We kindly inform you that, as long as the subject affiliation of our 300.000+ articles is in progress, you might get unsufficient or no results on your third level or second level search. In this case, please broaden your search criteria.
The article discusses the problem of “translatability / non-translatability” of Turgenev’s ethnocultural elements of his Rudin translations to Polish by M . Nowiński ( 1886), S. Kołaczkowski (1948), and J. Dmochowska (1953). It analyzes one of the dominants of Turgenev’s works related with the cultural concept of “Russia” and its component “native man.” The main tool of expressing the “Russianness” as an ethnic trait of Turgenev’s characters is their speech and anthroponyms, i.e. person’s name. The analysis of word combinations carrying the key word “Russian” (or “in Russian”) revealed that in general, Turgenev’s dominant is present.
More...
The theme and historiography of Jewish communities in Romania is a topic which has been widely researched, beginning with the 19th century and, up until today, is still an ongoing inquest. Usually depicted by historians, the subject, however, lacks an architectural and urban overview of the phenomenon in terms of analyzing the relationship between Jewish constructed spaces and their developing urban context – the city / the town. These touristically attractive urban sites, although lacking the proportion of former living communities once encompassed, display, in the majority of cases, an ample built heritage (housing, synagogues, shuls, cemeteries etc.) and spatial remains of Jewish living.
More...
In den letzten Jahrzehnten wurde die Frage der eventuellen Teilnahme von Olaf Tryggva son an der Schlacht von Maldon mehrfach, vor allem von den britischen und skandinavischen Forschern, aufgegriffen. Anzumerken ist hier jedoch, dass diese Analysen in der Regel recht oberflächlich oder sogar marginal waren und nur als eine mehr oder weniger wichtige Ergän zung zur in einer Publikation behandelten Thematik galten. Unter den möglichen Teilnehmern an den Ereignissen vom August 991 werden neben dem künftigen Herrscher von Norwegen noch der König von Dänemark Sven Gabelbart und die sonst unbekannten Personen wie Jóstein und Guðmund genannt. Da die Anwesenheit von Sven bei Maldon von den meisten Historikern zu Recht in Frage gestellt wird, bleibt Olaf die einzige historische Figur unter den potenziellen Führern der skandinavischen Angreifer, was leider zur Folge hat, dass einige Historiker — und ihnen folgend auch die über das Mittelalter schreibenden strikt literarischen Künstler — gerade in ihm ziemlich voreilig den Oberbefehlshaber der Wikinger sehen. Der vorliegende Beitrag setzt sich deshalb zum Ziel, die verfügbaren Quellentexte (neben dem altenglischen alliterativen Gedicht, das als Schlacht von Maldon bekannt ist, gehören dazu in erster Linie verschiedene Versionen der Angelsächsischen Chronik sowie unterschiedliche historische oder sogar hagiographische Werke) zusammenzustellen und sie mit der obigen Meinung kritisch zu konfrontieren.
More...
The article analyzes a fragment of the 12th-century account of the miracles of Henry II, created for the purposes of promoting the cult of this Holy German Emperor. The article, therefore, discusses the narrative threads regarding the perception of the Slavic peoples by 12th-century Bamberg clergy, the collective authors of Miracula Sancti Heinrici, with particular emphasis placed upon the conception of promoting the cult of Henry II beyond the boundaries of the Reich and transplanting it to Poland. To that end, the article analyzes two excerpts from the manuscript, which document the intentions of transplanting the cult of the Holy Emperor to the territory of the Slavic lands, and Poland in particular. The first of those excerpts concerns an account of the miraculous healing of a Slavic man in Merseburg, while the second recounts a vision of Werner, the Bishop of Płock. Therefore, the article considers first and foremost the ideological meaning of the discussed examples excerpted from the source text, including the historical context of its creation.
More...
The aim of the following article is to present the attitudes of Jan Długosz towards the issue of crowning the representatives of foreign dynasties as kings of Poland. Thus, the article focuses on Długosz’s opinions regarding the following rulers of Poland: Wenceslaus II of Bohemia, Louis I of Hungary and Władysław II Jagiełło, who all came to Poland from the neighboring countries and who represented dynasties other than the Piast dynasty. To this end, the article presents Długosz’s opinions regarding the ascensions of foreign monarchs to the throne in the Kingdom of Poland, as well as discusses both the benefits and the disadvantages of having a foreign ruler on the throne, included in his Annales. In the last section of the article, referring to the descriptions of the monarchs’ reigns found in Długosz’s opus magnum, attempts to ascertain the influence of their foreign (ethnically, religiously or culturally) ancestry on the subject matter of Długosz’s comments.
More...
The author of the paper argues the necessity of studying the daily folk dress. We have little information about it. Previous researches have given priority to the holiday dress. The author discloses the features of the daily dress as being the oldest, most conservative and most devout to a community. It is worn for a longer time and by more persons. It is more resistant, more fit for daily life, due to its cut and size. It is the dress that, during hard times, like a last bastion, continues to bear the signs of cultural identity. The researcher discusses examples of interaction between daily dress and the holiday one, regarding the formation and functioning of some elements of the folk dress.
More...
Наташа МИЛИЋЕВИЋ: Dragan Bogetić. Nesvrstanost kroz istoriju. Od ideje do pokreta. Beograd: Zavod za udžbenike, 2019.
More...
The author of the paper evokes the personality of Elena Alistar, the single woman deputy in Sfatul Țării [the name of the Bessarabian parliament during 1917-1918] who voted for the union of Bessarabia with the Romanian Kingdom on the 27th of March 1918. She emphasizes her activity during the interwar period, as director of the Eparchial Girls’ School from Chișinău, as well as her fate after 1940, when she sought refuge in Romania. Using information collected from the former graduates of the Eparchial School and unpublished manuscripts, the researcher clarifies some data from the biography of Elena Alistar, data that were wrongly published in different papers. In the meantime, she emphasizes the contribution of Elena Alistar to promoting the Romanian folk dress in Bessarabia. During the interwar period, the holiday costume was worn by the Bessarabian intellectuals on different occasions, as an expression of their Romanian identity. This information is a valuable source for the study of the significances of the folk dress in the Bessarabian society from that time, eventually, for identifying the peculiarities of the costumes worn then.
More...
The binary division of the Universe, between the visible and the unseen one, between the human world and the world of Others (spirits, dead people), between here and there dates back to ancient times, and is based on the binary oppositions. The good places one can find in the inhabited places, but also next to them, as well as on the contact places which changed once man conquers the surrounding universe. At a macrocosmic level, there is a world in which people live, this world, our world, focusing on the inhabited space, in other words, on the hearth of each house, around which one can notice the expansion, in successive circles, of the other microspaces owned by man, prepared by him through defense practices in order to be able to move freely within them. The main elements with spatial, but especially ritual values in this first circle of the humanized world are the hearth, the stove, the oven, the chimney, the beam of the house, the table, the bed (cradle), the lintel, the window, the eaves of the house. As we move away from the house, there are other items which man consecrated and used in his own interest: the yard, the stable, the fence, the gate leading to the household entrance. Magical interest has also the borderland of the village, the borders themselves which separated peoples’ plots of land, gradually reaching the most dangerous places, such as the crossroads, the bank of the river, the bridges, the forest, the mountains, etc. Beyond these transition places which could be reached by people too as they needed to gather construction materials, to travel, but also to earn their living, and, why not, dangerous entities, representing various embodiments of the sacred world which lived in another space, known as the Otherworld. This is not necessarily a world of the dead (which we are to describe below), but a place where the Others, the anti-humans, the non-humans, the super humans lead their existence. On the other side, the Otherworld has different representations. In fairy tales there are specific topoi, sometimes according to the folk beliefs about the world of dead. We still have lots of representations of this realm of dead from archaic times, but swe can also meet some old representation contaminated with Christian elements. The paper focuses on the Otherworld, as it seen in Romanian folk beliefs, pointing ou especially the archaic representations of the final road towards the Otherworld. Mainly the data are excerpted from an old funeral song, The Song of the Dawn, interpreted by professionals at the dawn, during the wake of the deceased. The song knows several hundreds of variants in the South-West Romania, in some villages being interpreted till nowadays.
More...
Folk architecture, the way we know it today, is the last sequence of a long developing process (still undergoing), which aesthetically and spiritually, asserts as the sum of previous stages. The appearance of rural settlements is profoundly affected by the economic life and geographic environment, which imposed not only specific arrangement as for the shape of settlements but also certain jobs of the inhabitants. Development of houses from those with one room to those with more subsumes under the following specific categories, since their appearance to nowadays: the house with a room to live, the house with a room to live and one room, the house with one room to live and porch and larder, the house with two rooms to live each with separate access, the house with three rooms to live. Naturally, each category has variants and sub-variants, whose classification would be less useful and challenging to make. Research of traditional architecture made possible identification of its essential features and a confirmation of its value within a unitary pattern. Study of architecture holdings is a source of information for those who wish to project and build resting on the long, traditional expertise, and certain seized general aspects stand for the whole country.
More...
For our brethren living on the left bank of the Prut, “scoarțe” [traditional wall-carpets] are not only a dimension of the folk culture, but a true identity mark. At the beginning of spring, the Bessarabian researchers, led by Petru Vicol, the director of the National Museum of Ethnography and Natural History, had selected the oldest and most valuable “scoarțe” from the collections of the institution and crossed the Prut in order to show them to the lovers of beauty living on the other bank of the Romanian area. In the halls of the Ethnographic Museum of Moldavia from Iaşi would flow a colourful universe, full of essences, in which the aesthetic valences constitute only one of the dimensions of our folk-art masterpieces, full of deep meanings. The Bessarabian fabrics cannot and should not be isolated from those on the right bank of the Prut and, not even less, from those existing in other Romanian regions. They transmit the same ethnic peculiar message, the same apperception of the ancestral symbols, the same aesthetic and decorative content.
More...
This article refers to the exceptional cultural career of the grapevine, which has spread from the dawn of the Greek Antiquity until the modern era. Associated to the cult of Dionysus, the god of wine but also of pleasure and promoter of agriculture, the grapevine presents powerful forms of manifestation also in the Thracian-Dacian space, North Pontic Greek colonies as well as in the Roman Dacia, as the antique literary sources, epigraphic texts, coin issuing or various graphic representations attest.Vetero- and neotestamentary texts, which have a crucial role in our spiritual configuration, reveal the divine hypostasis of the grapevine, highlighted by folk beliefs and narrations presenting biblical themes. Relying on older documentary sources, but also on field research, the author refers to the climaxes of the viniculture calendar and brings under discussion the sequence of beliefs, rites and ritual ensembles that animate our ethnographic and folkloric landscape. Each stage included in the process of transforming vine into wine is accompanied and supported by a set of magic acts meant to insure prosperity.The article points out the positive potential of the grapevine, a plant that integrates an ample set of values; it also highlights the existence of a permanent dialogue between the religious and the traditional thinking, the exchange of values or the re-semantization.
More...
The paper is based on the field researches undertaken in the Lozova village, Strășeni district, between 2016-2018, as well as on the specialized literature. The author identified thus the types of households and houses, according to the existing scientific classification, the customs and beliefs pertaining to the choice of the house place and its building; the position of houses and households depending on the access routes and on the ground; household annexes and their position; the evolution of the architectural elements, their similarities in the Romanian area. The author presents the description of a traditional house, built in 1937, pointing out a building specific for this village – “bașca” [a kind of cellar], and “prispa/târnaț cu draniță și deregi” [a kind of porch with shingle and wooden posts] which is characteristic for the entire Romanian area. The researcher provides relevant arguments which prove once more the identity and the unity of the Romanian cultural area, both through the form and the name of the constitutive elements of the house.
More...
The present paper analyses the handicraft heritage constituted during the 75 years of existence (made on 28 April 2018) of the Ethnographic Museum of Moldavia. The period between 1968 and 1975 was the most favourable one in the entire history of the museum, in terms of collection development. In those years no fewer than 368 objects related to traditional handicrafts were purchased by or donated to our institution, most of them belonging to the field of household industry. Our research focussed on the following handicrafts: textile household industry, wood manufacture (wheel making, making objects using staves, woodworking excepting house carpentry), ropemaking, blacksmithing, skin manufacture (making of coats, caps and ‘opinci’ – traditional peasant shoes), pottery and stone manufacture. The documentation work based on museum’s main specific sources: the heritage stored within museum spaces, the inventory record, object data sheet and photographic library. Scientific research led to the identification of approx. 860 objects distributed as follows: textile household industry – approx. 370 objects; wood manufacture – approx. 380; ropemaking – 30; blacksmithing – 25; skin manufacture – 21; pottery – 16; stone manufacture – 15, etc. If we relate these figures to the total amount of museum objects, it results that more than 10% of the museum heritage belong to the field of traditional handicrafts. A large discrepancy is to be noted between household industry and wood manufacture on the one hand, and the other five handicrafts on the other hand. It is our opinion that the museum of Iaşi did not have a coherent purchase policy, as the main ethnographic-cultural areas of Moldavia from which handicraft heritage comes include Bukovina (more than half of them) and afterwards Iaşi, Neamţ and Botoşani counties.
More...
This Serbian comparative ethnographic study of the two different ethnic groups, the Sarakatsani and Vlachs shows the author sympathy for Balkan shepherd. The aim of this study is to fill in the gap, about the rituals and customs of two ethnic nomadic groups, of Sarakatsani and Vlachs, who differ in their origin and cultural characteristics, but they have been for the first time treated side by side by a Serbian scholar. Dragoslav Antonijevič had combined some ethnologic information harvested during the three field researching expeditions with the data from scientific literature published in various books and papers. Although this study has no given the answer to many problems that is has treated of, in fact the study has opened the door for further studies and researches.
More...
The article falls under the category of case studies, focusing on the way miners were seen by the people outside their guild during the totalitarian regime of the communist times. Being a paper that has as its central theme aspects from the life of miners belonging to the well- established mining communities in Romania – Valea Jiului zone, but referring also to the miners in the Bohemian coal mines, the article aims to examine data that could provide support for the workers who are often unfairly rewarded for their hard work. The case study strives to put together bits and pieces of the miners’ efforts to get coal and to justify the negative aspects judged ab iratio and ad absurdum by the uninitiated ones in the secrets of a craft that turns into destiny. The proletcultist way of judging miners turned them into heroes, as one can see in Mihail Davidoglu and Marie Majerová’s works.
More...