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Am Abend, als wir die Macht übernahmen...
A conversation with Andor Kovács, President of the National Committee in Csurgó district
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A conversation with Andor Kovács, President of the National Committee in Csurgó district
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An interview with the eyewitness and participant István Vizinczey
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In 1929 Karol Lanckoroński (1848–1933) donated his collection of scientific photographs to the Polish Academy of Arts and Sciences. Among the photographs of works of art and archeological relics in that collection we can also find prints of ethnographic nature, including photographs by Alfred Silkiewicz, a photographer with connections in Ternopil. On 6 July 1887 the heir to the throne Archduke Rudolph visited Ternopil and saw an ethnographic exhibition designed specially for his visit in the municipal garden. The central figures of the exhibition were residents of minor towns of Eastern Galicia brought to Ternopil, dressed in regional costumes. The text focuses on the circumstances of taking those photographs and on their significance as a source for researching the history of Galicia and its residents.
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The Calvinist church from Fântânele (Mures County, RO) proves to be one of the most important architectural monuments in the upper part of the Târnava Mică Valley, due to its construction in the 13th and 14th centuries and to its special artistic details, preserved through the decorations and interior furnishings. It was built on a nucleus of Romanic origins that can be detected in the elevation of the nave and also in the tower attached to the western façade. Later on, the church was subject to several modifications that can be ascribed from a stylistic and chronological perspective to the Gothic period and Transylvanian late-Renaissance. Imprints of the Gothic building-phase can be identified in the polygonal apse, consolidated with buttresses displaying features similar to those found on the side walls of the nave. These additions date back to the 15th and 16th centuries and this intervention represents the most important alteration of the edifice. Even though smaller in size, the elements introduced in the 1600s are remarkable due to their esthetic and stylistic quality. The modifications of that time culminated in 1625, when the construction of the coffered ceiling, which is still present in the apse, was carried out. The painted plafond, financed by János Gáspár of Szöverd, exceeds the importance of local heritage, as it is the only in situ example from Transylvania dated during the first half of the 17th century. Later interventions lack any well-defined stylistic qualities, however their impact on the recent evolution of the church proves to be significant. Examples to be mentioned here are the painted coffered ceiling placed in the nave of the church in 1782, along with the Southern portico, erected in 1835 and 1836. Between 1980 and 1983 an extensive restoration took place, accounting for the largest action of this type in the recent history of the building. The ecclesiastical building valued primarily due to its mural paintings (to be discussed by the author of this study in a forthcoming paper), also raises other questions pertaining to art history, along with the problems identified by specialists in the second part of the 20th century. The advances in the research of the Transylvanian built heritage over the past decades resulted in an extensive amount of new data, thus, widening the perspectives of the analysis of the Calvinist church from Fântânele. Therefore, we find it necessary to make several corrections to a previously formulated theory concerning the authorship of the church’s coffered ceiling. Contrary to the idea presented in 1945 by the historian Lajos Kelemen, one cannot make a well-supported argument for the association between this feature and the painter János Kepíró of Egerháza.
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The article describes the process of studying gentry archives by Professor Adam Skałkowski (the 1919 founder of Poznań historiography) and his students. These vast source materials perished along with the gentry class itself in 1945, and the works of the Poznań historian and his followers are the last trace of them. The main source material is the correspondence between members of the gentry and Skałkowski’s students, stored mainly in the Manuscript Department in the Library of Adam Mickiewicz University, but also in the Archive of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw and the Ossolineum in Wrocław. This is complemented by Skałkowski’s memoirs from the author’s collection. The inquiries and trips of Skałkowski and his students to palaces and manors helped create dozens of source articles and monographs. The article aims at reconstructing these researchers’ work in archives. The series titled “The lives of esteemed Poles in the 18th and 19th centuries” (written by Skałkowski) alone included 34 book publications — the fruit of these investigations, including multiple papers by MA and PhD students.
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The last decades of the 18th century and the first half of the 19th century were also marked in the Romanian space by the agglutination and crystallization of two apparently contradictory processes: the establishment of the Romanian national identity and the organization of the national struggle, and the organization of civil society, with the mission of democratizing and making the political life of society transparent. In order to dislodge the old political arrangements based on police control, censorship, etc., the national elites resorted to various forms and means of action; on the one hand, to the politics of conspiracy and plotting, after the Italian Carbonari model, or to masonic lodges and fraternities, i.e. secret associations and societies, fashionable throughout Europe. They replaced the political activity carried out in legal forms (the political opposition in the Public Assembly) because the civil society was in the process of being organized and was still proving fragile, and they offered their members (conspirators, conjurers, freemasons) a space of freedom and personal security, for the spread of new ideas and new programs for social and national emancipation. As such, although secret or discrete structures of a special nature, surrounded by an imaginary conspiratorial halo, secret societies, masonic lodges fortified civil society and contributed to the realization of the ideals of this time (the decades of the middle of the 19th century).
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The article is an attempt to look at the origins and development of Kuwait City before the oil boom as a socially created space. Its structure reflects social and economic dynamics as well as cultural and environmental sustainability, although it was the mercantile function that was the most important city-forming factor in Kuwait. The specific character and functionality of the city were determined by its location, climate, connections with the Persian Gulf and, at the same time, Bedouin traditions and culture, as exemplified by the house of the merchant family Al-Badr.
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Hivzija Hasandedić is one of the scholars who got their degree at VIŠT (degree in Islamic-Sharia theology), where he received theological, universal education, but in a later phase in their life made an eminent contribution in the field of Bosnia and Herzegovina cultural heritage studies. Hivzija Hasandedić left almost an entire library of valuable research contributions and authentic documents which are indispensable in studies of the history of Bosnia and Herzegovina. The most dominating aspect of his method was the micro-historical approach to his studies that can be explained as the history from beneath or the research that takes for its subject, not some large-scale events, but rather focuses on those small, marginalised spaces and topics. These small topics as such create a mosaic which provides a better and more wholesome view of the entire historical process. The present article aims to study and present Hasandediće’s methodology of the approach to studies of culture and history. We tried to observe what heritage was the subject of his study, in what way and in what volume, believing that in that way we would gain a better understanding of his attitude towards cultural history and what enabled him to produce such a remarkable volume of works.
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In 1988, Gary Vikan dedicated a study to the famous post-Byzantine calligrapher Luke the Cypriot, Metropolitan of Wallachia. Trying to substantiate the claim that the subject of his research “was closely acquainted with Anastasios Crimca, Moldavian Metropolitan, who was also a renowned manuscript illuminator”, he stated that “Mount Sinai cods. 1480 (Gospels)” was written by Luke, “while the headpieces and Evangelist portraits are by Crimca”. The detail was important, because it highlighted a previously unsuspected connection between two major Early Modern “schools of scribes”, a Greek one, gravitating around Luke († 1629), in Wallachia, and a Church-Slavonic one, galvanized by Crimca († 1629), in Moldavia. Yet Sinaiticus gr. 1480 does not contain the Gospels and it was not copied by Luke: it is a liturgical chant manuscript copied by one of Luke’s most talented disciples, hieromonk Iakovos of Simonopetra, in Bucharest, in 1625. There is, however, a manuscript that fits the (laconic) description provided by Vikan: Sinaiticus gr. 203. The present paper places the manuscript in its (dual) cultural context and reconstructs, with the help of archival materials, the career of the donor. Based on this evidence, it argues that it mirrors the profound political, economic, and social transformation of Southeastern Europe after the fall of Constantinople (1453).
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The article examines some aspects of the traditional medicine of the Bulgarians in Southern Ukraine based on the example of the Bulgarian Diaspora group living in Ternivka (today a micro district of the city of Mykolaiv) since the beginning of the 19th century. The text demonstrates that the heritage of folk medicine is passed down from generation to generation in the community, in particular the experience of self-healing with phytotherapy, minerals, etc. The role of the healers – soothsayers and fortune tellers, as well as folk midwives – is noted. Personal information is provided about individual healers and their treatment methods. Examples of treatment by spells of ordinary and so-called folk diseases are given, as well as authentic texts used by witches recorded by the ethnographer Sergey Tsvetko. Particular attention is paid to the peculiarities of the treatment of children’s diseases. A conclusion is made about the limitations of folk medicine and its natural transformation into non-traditional in the second half of the 20th century.
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The movement of religious and moral revival of the Army of the Lord, which appeared in the Romanian Orthodox Church in 1923, at the initiative of the priest Iosif Trifa (1888-1938) from Sibiu, will exert a strong influence on the Orthodox Church. The relations with the ecclesiastical authority, the Archdiocese of Ardeal, represented at that time by the Metropolitan Dr. Nicolae Bălan, and the de facto founder of the movement, the priest Iosif Trifa, at first very good, cooled down with the extension of the movement's activity beyond the borders of the Archdiocese of Sibiu, and his acquisition of a personal printing house. A tense situation built up which, in 1935-1938, degenerated into a conflict with unforeseen consequences for the Army of the Lord. Under the communist regime, which regarded the movement as anti-sectarian and chauvinist, the civil sentence of the Court of Sibiu of 22 December 1949 dissolved the Army of the Lord as a society and eliminated it from the register of legal entities. The Army of the Lord continued to exist underground and manifested itself through isolated actions of members in various parishes in the country until 1990 when it was legally and canonically rehabilitated.
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The purpose of the paper is to draw a parallel between different folkloric traditions in Chitid, Hunedoara County and Jina, Sibiu County. I am interested in discussing how these ancient traditions can be preserved in the modern world which is entirely submitted to the globalization phenomenon. I am also interested in discussing about these historical and geographical areas in the context of multilingual and religious diversity. In order to offer a consistent view of this parallel, I will use the technique of diverse monographic books, focusing on how to express the idea of the patriarchal universe avatar in contemporaneity. The creative use of language will be regarded as a means to make visible the new paradigm in which Romanian folklore can be understood and loved in contemporaneity.
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Five scholars from the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences (Markéta Devátá, Oldřich Tůma, Barbora Čermáková, Michaela Tučková and David Weber) have compiled an extraordinarily comprehensive encyclopaedia, "Pamětní místa na komunismus v České republice" [Places of Memory of Communism in the Czech Republic]. In the form of individual entries with informative texts and photographs, it records 807 different memorials in the Czech Republic dedicated to people and events connected with the period of communist rule in Czechoslovakia (1948–1989), which were created during the following thirty years of democratic rule (1989–2019). The reviewer introduces the structure of the publication and emphasizes the usefulness of the project. In his view, the documentation collected and categorized in this way provides a thorough overview of the phenomenon of Czech public commemoration of communism, including events and figures both well-known and forgotten, while, in addition to the victims of the regime, also notes the border guards on the western border. While appreciating the effort of the introductory chapter’s authors to place the Czech culture of remembrance in an international context, the reviewer believes it would be desirable even in such an empirical publication to place the cases more in their historical context and to pay more attention to the instigators of the memorials. The book is also availableonline at www.pametnimista.usd.cas.cz, and is searchable by region, topic, timeline or full text.
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Ştefan Ştefu is an important figure of his generation, trained on the benches of the Arad schools, who at the beginning of the 20th century fought for the emancipation of the Romanians. He worked as a schoolmaster in different localities, knowing well the problems of Romanian society. He also stood out in the musical field, being a supporter of Romanian choral music, an important element that strengthened national sentiment when the Hungarian political class was implementing harsh Hungarianization measures. Like other contemporaries, Ştefan Ştefu was mobilized in 1914, arriving at the front in Poland, from where he never returned.
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This research is based on information obtained from two avarız defters compiled in 1694 and preserved in the Ottoman Archives in Istanbul. The documents reveal that the city of Yambol had a predominantly Muslim profile, with 82% of its population identified as Muslim. The non-Muslim community in Yambol consisted of Bulgarians, Jews, and Armenians. Additionally, members of the Crimean Tatar Giray dynasty and their subordinates were also present. The social composition of Yambol included individuals from the two main social categories: reaya and askeri. What is characteristic of the representatives of the askari group is that they were the overwhelming majority (65%) among the urban dwellers. The soldiers among them – local residents and displaced people from other parts of Rumeli, represent 58% of all residents of the town. This ratio allows Yambol to be defined as a “militarized” city in the Ottoman province. The study includes an Annex with the translation from Ottoman Turkish to Bulgarian of the avarız defter for the town of Yambol, dated May 26 – June 4, 1694.
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The role of the Janissary corps in the history of the post-classical Ottoman Empire is one of the most debated themes in historiography. Undoubtedly, this role transcended its purely military functions and had much wider social, economic, and political repercussions, not only for the capital of the Empire but also for the provinces. This was particularly true in the context of the decentralization of the corps and their infiltration into local societies and economies in the eighteenth century. This paper aims to examine the local implications of these multi-layered processes in the town of Rusçuk (Ruse, on the Lower Danube), based on information from a rare, detailed mid-18th-century avarız defter. The source provides valuable information on the local society, with a key focus on the military strata in the town of Rusçuk, dominated almost entirely by the Janissaries. The information from the defter offers valuable details about their inner hierarchy, payment structures, and clustering along professional lines in the urban quarters. This exhaustive but generally statistical information will be correlated with data from the kadi court records of the local sharia judges of Rusçuk from approximately the same period (circa mid-18th century). Through a micro-historical approach, the study attempts to provide a more adequate context for understanding the demographic parameters, the degree of infiltration of the military into local society and economy, and their role in the everyday life of the province.
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In the courtyard of the Pleven prison, during agricultural work, a ceramic vessel with over 7,000 silver coins with a total weight of 8,345 kg was discovered. The treasure was most likely hidden around the 20s of the 15th century. It consists of coins of Sultan Bayazid I (1389 – 1402), Emir Suleiman (1402 – 1411), Emir Musa (1411 – 1413), Emir Mehmed ( 1403 – 1413) and then as Sultan Mehmed (1413 – 1421), Emir Mustafa (1416, 1419, 1421 – 1422) and the Bulgarian Tsar Ivan Shishman (1371 – 1395).
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Until the wars of national unification, the navy and maritime industries developed largely spontaneously, without clear strategy and objectives, with constant opposition from some politicians. The transformation of Bulgaria into a maritime country is a slow and difficult process, also related to a change in the way of thinking. In Bulgaria, as in many other countries, the creation of the military fleet became an engine for the development of other maritime activities and industries.
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After 1878 the restored Bulgarian state set on the way of its European development. Historians determine this development as quite turbulent and the years between the XIXth and XXth century – as economical paragon. Analyzing Pleven model in this article we try to present the current situation of post-Liberation Bulgarian society, as well as the achievements and efforts made by central and regional Bulgarian authorities for the country’s modernization. The main source used is the reports of the Pleven district governors from the comment period, which enrich the knowledge of the socio-economic trends of the era, give a general idea of the period and are a valuable source for this period of Bulgarian history. Looking at modernization processes not infrequently at the center of research in urban centers, while smaller settlements remain on the periphery. For this reason, in the following lines, in addition to Pleven, as the center of one of the counties in the country, we will also consider some of the processes near this town and settlement, thus obtaining a more complete picture of the processes taking place during this period. Analyzing and focusing on the period between these two decades on regional scale, we can easily determine that this development has not been easy at all, that it has been frequently hindered and opposed on behalf of the conservative Pleven citizens.
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Reminiscing about childhood in the city is often associated with memories of places, spaces and games. In this article I will look at childhood in the context of games in the city and its neighborhoods, spaces and quarters. I use anthropological, historical and visual approaches to look at the way children use these spaces to play games. The purpose is to show the connection between places and the so-called „ownership of territories“ as part of creating images of childhood. The focus will be on places for play and neighborhoods as spaces of interaction and sense of belonging. Through the analysis of stories and visual data related to the city of Plovdiv, games and images of childhood from different periods of time will be presented.
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