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The basilisk: An episode from the Historia de preliis Alexandri Magni

Author(s): Vanya Lozanova-Stancheva / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2021

Keywords: Historia de preliis Alexandri Magni; Rezension J3; Archipresbyter Leo; basilisk; Itinerarium Alexandri

The paper aims to analyse the episode about the fight of Alexander the Great with the sinister, poisoning the air with his breath and eyes basilisk in the medieval tradition about the Romance of Alexander, respectively the Historia de preliis Alexandri Magni (Rezension J3). However, the tracing of the literary tradition in the Latin West unequivocally suggests the functioning of at least three basic variants of the mythic-and-literary narrative, which presupposes the multiplication of the sources and its transmission. Variations in the story of Alexander and the basilisk sometimes indicate a distancing and alienation from the paradigm of the Rezension J3. If the oldest α-Rezension of the Pseudo-Callisthenes’ literary core dates no later than AD 200, we are most likely faced with a later interpolation of a text that functioned independently of it, but dating back to an earlier epoch, not later than the middle of the 4th century, and probably before that. This would hypothetically outline the chronological boundaries and possible transmissions of the episode with the meeting of Alexander the Great and the basilisk as an integral part of the landscape of the Otherworld on the way to the “land of the blessed” and the end of the world passing through the “land of twilight”, where miracles can happen and fantastic monsters meet.

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Semantic readings of the indirect evidentials in Bulgarian: knowledge vs. reliability

Author(s): Ekaterina Tarpomanova / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2021

Keywords: evidentiality; Bulgarian; knowledge; reliability

The paper deals with the categorial semantics of the evidentiality in Bulgarian offering a context analysis of the non-firsthand evidentials (inferential, reported and dubitative). The most typical contexts of the three evidentials are explored to evaluate the level of knowledge of the speaker and the level of reliability of the information which motivate the usage of the respective evidential.

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One “Love Forever” - Petar Dinekov and Poland

Author(s): Vasilena Bilyarska / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2021

Keywords: Petar Dinekov; Polish intellectuals; literature; archives; intercultural exchange

The years Petar Dinekov spent in Poland between the two wars, and the relations with the Polish intellectuals prior, during and after his stay there are the topic of this article. It is developed mainly based on materials from his personal archive and diary, stored in the Central State Archives (CSA, No. 1987, 4,441 archive units) and the Bulgarian Historical Archive at the SS. Cyril and Methodius National Library in Sofia (BHA, No. 904, 297 notebooks). There are still seven boxes remaining unprocessed containing additional documents in Dinekov’s archive in the CSA, with Polish documents prevailing. As an annexe to the main text, a statement of the materials on the Polish theme in Dinekov’s archive was published.

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Non-verbal theatre on the stage of international theatre festivals Sofia Puppet Fair and World Theatre in Sofia

Author(s): Yanita Kirova / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2021

Keywords: theatrical festivals; non-verbal theatrical forms; non-verbal communication; Sofia Puppet Fair; World Theatre in Sofia

Non-verbal theatrical forms and non-verbal communication in theatre largely refer to those “miracles” that theatre has strived for during the years of its metamorphosis in order to reach universal conditions of understanding and communication without the need for knowledge of foreign languages or customs and providing similar historical attitudes and life views, regardless of cultural and social differences in spaces. The article focuses on the issues concerning precisely the place and role of non-verbal theatrical forms on the stage of two theatrical international festivals, which take place in Southeast Europe (since the beginning of the 21st c.): Sofia Puppet Fair (since 2002) and World Theatre in Sofia (since 2007). The issues have been addressed in terms of the sphere of non-verbal theatre and how non-verbal forms are part of contemporary theatrical trends and the aesthetic profile of the global theatre scene over the past two decades, reflected in the programme selections of festival editions over the years. Despite some differences in the profiles of the two festivals studied, the results of the analysis of the festival repertoires clearly show that non-verbal theatrical forms occupy an essential part of the festival programmes of two of the largest and most established international festivals on the territory of Southeast Europe. Non-verbal theatre is part of the world’s tendencies to search for new expressive means and non-standard forms for reading classical texts as well as for creating contemporary author’s works. The universal form of non-verbal communication is also at the heart of the theatre’s attempts to reach a wider audience.

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Some observations on Komētopouloi’s genealogy in Bulgaria

Author(s): Georgi N. Nikolov / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2022

Keywords: genealogy; Khan Krum’s dynasty; Komētopouloi; Tsar Samuil; The Old Testament

The paper has made use of notices given by the Byzantine scholars Ioannes Scylitzes, Ioannes Zonaras, Michael Psellos, Anna Comnena etc., as well as by the Armenian chronographer Stepanos of Taron. There have been shown examples to demonstrate the genealogical kinship of the Bulgarians in comparison with characters taken from the Old-Testament history. For the first time has been supported the position that Samuil had been the oldest of the four brothers - the Komētopouloi David, Moses, Aaron and Samuil. Convincing evidence has been proposed that the Komētopouloi were related by blood with the Bulgarian dynasty founded by the Bulgarian Khan Krum (796-814).

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Austria in the pages of the Bulgarian press during the 1950s

Author(s): Dimitar Dobrev / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2022

Keywords: Austria; Bulgaria; Cold War; Soviet policy; newspaper Rabotnichesko delo

The focus of the studies that examine the Bulgarian-Austrian relations during the Cold War falls on the main aspects of the economic, political and cultural domains. The topic of Austria in the pages of the newspaper Rabotnichesko delo (“Worker’s Deed”), which was the printed organ of the Bulgarian Communist Party, has not been a subject of any research until now. The chosen time frame makes it possible to follow both the policy of the Soviet Union towards Austria from the beginning of the Korean War until the death of Stalin, but also how the country’s image gradually changed on the pages of the Bulgarian press, again in relation to Kremlin’s tactics after 1956 against the background of Kremlin’s peaceful coexistence policy.

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Single-person households in Bulgaria

Author(s): Kremena Borissova-Marinova,Marta Sugareva / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2022

Keywords: single-person households; family models; second demographic transition; Bulgaria

This article studies the distribution of single-person households in Bulgaria emphasizing both on the dynamics of this process in time and the main factors that have been inducing it. The main point of this article is the analysis of the structure of such single-person households by main demographic attributes such as sex, age, marital status, etc. It has attempted to find out which are the population strata generating single-person households most often and what would be the relation of the phenomenon of this type of families’ large-scale occurrence to some other demographic and socio-economic parameters of modern lifestyle, which would include an international comparison with some other states in Europe and worldwide, inter alia. This study has used official data retrieved from the national statistics in Bulgaria and some other countries, both from censuses and specialized surveys (EU-SILC).

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Influence of the territorial specialization in economic activities on the birth rate in Bulgaria

Author(s): Nikolay Stoenchev,Elena Stefanova / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2022

Keywords: territorial specialization; coefficient of localization; crude birth rate; total fertility rate; mean age of mothers at childbirth; coefficients of correlation

The territorial specialization in economic activities is related to the provision of work and income to the population, contributing to sustainable regional development, and should influence the birth rate, since both the economic status and the prospects of the territory exert their influence on population’s migration at a young age. The scope of this research encompasses the analysis of the strength and the direction of relationship between the coefficient of localization by economic activities - acting as a factor, and the fertility indicators (including the crude birth rate, the total fertility rate, the mean age of mothers at childbirth and the mean age of mothers at first childbirth by provinces) - acting as a result. The coefficient of localization was calculated in two variants: based on the number of employed individuals by economic activities and based on the gross added value produced, by economic sectors. Official data from the National Statistical Institute (NSI) were used, with the birth rate being matched with lag values of the factor. Significant dependencies between the studied figures were revealed, which allow to refine management decisions regarding the restructuring of the economy in a regional aspect with a view to a favourable impact on the birth process in a smooth, natural and perspective way.

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Collective intelligence in mixed gender teams in outsourcing organizations

Author(s): Asen Trichkov / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2022

Keywords: collective intelligence; mixed-gender teams; outsourcing organization

Nowadays, the diversity of the teams in work organizations is measured as an indicator of better efficiency and higher knowledge. Collective intelligence (CI) refers to a group or a team’s combined capacity and capability to perform a wide variety of tasks and solve diverse problems. The paper presents the collective intelligence survey in sample of 46 employees in outsourcing organization, divided in 15 gender different teams (male, female, mixed). The results are showing that within the current sample, on two of the CI subscales “Coordination” and “Networking” women or female teams are demonstrating higher levels. The derived result would serve to give overview of the value of diversity in work teams. The result is giving information of potential structure that could be implemented, giving an advantage of the women in organization for knowledge keepers and a pillar of successful communication leading to successful realization.

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China’s influence in the CEE countries - the relation and its impact on the region

Author(s): Arta Haxhixhemajli / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2022

Keywords: China; 16+1 initiative; European Union; trade; foreign policy

In the last few years, China has managed to experience an economic boost and maintain its relation with Central and Eastern European (CEE) countries. The paper presents the evolution and the results of the 16+1 initiative from the beginning to the present. It compares it in terms of trade, economy, foreign policy, and geopolitics by identifying China’s influence and analysing its importance in Central and Eastern Europe (CEE). Nonetheless, the development of the 16+1 initiative has demonstrated that China is becoming a power through growing investments and enlargement compared to the European Union (EU). The trade relations between China and the CEE region are constantly growing in fund projects, energy, infrastructure, and transport. Furthermore, the paper tackles factual information to understand Chinese involvement in the CEE and on which spectrum of cooperation from the lenses of the EU.

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Forest protection in China and Bulgaria: A comparative legal analysis

Author(s): Georgi Bakyov / Language(s): English / Issue: 2/2022

Keywords: forest protection; environmental rule of law; forestry act; European Green Deal; Constitution of the People’s Republic of China

Forest protection represents a significant phenomenon, a legal and social principle in itself, related to the larger aspiration of humanity to achieve an ecological balance of anthropogenic activity and sustainable development. With the present study, we will analyse an interesting problem related closely to environmental protection. Bulgaria and China are characterized by a significant percentage of afforestation in their territory. Forests in China vary between 21 and 24 percent, while in Bulgaria they reach 36 percent. The principles of regulation of forest protection in China and Bulgaria share some common features, but also hide their peculiarities. With this research, we set the following predetermined goals: to give a basic idea of the legal framework in each of the countries related to the protection of forests; to indicate the main principles that determine the legislation in the area; to indicate the best examples of their comparable features.

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The MyStreet Movement and Participatory Video

Author(s): Balázs Cseke / Language(s): English / Issue: 23/2023

Keywords: participatory video; self-representation; digital archive; digital literacy; minority literature;

What is the future vision of children in a Pupil Referral Unit in North London? How does Budapest’s skateboarding subculture create its own representation? What do Prague residents do on the anniversary of the Velvet Revolution? These are a few of the wide-ranging topics explored by the filmmakers of MyStreet. Launched in the early 2010s, the MyStreet project, modelled on the UK’s Mass Observation movement, expanded traditional academic forms of knowledge production to include broad social groups, researching everyday experiences and publishing the videos on a map-based website. This article presents the history and connections between MyStreet and its historical predecessor, the British Mass Observation movement of the 1930s, and then analyses some videos from the collection to examine how MyStreet enables marginalized groups to represent themselves.

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Remake Bodony: Visual Participatory Action Research and Tiny Publics

Author(s): Márton Oblath / Language(s): English / Issue: 23/2023

Keywords: visual research methods; photovoice; social documentary; participatory action research; participatory film;

Remake Bodony is a documentary film, which was collaboratively developed by the inhabitants of Siklósbodony, Hungary in 2017. The article presents an account of the film production process as an organic continuation of two prior participatory visual arts workshops using photovoice and community mural painting. The reconstruction adopts a methodological lens and interprets these participatory activities as three stages of a visual participatory action research project. Three analytic dimensions are introduced: methodological configuration, “tiny publics” (Fine 2012), and the participants’ emerging research questions – to produce an account of the collective thought process occurring in the course of filmmaking

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The Camera as a Social Catalyst

Author(s): Sára Haragonics / Language(s): English / Issue: 23/2023

Keywords: participatory filmmaking; minority and majority representation; integration; society; catalyst; community; workshop; group identity;

The methodology, practical aspects and social embeddedness of participatory filmmaking and specifically the catalyst method developed by the author are presented in this study through workshop processes in Hungary. While the catalyst method is based on participatory video methodology, it uses film primarily for interpersonal communication, and its main goal is the use of the camera as a group cohesion and intergroup catalyst. The method addresses the representation and self-representation of participants along social fault lines through filmmaking, it is based on the principle of dialogue and aims at community building and participation. The method is hopefully applicable in other countries, as the democratising potential of participatory filmmaking for at least partially redressing existing inequalities can be utilized in other locations as well.

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Displacements. Contexts for a Participatory Media Project

Author(s): András Müllner / Language(s): English / Issue: 23/2023

Keywords: minor media; participatory video; Challenge for Change; camera as catalyst; youth participatory action research (YPAR); displacement; liminality;

This paper presents a participatory film intervention focused on young people, which was held within the framework of a grant coordinated by the Minor Media/Culture Research Centre and took place in the form of a summer camp in 2021. After revisiting some historical examples and definitions of participatory film, the author focuses on the concept of displacement as used in film theory and psychology, which he attempts to redefine and thereby reverse its negative connotations. The author analyses the catalyst method, one of the various forms of implementing participatory video as a visual research method, which was the one used in the research described here. The participatory film methodology based on the camera-as-catalyst is meant to foster inter-group collaboration through camera use in order to achieve a free performance and interplay of identities and ultimately to strengthen social cohesion. Beyond the emancipatory intent, the diachronic and synchronic case studies are also linked by the fact that most of the projects were also collaborations with young people, as was the case in the Minor Media summer camp. In the final section, the author analyses the films made by the young people in terms of their relation to contemporary popular culture and the performance of adolescent identities defined by liminality.

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You-Too: Mental Hygiene Methodology for College-Age Students

Author(s): György Ligeti / Language(s): English / Issue: 23/2023

Keywords: learning methodology; you-too; self-knowledge; teamwork; Roma students;

You-Too, a newly developed teaching and learning methodology in mental hygiene for college-age students, focuses on individual needs and uses their motivational power instead of trying to solve perceived or real social problems. This paper presents the theoretical background and main features of the method, as well as the anthropological observations we made during its operation.

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Participatory Video in the Museum

Author(s): Krisztina Varga / Language(s): English / Issue: 23/2023

Keywords: museum; participation; participatory video; museum pedagogy; InsightShare;

Since the turn of the 2000s, the institution of the museum has become increasingly open and participatory, with an emphasis not only on engaging the public, but also on active involvement, community empowerment and shared knowledge creation. The resulting process, in which the museum adapts new methodologies to its toolkit, entails the introduction of participatory video. In this article, the author examines how participatory video can be used as a museum pedagogical and/or method of mediation. Through selected examples, she presents the methodology of participatory filmmaking and its adaptations in museums, analysing the project The Living Cultures: Decolonising Cultural Spaces (2020). She also presents two participatory filmmaking museum sessions in Hungary: the Participatory Filmmaking Camp of the Hungarian Jewish Museum (2015) and the MyStory pilot project of the Sopron Museum (2018).

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The Power of Close-ups and the Poetics of Silence: The House is Black by Forough Farrokhzad

Author(s): Mona Monsefi / Language(s): English / Issue: 23/2023

Keywords: Forough Farrokhzad; Gilles Deleuze; documentary; human body; Biblical poetry;

The House is Black is a lyrical documentary by a modernist Iranian poet and filmmaker, Forough Farrokhzad. It is a kind of symbolic visual poem about leper patients of a leprosarium in Iran made in 1962, which transcends time and place. This paper describes the ways in which the emphasis on the human body, references to historical and religious sources, and the use of the Biblical verses replace conventional interviews to create a narrative in the film. Utilizing Gilles Deleuze’s concept of affect, the paper analyses the camera’s focus on hands and feet, in contrast to absent facial expressions, which engages the audience.

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Dance and the Mediated Immersive Flux in Carlos Saura’s Musical Hybrids with Live Feed

Author(s): Fátima Chinita / Language(s): English / Issue: 23/2023

Keywords: screendance; pure musicals; haptic perception; live video feed; sensoriality; Carlos Saura;

Carlos Saura’s “pure musicals,” as he calls them, are highly based on the formal properties of the image and the expressive use of light in a minimalist scenic space. Although, they have not been declared screendance pieces (as per Rosenberg 2012), which conjoin rhythmic body movements with screen-based, technologically mediated methods of rendering, they are full-fledged screendance examples, being hybrid, symbiotic, and integral (Richard James Allen, 2006). This article concentrates on Saura’s musicals from 2005 onwards – Flamenco (1995), Iberia (2005), Fados (2007), Flamenco Flamenco (2010), Argentina (Zonda, folclore argentino, 2015) and Jota de Saura (2016) – particularly the immersive mediation operated through the use of live video feed as an intermedial sensorial device. Saura’s silky, glossy, and lustrous images form an optical-haptic continuum. The twofold bodies, the digital doubles and the flesh-and-bone act as inducers of crystallization in Gilles Deleuze’s perception of modern cinema (1985), inasmuch as they interact and alternate in a cinematic flux, forming a circuit. Thus, an image of a recorded stage performance enters into a relationship with cinema, a medium already endowed with reflective features, producing the crystallization of these screendance films in all their Saurian immersivenness and sensoriality.

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Immanence, Ethics and Dystopia in The Lobster by Yorgos Lanthimos

Author(s): Kevser Akyol Oktan / Language(s): English / Issue: 23/2023

Keywords: transcendence; immanence; ethics; Spinoza; cinema; dystopia;

The article discusses The Lobster (2015) by Yorgos Lanthimos in connection with the concepts of transcendence and immanence, morality and ethics. This film is a dystopia that critically reveals the relationship between modernity and morality and draws attention with its objections to transcendental moral values. Therefore, in this study, the film is the subject of a discussion mainly focusing on the loss of control of modern individuals over their own lives under the pressure of transcendent values and moral systems that produce hierarchy. The film is evaluated on the axis of Spinoza’s approach to immanence ethics. The distinction between morality and ethics, which stands out in Spinoza’s philosophy of immanence, and the association of morality with transcendence and ethics with immanence form the basis of the analysis of the film. Criticisms of transcendence and morality are hidden in the ironic style that is based on Cartesian oppositions such as nature–culture, good–evil, mind–body, woman–man, rule-illegal, similarity–difference in the film. In addition, the emphasis on the lack of emotion in the film is an important part of the critical style of the film in terms of the role that Spinoza assigns to the affects in the context of activating the conatus.

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