the forms of violence against civilians –ethnic Bulgarians, Romanians and others, in Dobrudja during the years 1916–1918 and compares their places in the historiography and collective memory in Bulgaria and Romania from the Great War to our days. Most attention is paid to the deportations of civilians committed by the Romanian authorities before the beginning of hostilities in the area in 1916. The interpretations of the War and the acts of violence are divergent and even opposed south and north of the Danube. The reasons for the conflict and violence are seen mainly in the “court” of the neighbor. However, in both national cases the points of view are based mainly on the same ideological basis − the nationalism that uses history as an instrument of construction and cohesion of the nation. The diversified sources, the distancing from the national discourse and the comparative approach could offer some guarantees to avoid the risks of double standards and speculative uses when dealing with a historical subject as contradictory and dangerous as the violence. The revisions in the national historiographies and politics of memory are the prerequisites for the reconciliation with the troubled past. Examples of such changes already exist in the context of the European integration.
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This article represents a brief analysis of the ways in which Romanian communist (especially the nationalistic-communist) and post-communist historiography has dealt with the onset of hostilities in Dobrodja in 1916 and the Battle of Tutrakan and its consequences. We have worked with around 40 articles and studies, a few collections of documents, several contemporary accounts, as well as a historical novel, all these being representative for the Romanian historiographic discourse before and after December 1989. Generally, the approaches of Romanian historians and researchers range between emphasizing and mitigating. In extreme cases, they even cover up almost entirely Romanian faults and weaknesses from 1916, without trying to provide too many information from Bulgarian sources.
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The article deals with the question of the formation – since the end of World War One until the emergence of the Nazi regime – of various conceptions of the political system in influential and widespread intellectual circles of the so-called revolutionary conservatives who represented nationalist, anti-liberal and anti-parliamentarian views. This political ideology adopted a clearly critical position regarding political, constitutional and legal solutions adopted in the Reich after the fall of the Hohenzollern empire in 1918. Criticizing parliamentary democracy, though not necessarily democracy as such, revolutionary conservatives announced the need to establish a system of dictatorial leadership in Germany, modeled after the rule of Napoleon Bonaparte, oftentimes seeing the then President of the Reich, Paul von Hindenburg, as a suitable person for this role (they rather sporadically perceived Adolf Hitler in this way). Some of them not only approved of an authoritarian model of government understood as an opposition towards the so-called Weimar system, but also accepted the principles of totalitarianism (e.g., C. Schmitt, E. Jünger, E. Niekisch). Since 1933, the Nazis partly adopted the anti-liberal, anti-parliamentarian and authoritarian conceptions of revolutionary conservatives, reaching for – among others – Carl Schmitt’s theory of decisionism or Ernst Jünger’s idea of the total mobilization of the nation.
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This project deals with the times of Suleiman the Magnificent (1522–1566) and the doge Andrea Gritti (1523–1538). However, the basic problem it focuses on is information – the information that Venice collected through its diplomatic envoys in the capital on the Bosporus and which is preserved to this day in the Venetian archives. Of course, the gathering of information on the Turks, the appearance and development of the so-called genre “delle cose dei Turchi” certainly did not first arise at that time. Interest in the subject goes back to Byzantine times and naturally continued after the conquest of Constantinople. Venice was in a most advantageous situation in this respect, for it had knowledge about the territories and its population accumulated over centuries, as well as commercial and economic ties of centuries’ standing with various cities and ports. This knowledge and these skills were handed down over the years by its officials, merchants and diplomats and preserved through documents in its archives. Venice played a major role in collecting information and carrying it over from the East to the West. Merchants were the most active factors in this activity. Subsequently, especially in the 16th century, these processes achieved a completed form with the development of diplomatic practices and the functioning of the Venetian system of governance, developed into numerous offices and chancelleries of the Serenissima. Their most outstanding manifestations were the famous Venetian relazioni – the reports by diplomatic envoys of the Republic, ceremoniously presented to the Senate. The first preserved written texts of this kind date back to the late 15th century.
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The everyday lives of citizens in the early months of the Independent State of Croatia were defined by petition writing more than by any other activity. It was through petitions to state ministries, agencies and local Ustasha authorities that ordinary people sought to gain social advancement, achieve justice and negotiate their dayto- day existences. Cumulatively, they provided officials with a picture—however fragmentary—of public opinion in the state. By contrast, the Serbian and Jewish communities, whom the Ustasha state had targeted for destruction, used petitions as a means of mediating Ustasha terror. Petitions were never just a mode of communication between the state and citizens; they were imbued with subjective meaning. For those included in the envisaged national community, petition writing provided an opportunity to demonstrate that they had been inculcated with the state’s new ideological and cultural orthodoxies, transforming themselves from Croatian citizens into Ustasha subjects; for those “undesired elements” outside the national community, petition writing constituted nothing less than a search for salvation. Yet, paradoxically, it was the state’s “community aliens” who had to demonstrate in their writing the greatest evidence of transformation. In reproducing the language of the state and separating their transformed consciousnesses from other members of their community, they hoped to gain admittance to the national community and avoid terror. The cadre of ambitious young experts and students who poured into state ministries in the spring and summer of 1941 engaged with state ministries and agencies in a very different way, aiming to be active agents in the remaking of society. Nonetheless, they also aimed to provide evidence of their transformation into Ustasha subjects imbued with the state’s values.
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This article presents in brief several rather unusual sources of Balkan social history, placing them into macro-historic context. It refers to three Greek itineraries produced for the needs of itinerant traders, which contain records that could contribute to our better understanding of Balkan national identities formation at the end of 18th and the beginning of 19th century. On the micro level of history these itineraries give us direct information, but viewed from the perspective of macrohistory they become really interesting. The first one of them is a MS written during 1769 and 1773, now at the Elenka and Cyril Avramovi Library Club, Svishtov, Bulgaria. It follows the route Trieste – Brasov via Graz and Vienna. The other two itineraries are printed publications from 1824 and 1829. All these three itineraries together eventually mirror the formation of national identities, the national programs in the Balkans at the time, and all those changes of mentalities that occur during the period.
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The article examines the names of places that are in the village of Troskovo, Blagoevgrad.
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The article searches the historiography roots in the writings of the famous Bulgarian and Russian scholar Marin Drinov (1838–1906). It traces in a retrospective manner the major influences on Drinov’s work – Sergey Solovyev, Osip Bodyansky, Pavel Shafarik, and Feodor Buslayev. The paper also inquires about the teachers of Drinov’s teachers – Nikolay Karamzin, Mikhail Pogodin, Wilhelm Humboldt, Jacob Grimm, and others. The most important phenomena of the historical and linguistic writings of the late 18th and the 19th centuries are treated as well – romanticism, positivism, historicism, German philology, Slavic philology, mythological school, genetic approach, comparative and historical methods in philology, etc. The conclusion outlines the scholarly place of Drinov as a member of a chain of outstanding thinkers, remarkably characteristic for the vast span and the grand magnitude of their research and academic activities.
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The study traces the contacts of the founders of the Bulgarian Literary Society (BLS) Marin Drinov and Vasil D. Stoyanov with the Bulgarian community in Istanbul, where a significant Bulgarian literary, spiritual and political center was formed after the 1840s. Ever since the BLS was founded in Braila in 1869 there was the idea to move its head office to some central town in Bulgaria or to Istanbul in order to be closer to the people and to better meet their educational and cultural needs. This plan remained unfulfilled until 1876 because of the opposition of the revolutionary emigration in Romania and the dissent of the Bulgarians in Istanbul. Only after the Liberation BLS transferred its activity in Sofia, the capital of the Principality of Bulgaria, and thus it was under the new conditions that the original idea of its founders was carried out.
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Professor Marin Drinov doesn’t participate directly in the activity of the Constituent Assembly on the elaboration of the First Bulgarian Constitution (February-April 1879). But he has his own position on the construction of the Bulgarian state, on the state system and government; on the rights and obligations of the deputies, ministers, head of state; on the structure of the National Assembly. His opinion about the Constitution was sent to the Russian emperor’s commissioner Alexander Dondukov-Korsakov in December 1878. The conception of Drinov doesn’t concern the Assembly convened in Tărnovo. Professor Drinov as soon as is associated with forming of a team, which translated from Russia Organic Regulations, transformed in the basic foundation of the Bulgarian the proposed Constitution.
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The publication presents the scientific and everyday relations between the Bulgarian scholar and Professor at Kharkov University Marin Drinov (1838–1906) and the Czech slavist and Librarian of the National Museum Adolf Patera (1836–1912).The relation becomes a mediator of knowledge for the Bulgarians; a mediator of a new concepts in science, culture, Slavic studies etc., whose path starts at the heart of Europe – Bohemia, to reach Bulgarians and affect their worldview. M. Drinov, together with V. D. Stoyanov was greatly influenced by A. Patera and other Czech intellectuals, including in the creation of the Bulgarian Literary Society in Braila. The publication also includes brief biographies of Marin Drinov and Adolf Patera.
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