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Keywords: Greece; Bulgaria; EU accession; Balkans; Cold War
The EC / EU has been an important factor in Greek-Bulgarian relations since the 1960s. This article focuses on three ‘moments’ of this triangular relationship: Bulgarian attitudes towards Greek EC association and accession during the Cold War; Greek attitudes and assistance to Bulgaria’s EU accession; and Greek and Bulgarian positions as Member States on the EU’s Western Balkan agenda. In conclusion, the article deplores the lack of common approaches between the Balkan states, including Greece and Bulgaria within the EU, in pursuing their converging interests for a strong and inclusive EU and often prioritising instead bilateral issues.
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Keywords: cultural memory; national genealogy; uses of the past; Thracians
The ancient origin of the Bulgarians as a nation is related to the Thracians who receive a special place in the ethnic genealogy. The paper is examining the contemporary uses of and identifications with the Thracian past. The presented uses are, on the one hand, indicative of the policies of shaping identities in regions populated by people with varied religions and / or ethnicity by placing an emphasis on certain segments of history. On the other hand, they provide evidence of the activities of numerous NGOs, who foresee the ample opportunities offered by archaeological sites and nature’s beauty for developing cultural tourism. Without exhausting all the uses of antiquity in modern times, the representations and interpretations discussed in the paper give an idea of the way modern Bulgarian culture incorporates the idea of the “Thracian past”. The leading idea is that of continuity, viewed spatially by organizing festivals at archaeological sites, presented through re-enactments of historical events or rituals, reminded of by monuments and names from Thracian times in the modern landscape, used for the development of tourism, and last but not least, experienced in the categories of ancestors and descendants.
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Keywords: textbook analysis; Bulgarian geography textbooks; Greek-Bulgarian relations; Bulgarian nation-building; Images of Greece
The article analyzes the presentation of the Kingdom of Greece and of the Greeks inhabiting the Ottoman European provinces in the first six modern Bulgarian geography textbooks that were published in the period 1835 – 1853. Influenced by foreign Russian, Serbian, Greek and ultimately Western European geography sources, as well as by their own ideas, Bulgarian authors presented a very affirmative vision of the adjacent southern national community peacefully coexisting and even intermingling with Bulgarians in some regions and towns. The Ottoman provinces of Macedonia and Thrace were portrayed as mixed domain of Bulgarians, Greeks, Turks and other nationalities such as Vlachs or Jews. The favourable attitude to the neighbouring Greeks and the Kingdom of Greece was combined and incorporated into the general pattern that facilitated the national emancipation of Bulgarians as a separate imagined national community. This affirmative attitude altered only later, after the start of the Bulgarian struggle for church independence, and mainly after the Crimean War, when the negative outlook to Greece started to gain ascendance.
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Keywords: Balkan History; Social History; Enlightenment in the Balkan; Identities and Nationalisms in the Balkans
The paper presents and comments an unused source of data about the Bulgarian social history in the 17 th – 19th centuries – the diaries of the Greek travellers, who crossed the Balkans at the time of the transition of the Bulgarian society to modernity. The diaries reveal the social and cultural conditions during the 17th and 19th centuries.
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Keywords: Melnik; Balkan Wars; Interwar Period; Migrations; Demography
Melnik is the smallest town in Bulgaria which is classified as an urban settlement mainly because of its historical traditions. It had unusual development on a boundary in many aspects: historically, geographically and as a type of settlement. Certain episodes of its history enjoy huge interest, while the popular representation of others, including the 19th and 20th century, is very fragmentary. The article reconstructs the sequence of key developments during the Balkan Wars in 1912 – 1913 which resulted in a true demographic catastrophe for the town. It also analyses Melnik’s subsequent demographic development in the framework of the Greco-Bulgarian relations in the next two decades.
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Keywords: WWI; Macedonian Front; Salonika Front; cultural heritage; cemeteries; monuments; Bulgaria; Greece
For Bulgarians the First World War was a national disaster. The memory of defeat in the war, the loss of so many soldiers and the Macedonian region remained very strong until the Second World War. The defeat in the Second World War and the predominance of the communists seemed to put an end to national aspirations. But the memory on a personal and social level remained strong as evidenced by its revival after the fall of communism. For the Greeks the First World War was not the most important war. For most Greeks it was rather a break, an interlude between national wars (1912 – 1913 and 1919 – 1922). That is why it was recorded in the literature and in the collective memory not as the Great War, but as the period of the National Discord, which has caused several problems to the political life in Greece for decades and is considered by many researchers the main cause of the in Asia Minor Disaster (1922).
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Keywords: History of the Balkans 19th – 20th centuries; Salonica; Bulgarian consulate; Osman Bey; Greek-Bulgarian relations
The text traces the history of a luxury villa built by Osman Bey in the new part of the city of Salonica at the end of the 19th century. Over the years the building changed owners many times and underwent various metamorphoses. Its story is a downsized version of the colorful palette of the Salonica society, of the multiformity of life and of the intertwining interests in the city. Parallel with that its fate reflects the development of the Bulgarian-Greek relations and constitutes a typical example of fact concealing and suppression of inconvenient truths.
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Keywords: Slovenian-Croatian border; Slovenia; Croatia; European Union; history of the border; perception of the border
Slovenian Croatian relations started degrading in 1991 when the former Yugoslav republics became independent states. For Slovenia, which only has 46 km of the Adriatic coast, the question of the maritime border is especially pressing. In Tito’s Yugoslavia the maritime borders between federal units were not specified, therefore they should be drawn anew. The author concentrates on the period before the first Yugoslav state. The reason for that is obvious: The Slovenian and Croatian nationalisms were formed in this period, and the administrative borders on the ground were demarcated by the Habsburg administration in the 18th and 19th century. In the second part of the article, the author tries to grasp the image of the border in Slovenian public sphere and the importance of the border in the last two decades for the Slovenian nationalism. The context of the EU was did not just help to solve the problem, it also complicated it.
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Keywords: Commerce; companies; family firms; ‘micro / macro’ districts; network; regions; territoriality; commercial products; letters of exchange
Rather than setting out to provide new information about commercial networks and other related phenomena, this paper will seek to propose a model describing the emergence, evolution and co-development of ‘micro / macro’ districts and commercial supra-regions in Southeastern Europe in the 17 – 18th centuries. By ‘micro / macro’ districts, one can understand those places which, vital for trade and production, emerged around market towns and market cities, such as the oppida in Hungarian area, or emerged in the context of the production of, and trade in, particular products, or developed around the crucial centers of commerce established in the Southeastern European. The orientation of these ‘micro / macro’ districts and their links with interregional entities were moulded by multiple factors, which determined whether they formed smaller or larger commercial regions. I have opted to use the term ‘region’ rather than ‘network’ in order to convey the way in which very large territories can be linked by the socio-economic movement of people and products to form a larger entity.
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Keywords: Macedonian cinema; policies of representations; national identity
The article is focused on the movies connected with the film industry of the current Macedonian state – the so-called Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia – in order to explore in which way filmmakers conceptualize their national identity, anxieties about history, what sort of iconic repertoire they prefer and why. In other words, this paper analyzes the fluctuating policies of representation manifested in the cinematic works shot by two very popular in their native country directors – Milcho Manchevski and Darko Mitrevski. The general hypothesis is that the amazing variety of even mutually exclusive representations stemmed from the highly problematic historical continuity between Macedonian state and its deliberately constructed past. The vision for this extremely mythologized past was promoted through the medium of the educational system, film superproductions but, above all, the state institutional efforts for creating a new national identity attained their symbolic apogee in the implementation of the Skopje 2014 Project. The author comments the shifting models in imagining Macedonia in movies from the early 90‑ies till now (2010 – 2014) when the official authorities formulated a clear strategy on national history and identity. Cinema occupies an important place in the overall process of the visual rewriting of the past.
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Keywords: Bulgaria; Greece; Orthodox Christianity; language; literature
The concept “national culture” in the sense of a culture with obvious national features is relevant only from the nineteenth century onwards, when intellectuals intentionally started creating works displaying distinctive national features. Searching for such in the pre-modern era is futile, since at that time national awareness was absent. Typical of pre-national consciousness is allegiance to a religious community. As Tăpkova-Zaimova and Stojčeva pointed out, in the Balkans the distinction between “one’s own literature” and “foreign literature” is not valid any more from the fifteenth century on, “when the idea of a common Orthodox unity of all Christians had emerged and materialized”. Studying Bulgarian-Greek literary relations in the pre-national era in terms of national cultures in contact is in fact anachronistic. As Giuseppe Dell’Agata noticed, we do not deal with a “Greek culture” as opposed to that of other Balkan ethnic groups, but with (Orthodox) “culture in the Greek language”. In our contribution we provide additional arguments supporting this thesis, paying attention to the perspectives it opens for further research.
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Keywords: Foreign Sources for Balkan History; 15th – 18th c.; Narratives; Italian Historiography
“Sources of the Bulgari Chronicle” is the first attempt all written sourcesof an anonymous chronicle to be revealed. This chronicle has come down to us intwo manuscripts in Italian (one of them is entitled “Un manoscritto (18° secolo)che riguarda la storia dei conti Bulgari”) found in the archive of Bulgari family ofCorfu. It was published bilingually (in Italian and in Greek) in 2010 in Greece byStefanos Konstantinos Voulgaris, a descendant of the Bulgari family. The Chroniclehas evoked great interest in Bulgaria because this is the first comprehensive presentationof the Bulgarian medieval history in a separate book that has reached ourtimes. The revealing of the Bulgari Chronicle’s sources is an important task becauseit will provide information about the nationality of its unknown author, about hisancestry, about the time of the Chronicle’s composition. All authors and titles referredto in the Chronicle are presented in tables, which indicate that there are twomain sources of information. They are the works of the Jesuits Louis Maimbourgand Antonio Foresti, due to which the history of the Bulgarian medieval rulers, representedas forefathers of the Bulgari family of Corfu, has been compiled. As a resultof the analysis done, it is concluded that the author of the Bulgari Chronicle was anItalian, a devoted Catholic, who followed the principles of the historical writing inthe time of the Counter-Reformation. As to the time of the Chronicle’s composition,the possible terminus post quem is 1693, determined by the chronological order ofthe printing of the volumes of Antonio Foresti’s “Mappamondo Istorico”; the terminusante quem is 1698, when the Venetian Senate issued a decree conferring Antonio Bulgari and his successors the title of count.
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Keywords: Manuscript; Short Chronicle; Ottoman Balkan Possessions; Ottoman Expansion; Balkan History
The National Museum of Sarajevo, Bosnia and Herzegovina, holds Lyturgion (Missal) No E 543 from the beginning of the 16th c. which was probably written in the St. Joachim of Osogovo (Sarandapor) Monastery near Kriva Palanka, in today’s Republic of Macedonia. It contains the short Sarandapor Chronicle which follows the world history from the Creation to 1512. The laconic notes mention some important moments of the Ottoman expansion and the subsequent period. The identity of the persons and the events included in the chronicle offer valuable historical information. The Sarandapor Chronicle is a copy of a Serbian work, but the history described in it is not just Serbian – it is pan-Balkan. The monks who compiled the text perceived the persons and events included in it as part of a common history.
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Keywords: Cross-Cultural History; Allogenous Elites Nettoworks; XVIIth – XVIIIth Century; Transylvania;Romanian Principalities;
Using as a vantage point the case study of a Levantine family of diplomats of Genovese descent, Mamucca della Torre, the research follows up the intricate trails of physical mobility and sociological ambiguity of a number of transimperial subjects from Italy, which took early roots in the Genovese colonies of the Levant and in the Balkans (Istria). Subjects of the Ottoman Porte, diplomats in the service of Western powers, they settled eventually in Constantinople, Bucharest, Iași, Miklosvar and Kronnstadt (Transilvania), Viennna and Trieste. For three generations, members of the Mamucca della Torre family crossed back and forth the borders of the Ottoman and Habsburg empires, trading loyalties and privileges according to their own interests and assuming multiple functions specific to pre-modern societies: diplomats, interpreters, civil servants, military commanders. Based mainly on their secret diplomatic correspondence and on their private letters, the inquiry looked for answers to the issue of the status of the transimperial subjects against the overall process of reshuffling the ethnic, linguistic, cultural, religious, social and collective identities in Eastern Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries. The reconstruction of such dynamic and heterogeneous networks of cultural exchange and transfer by the means of cross-cultural history has found in individual biographies (Marc’Antonio Mamucca della Torre and his daughter countess Maria) or in family portraits (Mamucca della Torre, Kálnoky, Ferrati, Neniul) a valuable pool of customs and practices in-between the public and the private, or the East and the West.
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Keywords: Tridentine Reforms; Ottoman Balkans; Bosnian Franciscans
The post-Tridentine period was a time of reorganization and renovation of the Catholic Church and these processes provoked reforms in the Catholic ecclesiastic structures in the Ottoman Balkans as well. A significant factor for the penetration of the renovation ideas among the local Catholics was the Franciscan Province Bosna Argentina. But the implementation of the Tridentine reforms caused some disturbances of the traditional Franciscans’ work and resulted in many controversies. Nevertheless, the post-Tridentine reform program, contributed to the revitalization of the Catholic activities in the territories under the Ottomans.
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Keywords: Modernization processes; Balkans;
An important contribution to the study of modernization processes in the Balkans.
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Keywords: Economic history; Balkans;
A very precious and useful handbook for economic and monetary historians of the Balkans.
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