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Disent mezi politikou paměti a digitální historií: Ke vzniku online databáze "Bibliografie ekologické a environmentální problematiky v československém samizdatu"

Author(s): Petra Loučová,Doubravka Olšáková / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2024

This study focuses on the possibilities and limits of contemporary history research within the transformation of the humanities and social sciences influenced by new information technologies and the digital turn. The authors present the main trends of digitization policy in the Czech Republic in the context of the social debate on coming to terms with the communist past and in the context of professional discussions on the possibilities of the use of bibliographic datasets in the digital humanities. They focus on the role of digitization in the objectification of historical knowledge and its potential use as a tool for new interpretations of historical data, focusing first on the contrast between digitization from below, represented by the social activist digitization of samizdat texts on the initiative of individuals (typically former dissidents) or civic associations, and digitization from above, in the form of the statesponsored and institutionalised digitization of sources of state provenance (mainly materials of the security services of the Czechoslovak communist regime). In the second part of the article, the authors present the newly emerging online database “Bibliography of Ecological and Environmental Issues in Czechoslovak Samizdat” in the context of the current research on Czechoslovak dissent and bibliographic processing of samizdat texts. Using this example, they argue that bibliographies, which are among the traditional tools and aids of historical research, have a great potential for use in digital humanities and thus in digital history, although this potential is still unexploited in contemporary history.

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Digitální studovna Ministerstva obrany ČR: Využití technologií na pokročilou indexaci obsahu historických dokumentů

Author(s): Marek Fišer,Tomáš Kykal / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2024

Developments in information technology and artificial intelligence are providing tools that have considerable potential to facilitate and enrich research in the fields of history and related sciences. A prerequisite for their effective use, however, is the most perfect conversion of analogue historical sources into machine-readable form, so that the search, classification and extraction of the information contained in them is as efficient as in born-digital sources. In their study, Kykal and Fišer first provide an overview of the development of digital libraries and the making available of the results of digitization in the Czech Republic, taking into account the different strategies and technological backgrounds of libraries and archives. They reflect on the limitations of full-text search and point out a surprising systemic deficit in current digital libraries, namely the absence of the diagnostics of the quality of machine transcription performed by Optical Character Recognition (OCR) programs. They then pay special attention to presenting the parameters and possibilities of the Digital Reading Room of the Ministry of Defence of the Czech Republic (Digitální studovna Ministerstva obrany ČR, DSMO), which is based on the Kramerius Digital Library system. Thanks to its role as an aggregator of the digitization production of the memory institutions of the Ministry of Defence, the Reading Room makes available both library documents and digitized items from archive collections and museum collections. Using the example of a printed periodical of the Austro-Hungarian Army from the First World War, the process of the additional enhancement of OCR results using the PERO tool (Czech abbreviation for pokročilá extrakce a rozpoznávání obsahu – Advanced Extraction and Recognition of Content) is presented, including enrichment with a metadata scheme which captures the layoutof graphic and text objects (Analysed Layout and Text Objects, ALTO) and allows the precise localization of the searched text on the digitized image. Using this program, the textual content of not only printed or typewritten texts, but also handwritten texts, can be retrieved much more efficiently and with noticeably higher quality. Moreover, the data in the ALTO scheme could be used to automatically monitor the quality of OCR results. This procedure would significantly increase the usability of semantic search, machine translation, summarization and many other artificial intelligence tools that are yet to be fully deployed in the Czech Digital Library environment.

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Spadne Olomouc? Městská památková rezervace ve spleti politiky pozdního socialismu

Author(s): Adéla Rádková / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2024

This study links the history of conservation and urban planning with the history of regional politics. The author focuses on the administration of the Olomouc City Conservation Area (Městská památková rezervace Olomouc) in the period of late socialism, with an emphasis on the 1980s. She describes the development of the conservation area in the capital of Central Moravia since the early 1950s, the progressive dilapidation of its buildings and the increasing housing problems of its inhabitants, as well as the regulated criticism of this situation in the regional press since the late 1960s. The collapse of part of an apartment building in the historic centre of Olomouc in 1987, which symbolized the city’s neglected state, is revealed as a key moment. The event was covered in a popular national weekly newspaper "Mladý svět" [The Young World] and was perceived as the result of a long-standing failure to address the dilapidation of buildings and ineffective management, which exacerbated tensions among local political elites and led to personnel changes. The author analyses in detail the relationship between the city administration and the district and regional authorities, which had a major influence on political decisions and the allocation of funds for the reconstruction of historic buildings. In addition to the political and administrative conflicts, the author highlights the broader problems associated with the preservation of cultural monuments during the normalization period, such as the lack of financial and material resources, manpower, and construction capacity. She also examines the various strategies used by local authorities to gain support from higher authorities for the preservation of Olomouc’s historic centre. The results of the analysis point to more general structural problems of heritage conservation in socialist Czechoslovakia, where a lack of political will and a chronically dysfunctional economy undermined the effective protection and restoration of cultural heritage. The article thus provides an insight into the dynamics of political and administrative decision-making in the field of heritage conservation and the specific steps that were taken to improve the condition of the Olomouc City Conservation Area during the last years of communist rule in Czechoslovakia.

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Komunista s vlastním rozumem

Author(s): Petr Zídek / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2024

The Czechoslovak communist politician and physician František Kriegel (1908–1979), to whom Martin Groman has dedicated the voluminous biography "Kriegel: Voják a lékař komunismu" [Kriegel: Soldier and Doctor of Communism], had an extraordinary career. He was born into a Jewish family in the town of Stanislavov in the Austrian part of Halych (today’s Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine). He studied medicine in Prague and joined the Communist Party. He led an international medical team in the Spanish Civil War and served in a similar capacity in China and Burma during the Second World War. On his return to Prague, he was involved in the Communist coup within the party apparatus and then became Deputy Minister for Health. He escaped the political trials of the 1950s but was deposed from his functions and worked as a general practitioner. In the early 1960s, he served as a medical advisor to the Cuban government. His career then rose again, and during the Prague Spring he became a member of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and Chairman of the Central Committee of the National Front. His “moment of glory” came in August 1968, when he was the only one of the abducted Czechoslovak politicians to refuse to sign the so-called Moscow Protocol, which legalized the terms of the Soviet occupation. He was then gradually stripped of his posts and excluded from public life. As a dissident, he was one of the first signatories of Charter 77. The reviewer points out a certain paradox in the fact that Kriegel’s indelible record in history was determined by a single moment in his life. In his opinion, Groman has written an extraordinary book about this extraordinary man. His text is thoughtful, precise and readable at the same time. He keeps his distance from the subject, neither defending nor apologizing for Kriegel, but trying to understand him. However, he does not shed enough light on certain subtopics, such as Kriegel’s integration into Czech society, his Jewish identity, or his family and private life.

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Čtrnáct životů Františka Kriegla

Author(s): Jiří Hoppe / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2024

The Czechoslovak communist politician and physician František Kriegel (1908–1979), to whom Martin Groman has dedicated the voluminous biography "Kriegel: Voják a lékař komunismu" [Kriegel: Soldier and Doctor of Communism], had an extraordinary career. He was born into a Jewish family in the town of Stanislavov in the Austrian part of Halych (today’s Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine). He studied medicine in Prague and joined the Communist Party. He led an international medical team in the Spanish Civil War and served in a similar capacity in China and Burma during the Second World War. On his return to Prague, he was involved in the Communist coup within the party apparatus and then became Deputy Minister for Health. He escaped the political trials of the 1950s but was deposed from his functions and worked as a general practitioner. In the early 1960s, he served as a medical advisor to the Cuban government. His career then rose again, and during the Prague Spring he became a member of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and Chairman of the Central Committee of the National Front. His “moment of glory” came in August 1968, when he was the only one of the abducted Czechoslovak politicians to refuse to sign the so-called Moscow Protocol, which legalized the terms of the Soviet occupation. He was then gradually stripped of his posts and excluded from public life. As a dissident, he was one of the first signatories of Charter 77. According to the reviewer, Martin Groman has written an excellent, honestly craftedand carefully thought out, yet at the same time readable and engaging biography. The reviewer appreciates the way in which he has managed to focus, organize andmake use of the rich and uncluttered documentary material. A real sensation is the author’s discovery and use of Kriegel’s personnel file from the Moscow headquarters of the Communist International in the late 1930s. He reflects on some moments in Kriegel’s biography and disputes Groman’s interpretation of the Prague Spring in terms of whether it was really a conflict between groups of reformists, centrists and conservatives in the leadership of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia.

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Chápavý soudce, jenž nevynáší rozsudek

Author(s): Milena Bartlová / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2024

The Czechoslovak communist politician and physician František Kriegel (1908–1979), to whom Martin Groman has dedicated the voluminous biography "Kriegel: Voják a lékař komunismu" [Kriegel: Soldier and Doctor of Communism], had an extraordinary career. He was born into a Jewish family in the town of Stanislavov in the Austrian part of Halych (today’s Ivano-Frankivsk, Ukraine). He studied medicine in Prague and joined the Communist Party. He led an international medical team in the Spanish Civil War and served in a similar capacity in China and Burma during the Second World War. On his return to Prague, he was involved in the Communist coup within the party apparatus and then became Deputy Minister for Health. He escaped the political trials of the 1950s but was deposed from his functions and worked as a general practitioner. In the early 1960s, he served as a medical advisor to the Cuban government. His career then rose again, and during the Prague Spring he became a member of the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party and Chairman of the Central Committee of the National Front. His “moment of glory” came in August 1968, when he was the only one of the abducted Czechoslovak politicians to refuse to sign the so-called Moscow Protocol, which legalized the terms of the Soviet occupation. He was then gradually stripped of his posts and excluded from public life. As a dissident, he was one of the first signatories of Charter 77. The reviewer compares Groman’s work with several recent Czech biographies of communist politicians and credits him not only with historical erudition, but also with a skilful use of language, the ability to construct a coherent textual whole, and an unorthodox, hitherto critical use of State Security (Státní bezpečnost, StB) documents in an attempt to understand and contextualize the thinking and actions of a man who today appears both as a sympathetic hero and an ideological enemy. She describes Groman’s implicit methodological approach as a critical transformation of historical narrative and his authorial position as an “understanding judge”. She sees an important contribution to the biography in the author’s treatment of the concept of life roles, among which, however, the role of functionary is missing, along with that of “soldier” and “doctor”. This is overlaid with Groman’s emphasison Kriegel’s idealism as a lifelong ethos.

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Otevřený dopis redakčním orgánům časopisu "Soudobé dějiny / CJCH"

Author(s): Petr Zídek / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2024

In an open letter to the editors of "Soudobé dějiny / Czech Journal of Contemporary History", the Czech historian Petr Zídek raises objections to the publication of Scottish historian Rosamund Johnston’s article “Věra Štovíčková před mikrofonem: Rozhlas, politika a československo-africké vztahy v letech 1958–1968” [Věra Štovíčková at the Microphone: Radio, Politics and Czechoslovak-African Relations in 1958–1968] in the latest issue of the journal (No. 1/2024, pp. 138–165). He points out that in her text Johnston repeatedly refers to the book "Czechoslovakia in Africa, 1945–1968" (New York – London, Palgrave Macmillan 2016) by the American historian Philip Muehlenbeck as an authority. In this work, Muehlenbeck extensively, word for word and without acknowledgement adopted and used sources from Czech archives, aspreviously published and quoted by Petr Zídek himself and in publications coauthored with another Czech historian, Karel Sieber, in his books on Czechoslovak-African relations. In this context, Zídek raises the question of a possible violation of the principles of publishing ethics and the tolerance of the journal’s editors towards the plagiarism committed by Philip Muehlenbeck.

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Odpověď na vyjádření redakce k mému dopisu

Author(s): Petr Zídek / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2024

In this text, Petr Zídek responds to the editor’s comments on his open letter.

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Od dvojdomků pro Romy k romskému panelovému ghettu

Author(s): Marie Černá / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2024

In his book entitled "Luník IX: Zrod rómskeho geta" [Luník IX: The Birth of the Roma Ghetto], the Slovak historian Ondrej Ficeri reconstructs the history of the Luník IX prefabricated housing estate in the city of Košice, Eastern Slovakia, from the original plan in the early 1970s to build a new quarter of semi-detached houses for Roma, through the construction and operation of the prefabricated housing estate inhabited by both Roma and the majority population, to its degradation into a Romani ghetto in the late 1990s. The reviewer outlines the context of the development of state policy towards the Roma in socialist Czechoslovakia, which sought to integrate them into the majority society through the concept of so-called dispersion (rozptyl). She also appreciates Ficeri’s efforts to explore the changes, contradictions and problems arising from the confrontation of this policy with realityon a local scale. The author draws on a wealth of archival material and effectively devotes a great deal of space to the development of construction projects as well asto the negotiations and often contradictory arguments of local actors at the level of the political and administrative bodies of Košice. In doing so, he touches upon the essential issues of housing policy, sociability and social control, which are relevant not only in this specific environment.

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Černobílý svět "marxistického Šaldy": Ladislav Štoll v kulturněpolitických diskurzech československé levice

Author(s): Jana Tůma Königsmarková / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2024

The book by historian Vojtěch Čurda entitled "Ladislav Štoll: Příběh komunistického ideologa a formování československé kultury ve 20. století" [Ladislav Štoll: The Story of a Communist Ideologist and the Shaping of Czechoslovak Culture in the Twentieth Century] is the first critical biography of the Marxist-Leninist literary critic, cultural ideologist and politician Ladislav Štoll (1902–1981). He entered public life as a journalist in the 1930s as a defender of socialist realism and the ideological conception of literature in the disputes of Czechoslovak left-wing culture. According to the author, Štoll stubbornly adhered to his views throughout his life. After the communist takeover in February 1948, he became one of the most powerful agents of Stalinist cultural politics until the late 1950s, and his publication "Třicet let bojů za českou socialistickou poezii" [Thirty Years of Struggle for Czech Socialist Poetry] published in 1950 served as an ideological and aesthetic standard for evaluating individual authors as “progressive” or “reactionary”. Despite his lack of formal education, he was appointed rector of the newly established University of Political and Economic Sciences (Vysoká škola politických a hospodářských věd, VŠPHV) from 1949 to 1952 and subsequently served as Minister of Education and Culture. For most of the 1960s, he was head of the Institute of Czech Literature (Ústav pro českou literaturu) of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences. After the collapse of the Prague Spring, he returned to his post as a representative of the official course of normalization. Čurda emphasizes the generational aspect in the formation of Štoll’s attitudes, which, however, is not sufficiently elaborated according to the reviewer. The biography is built on thorough interpretation of Štoll’s publications and other related texts. Thus the author captures quite convincingly Štoll’s role in the debates and controversies surrounding the development of Czechoslovak literature over several decades as well as his influential position in times of power. This approach,however, fails to capture the full complexity of Ladislav Štoll’s personality, resulting in a somewhat two-dimensional representation. This is partially addressed by the concluding essay by Štoll’s grandson, the documentary filmmaker and theorist Martin Štoll, who evokes the family memory of the biography’s protagonist.

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Příběh Karla Gotta jako československá moralita

Author(s): Přemysl Houda / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2024

Karel Gott (1939–2019) was the most popular Czechoslovak singer in the genre of pop music from the 1960s o the late 1980s and, for the more conservative Czech audience, remained so practically until the end of his life. He anchored himself in the so-called mainstream, and as a performer of hits with an extraordinary voice and supreme vocal expression, he had many fans in other socialist countries and also – and in particular – in West Germany. Many, however, perceived him as a kind of symbol of conformity with the communist regime during the period of Czechoslovak normalization. According to the reviewer, the biographical book "Gott: Československý příběh" [Gott: A Czechoslovak Story] written by the well-known music publicist Pavel Klusák, can be read in three ways. Firstly, as a story of Czechoslovak show business from the 1960s to the early 1990s. In this respect, Klusák, who has an excellent command of the subject matter, has done a great job, which is matched by his insightful and factually rich interpretation. Secondly, as a story with moral lessons about the social responsibility of a significant protagonist of popular culture. Here, Klusák is too much in thrall to evaluative ethical judgments and to the notion of the artist as the conscience of the nation, which the reviewer finds anachronistic. Thirdly, Klusák tells a typically Central European story about a man in history, but ends it on the threshold of the 1990s, thus giving up the possibility of grasping it comprehensively. According to the reviewer, his justification that by that time Gott was a fully profiled personality and artist and did not change in any way does not hold up in the context of the turbulent events after the fall of communism. The polemical review concludes by stating that while Klusák has removed the layer of myths and Gott’s own retouches from his portrait, the image he now presents to his readers is somewhat one-sided and burdened.

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Exilová nakladatelství mezi spoluprací a konkurencí

Author(s): Marta Edith Holečková / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2024

In his book entitled "V různosti je síla: Exilová nakladatelství Sixty-Eight Publishers a Index nejen ve vzájemné korespondenci" [Strength in Diversity: The Exile Publishing Houses “Sixty-Eight Publishers” and “Index” in Mutual Correspondence and Beyond], the Czech literary historian Michal Přibáň focuses on the two most important Czechoslovak publishing houses in exile during the Cold War. Both were founded in the wake of the Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 and the new wave of refugees arriving in the West. Sixty-Eight Publishers was founded in Toronto in 1971 and was run by writer Josef Škvorecký (1924–2012) and his wife, writer Zdena Salivarová (born 1933). In the same year, Index publishing house was founded in Cologne by political scientist Adolf Müller (1929–2002) and journalist Bedřich Utitz (1920–2017). All were post-1968 exiles, while Müller and Utitz were reform communists. The reviewer appreciates the fact that Přibáň has set his topic in the overall context of the history of publishing efforts in the Czechoslovak exile sphere and has based his interpretation on rich source material. His ambition was not to cover the history of the two enterprises in detail; he tells the story of their birth and, above all, their complicated relationship. Because of the overlapping concepts and similar authorial backgrounds, competitive tensions between the two publishing houses sometimes escalated into rather sharp confrontations. Přibáň deals in great detail with the individual cases and, by uncovering their causes and roots, offers a more fluid and truthful picture of the exile literary life.

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Odešel velký historik a učitel prof. PhDr. Robert Kvaček, CSc.

Author(s): Jana Čechurová / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2024

The obituary commemorates the doyen and “guru” of modern Czech historiography, Professor Robert Kvaček, who was born on 5 July 1932 in Dvorce u Jičína and passed away on 27 April 2024 in Lomnice nad Popelkou. In the 1950s, he studied history at the Faculty of Arts, Charles University in Prague. In 1956 he joined the Department of Czechoslovak History and Archival Studies as an assistant and continued to teach there until late in life; from 1968 as an associate professor, from 1990 as a professor, and later as professor emeritus. He gained the reputation of a charismatic and highly regarded lecturer, attracting thousands of listeners from across various academic fields. He distinguished himself in the field of European diplomatic history in the interwar period and during the Second World War, gradually expanding his scope to include the post-war Czechoslovak “Third” Republic and the First World War. In addition to numerous monographs and studies, his "Diplomaté a ti druzí: K dějinám diplomacie za 2. světové války" [Diplomats and the Others: Towards a History of Diplomacy during the Second World War] (1988) stands out. He was also the author of various popularization works and several excellent text books on Czech and Czechoslovak history from the mid-seventeenth century to the present day. Robert Kvaček was a scholarly and pedagogical celebrity whose influence extended far beyond academia, but he was also a wise and kind man.

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Před více než rokem zemřel historik Karel Durman: (13. 6. 1932, Bystřice pod Hostýnem – 14. 4. 2003, Uppsala)

Author(s): Marek Jakoubek,Matěj Bílý / Language(s): Czech Issue: 2/2024

The obituary commemorates the Czech historian and distinguished scholar of Cold War history Karel Durman (1932–2023). Durman began his scholarly career in Czechoslovakia in the 1960s, but after the defeat of the Prague Spring 1968 he was not allowed to practice his profession as a reformist communist. He emigrated to Sweden in the following year. He anchored at the Institute for East European Studies, University of Uppsala, where he gradually established himself as an internationally renowned historian of European history from the 1870s to the 1990s, and especially of East-West relations from the Second World War to the end of the Cold War. He also dealt with the Russian and Soviet politics and post-war developments in theSoviet Union and the Eastern Bloc. His monograph "Útěk od praporů: Kreml a krize impéria 1964–1991" [Desertion: The Kremlin and the Crisis of Empire, 1964–1991] published in 1998, and his two-volume synthesis "Popely ještě žhavé: Velká politika1938–1991" [Ashes Still Hot: The Great Politics, 1938-1991], published in 2004 and 2009, have been of major importance to the Czech scholarly community.

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Договорите, предопределили съдбата на България (1878 – 1947 г.)

Author(s): Samuil Shivachev / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2024

This research examines the nature of the treaty as an important written act for diplomacy. The theoretical view on the structure of the international treaty is important to understand the essence of the policy, moves, and mistakes of Bulgarian diplomacy in the period from 1878 to 1947. In this long period of the Third Bulgarian Kingdom, its development was determined by several significant treaties: San Stefano (1878), Berlin (1878), Bucharest and Tophanen (1886), London, Bucharest, and Constantinople (1913), Noi (1919), Craiova (1940), and Paris (1947). An important point is the in-depth analysis of the treaties themselves and the role of the great powers in Bulgaria's development. Very important are the questions about the consequences of these treaties. They are directly connected with the decisions and influence of one or another great power in Bulgaria. They are also important for the difficult elections of the Bulgarian authorities, which are often dictated by the country's special geopolitical location.

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Още за епиграфския материал от скалните обители по Шуменското плато

Author(s): Georgi Kanchev / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2024

Originating as separate monastic monasteries in close connection with the churches that arose in the process of the Christianisation of Bulgaria at the foot of the slopes, the rock churches and monasteries on the Shumen plateau gradually reached their spiritual and cultural heyday with the entry and consolidation of Hesychasm in the 13th and 14th centuries. In the present work, special attention is paid to the inscriptions, testifying that the monastic colony on the Shumen Plateau was also connected with the large-scale church construction from the end of the 9th—beginning in the 10th century, after which it underwent a number of reconstructions in the following centuries. On the one hand, as in other monasteries from North-Eastern Bulgaria, the presence of proto-Bulgarian runic signs gives reason to consider the monastic practices on the Shumen Plateau in the context of the inclusion of the proto-Bulgarian ethnic group in the Christian faith. Finally, the inscriptions in the rock dwellings in the Osmarsko-Troitski Boaz—the so-called Troitski ktetor's inscription, the inscriptions in the Momina skala hermitage, and the Direklia rock church—reflect the transfer of heavenly patronage from ruined churches at the foot of the plateau. The rich epigraphic material (e.g., the so-called Inscription of the Grammarian Andrey, the anonymous grave inscription under Mamiltash in Troitski Boaz), the fragments of painting that have reached us (e.g., traces of frescoes and icon painting in the so-called Kostadin Monastery), and the individual reconstructions and expansions of the sacral space of the rock complexes eloquently support the observation that in its development the monastic colony took shape as a complete Shumenska Mala Sveta Gora.

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Приносът на Мартин Лутер в културата

Author(s): Evgeni Velkov / Language(s): Bulgarian Issue: 1/2024

The theme of the proposed short essay "Martin Luther's Contribution to Cultural History" is an attempt for a broader view of the reformer's activities. In addition to being a Protestant theologian, Martin Luther was a translator, a poet, and a composer of church hymns, which did not go unnoticed by his contemporaries, the artists Lucas Cranach the Elder and Lucas Cranach the Younger. The author's goal is to outline some perspectives of Martin Luther's activity, to pay attention to the historical context in which it occurred, to mention the main reasons that contributed to its course, and to briefly show how Luther's personality is reflected in the works of Cranach father and son. The essential part of the work in the study is based on the interpretation of materials from various fields of scientific knowledge related to Martin Luther and his work, yet in view of the specifics of the discussed issues, emphasis is placed on the theological aspect of the message. Knowledge from other humanities is also present, which, according to the author, could illustrate an idea of the real scale of the work carried out by the Protestant theologian.

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Cocev Kamen – A Scientific and Touristic Centre in North Macedonia

Author(s): Pero Sinadinovski / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2024

Located about 20 km west of Kratovo, Cocev Kamen is a significant natural and archaeological site with large scientific and touristic potential. This paper will present the results of archaeological research conducted over the last seven years. An archaeological field survey in 2018 confirmed the remains from several prehistoric and historical periods. Excavations at the site in the last five years have uncovered numerous movable and immovable finds from the Neolithic and Eneolithic periods, which testify to the earliest traces of life at this location during the 6th and 5th millennium. The results of these investigations have been published in scientific journals, placing Cocev Kamen on the scientific map, especially for the Neolithic period. Some of the movable and immovable finds are displayed at the Museum of the City of Kratovo, presenting them to the wider public. Additionally, over the last 2 – 3 decades, the archaeological site of Cocev Kamen has been continuously promoted by the local population and various associations. In recent years, a project for the tourist presentation of this site has been underway, including the construction of a restaurant, pathways, informational signs, etc. Considering the potential of this place and the activities undertaken here, we can expect that in the near future, this site will find its place in the tourism offerings of Macedonia.

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Материјална култура у Херодотовом делу: између сећања и текста

Author(s): Ognjen Tošović / Language(s): Serbian Issue: 3/2024

In his multi-layered and complex work, Herodotus of Halicarnassus mentions a large number of remains of material culture of various kinds. As a rule, certain isolated stories from the past are tied to these materialities, which the father of history fits into his narrative and finds a place and purpose for them in his work as a whole. Given that these materials and the stories related to them appear in dif-ferent social and cultural contexts, this paper points out their political and ideological implications for the society that preserves and transmits them. However, Herodotus himself was not free from cultural and ideological frameworks and perspectives, particularly evident in his description of other peoples – the Egyptians, Scythians, and Persians – whom he tried to bring closer to his Hellenic audience and their cultural-ideological framework. Consequently, in the second part of the paper, we will point out the sign and role of material culture in the context of Herodotus’ depiction of the Other. The first part of the paper analyzes three examples of materialized memory that relate to the Greek past and are lo-cated in the Greek social and cultural context. The first two examples, which refer to votive offerings and parts of the landscape at Delphi, indicate how narratives are created and attached to material ob-jects to convey a certain political message through them. The third example refers to a bronze statue representing a man riding a dolphin to which the story of the singer Arion is related. In connection with that story, it is pointed out that the local community’s positive memory of its ruler has been pre-served in its elements. The second part of the paper analyzes how the connection between materiality and memory is presented in Herodotus’ accounts of the Others – the Egyptians and the Scythians.

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