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The article examines the Peace Corps programs in Central and Eastern Europe after the end of the Cold War, based on archive documents. After developing volunteer programs in Asia, Africa and Latin America for 30 years, in the early 1990s, the Peace Corps received a historic chance to expand its activities in the countries of the former Eastern Bloc and help strengthen American influence in the region. The historical reconstruction of the organization’s activities in the different countries makes it possible to outline the main goals of the Peace Corps and to determine its effectiveness as a “tool” of American “soft power”.
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The article focused on the shortest and marginal work in Vazov’s cycle Epopee of forgotten, a top title in the national myth-poetic narrative. It proves that this marginality is seeming. A range powerful mythogenical energies works furtively under it through several of its characterizations like dramatic form and ballade heritage.
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~Odhgo,j (The Guide) is the most famous work of Anastasios of Sinai, the theological writer from the 7th-8th century. It is some sort of a handbook for fighting the heresies, in the first place Monophysitism and Monotheletism. Anastasios is discussing the terms, i.e. the categories, which the believer should use if he wants to be orthodox. In the second chapter Anastasios brings the definitions of theological technical terms which he will be using in his polemics. To strengthen his argumentation he quotes more than 120 etymologies of different words. Among them are 17 etzmologies of the names of the parts of human body. We are talking about some of them in this work.
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Raina Katsarova is the earliest Bulgarian ethnomusicologist who has introduced sound recording in her fieldwork. We owe to her the earliest archival recordings of traditional music from Bulgaria, kept at the National Centre for Cultural Heritage, Institute of Art Studies, BAS. What are the human and media dimensions to the earliest recordings as a communicative event? How does a fieldwork researcher experience the burden and the reward of the earliest recording activity? These are the questions to which this paper as part of a collaborative research project on Raina Katsarova and the beginings of recording activities in Bulgarian ethnomusicology would try and answer. Most of the sound recordings and fieldwork diaries under consideration are rare and unknown archival artefacts, published for the first time.
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Similarly to Beldiceanu’s thesis, who claimed, that conversion to Islam on the Balkans was against the interests of the central treasury, as it created exemption from the so-called poll tax (cizye), Pal Fodor argues in the same tone when investigating the religious policy of Ottomans in Hungary. Islamization remained limited owing to several factors beside the mentioned interests of the central treasury. As the territory of Hungary was never totally controlled, the Hungarian nobility was more or less able to tax the serfs from the refuge area and prohibit any relations with the Ottoman authorities (even under the penalty of death). Beside the existence of the condominium, the relatively small number of conquerors (50-100 thousand, beside them many Orthodox – compared to the 850 000 local reaya population), also implied that Islam could not be established among broad layers of society. Forced conversion was against the principle of zimma, but of course minor repressions against Christianity were regular (prohibition of reconstructing ruined churches, insulting priest or kidnapping them for ransom was a good business, etc.). The Ottomans tried to increase the existing opposition between Catholics and Protestants, but in this respect their attempts were mostly futile (although Catholics often claimed, that the success of Protestantism in Hungary is partly the result of the Ottoman support). The puritanism of Calvinist churches and the anti-Habsburg behaviour of Protestants were advantageous for the Ottoman rule. It is true that Catholicism was never treated so well, but even this initial sympathy towards Protestantism disappeared by the 1560s as many Protestants fought against the Ottoman army. Furthermore, the Antitrinitarians wanted a syncretic religion reforming the Islam too instead of accepting it. The Ottoman behaviour soon shifted to neutralism (they even let Catholic monks entering the occupied zone from 1615 on), and religious questions only had relevance, when these could serve political or economic goals. Favouring Orthodox people (establishing churches) was also among the tactics partly because of the family ties of the conquerors. On the whole, the attitude of the Ottomans towards their Hungarian subjects can best be described by the term “religious indifference”. Taking advantage of the constant religious disputes between the various denominations, the main aim of the Ottoman’s “religious” policy was to extort as much money from the local Christians as possible.
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The paper offers a critical reading of the widespread thesis of the ‘return to religion’ after a ‘religious vacuum during communism’. Adopting the perspective of the religious actors – here taken in the broadest sense of the term, the author questions the logic of post-socialist religiosity by recourse to sociological and anthropological categories of agency, social capital, and religious specialists. After a theoretical introduction, two case studies from Bulgaria help developing the ideas of religious activism, religious entrepreneurship and (self-)legitimizing strategies. Special attention is paid to dreaming as a mechanism of fostering religious initiative and in the same time, of veiling individual agency. Examples from Herzegovina, Romania, and the FYR of Macedonia are further convoked to outline a few tendencies in the religious life of the Balkan post-socialist societies. These are: medicalization of religiosity and the interplay of religious and medical legitimization; the interdependence of religious revival and the search for new arenas of accumulating and/or exhibiting social capital; the mutual accommodation of religious virtuosi and Church hierarchies. All of them are indicative of in-depth evolutions of ‘religion’ under communism, which cannot be subsumed under the ‘religious vacuum’, and which help understanding the shifts and specific expressions of religiosity in Balkan post-socialist societies.
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The paper presents in detail and on a territorial principle the specificities of the custom of the Bulgarians connected with All Souls’ Day. It involves commemoration of deceased relatives, which is performed every year on specific days at their graves. The author claims that the custom is a relict of the cult of the dead and that it plays a concrete social role, being performed at the cemetery where all deceased individuals from a certain territorial community are buried. The custom is assumed to have a dual nature. On the one hand, it is part of the burial rites and can be perceived as their continuation, in functional terms the custom is close to calendar rites and in most cases it is characterised by the spirit and specificities of the festive cycle to which it is attributed. A specificity of the Bulgarian All Souls’ Day is the abundance of food in honour of the dead and the food served at the feast.
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The historical turns of the events that took place in Bulgaria in September 1946 were followed closely by the Turkish media. Almost every day the front pages of the leading newspapers carried materials reporting in detail the internal political news in the neighbouring country which, regardless of the editions’ ideological orientation or platform, was approached without prejudice and objectively. The interest of Turkish newspapers and journalists in Bulgaria increased dramatically after the country was proclaimed a republic as a result of a referendum and the spreading of information that the royal family, which was forced to leave the country, would pass through Istanbul. We have tried to resurrect this picture on the basis of the materials featured on the pages of the then widely circulated newspapers Cumhurriyet (Republic), Vatan (Fatherland), Tasvir (Description) and Son Posta (Last Mail), which responded to the event most comprehensively. The articles of young Turkish journalists who reported the passage of the Bulgarian royal family through Turkey with assertion and inspiration, albeit at places with an obvious quest for the glamorous and the sensational, not only throw light on Turkish society but also constitute pristine evidence of an important event in the latest history of Bulgaria.
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The object of the paper is unpublished manuscript, started in 1862 by Mladen Mladenov from the village of Vasilovtsi, Lom region, during immigration in Russia and finished after his coming back to his birthplace. Main place in the manuscript take the prayers, re-written from printed prayer books. Especially important is a chronical narrative, entitled “Knowledge for the People”, in with are described the immigration of the village people from Lom region in Russia in 1862, their short stay there and the coming back of Vasilovtsi’s inhabitants in their homeland, after which they build a new school building. On the basis of the manuscript conclusions are made concerning the character of the village community and the personality of priest Dimitar Ivanov.
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The article discusses the role of the program article by Ivan Shishmanov “The Importance and task of our ethnography” for the development of modern Bulgarian ethnology.
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The article is dedicated to one of the most valuable Old Bulgarian chronicles related to the history of Bulgaria in the Early Middle Ages and known to science as Nominalia of the Bulgarian Khans (8th C). The study mainly focuses on two problems: the origin of the chronicle’s text and the historical information it contains. In relation to this, it also discusses the ancient Bulgar cyclic calendar used by the author(s) of the royal chronicle. An essential outcome of the study is the ‘deciphering’ of the years (of birth, ascension to the throne and death) of the remarkable Bulgarian rulers Khan Kubrat (635–662), Khan Asparouh, Khan Tervel (700/701–724/725) and Tsar Simeon the Great, who was born in 867/868 and who ruled from 893 to 927. The connection between the Nominalia of the Bulgarian Khans and the ideology and traditions of Bulgaria in the Early Middle Ages (7th – 10th C) is underscored in conclusion.
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The article studies the specifics of the visions of degeneration and regeneration in Bulgaria within the eugenics discourse and other intellectual and political discourses with which it interceded. Hence, certain concepts of modernity, historical time and identity are reconstructed as a result of biosocial engineering in Bulgaria at the end of the 19th century and especially during the interwar period. The analysis is structured in several sections, which address the following topics: biological images of social time as elaborated at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century; the racial anthropological perspective of the biologist Metodiy Popov towards national historical time; the psychologizations of the „national soul“ envisaged as undergoing social progress and/or decay, as well as the scientific-political versions of a „New Revival“ of the Bulgarian collective organism. The theme of biopolitical regeneration is interpreted as enriching the conceptual background of the „revivalist imagination“ in Bulgaria.
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