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 offers a survey and content analysis of oral narratives featuring the motif of a love relationship between a dragon and a human female. The texts are recorded in different parts of Bulgaria in the second half of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st century. I present the different interpretations of dragon’s love in Bulgarian academic tradition and comment on their aptitude to explain the diverse variations of this plot. Examining the stories, I delineate the common traditional motifs (topoi) as well as the idiosyncratic elements of this plot pattern. The conclusions refer to the multifaceted and dynamic nature of the dragon’s image in the narratives and the multitude of meanings which the motif of dragon’s love can bear and express. Having archetypal characteristics (in the Jungian sense) the image of the dragon and the motif of dragon’s love preserve their liveliness and attraction in different cultural and historical contexts and are still popular in contemporary culture and mentality.
More...
The article presents the serpent concept, preserved in the archaic culture of the village of Erketch (Kozichino), Pomorie region. In this conception the dragons are depicted not as a myth but as a reality. The heirs of these serpents have long lived among the people and are always born with tails. Their kind is distinguished from afar, because they are shapely and tall persons. On the other hand, the description of some “wild people” directly corresponds with the idea of “bear man” in another region of Bulgaria, unique by its archaic nature – the Rhodope Mountains.
More...
Every questioning of a witness by a prosecutor is of a legal and formal nature. Its aim is to determine “what really happened”. A historian, if interested not only in reconstruction of the course of events, strives to get to know the world of the witness he or she is interviewing. These aims determine the methods, but do not exclude learning from each other’s experience, as well as results of investigations, inquiries and research. The same person can be the subject of interest for a narrative; a prosecutor and a historian can complement each other in their findings. This article represents a contribution to the discussion on the differences in methodology in the work of historians and prosecutors, as well as the importance of interviews with witnesses for the research on contemporary history.
More...
The biographical account of Barbara Gołajewska-Chudzikiewicz was recorded in 2007 as a part of the documentary project “The Forgotten Witnesses to the 20th century” run by the KARTA Centre and the History Meeting House. The narrator tells the story of her life, as well as the story of her family, starting in 1918. As the material is very extensive, in this publication only the fragments regarding the years 1918–1945 are presented. The narrative, in a manner typical for landed gentry of the Kielce region, contains a description of Ms Gołajewska-Chudzikiewicz’s childhood and family life in a small landed estate of Bieganów in the times of the Second Polish Republic. It gives insight into the course of her education, upbringing of children and young people in a landowning family, relations between the servants and the landowners, everyday life in the manor house, along with civilization difficulties, celebrating of holidays, the manor-village relations, and finally the general way the landed family functioned between the countryside and the city. The next important part of the narrative starts with the outbreak of WWII and conveys the everyday life of the manor under German occupation in the General-Government. The narrator describes the functions of the Polish manor in occupation conditions: helping and giving shelter to those displaced from the territories incorporated to the Third Reich, helping the Warsaw Uprising fugitive fighters, active participation in the Home Army structures, and relations with the German invader, as well as food and clothes extortions run by armed groups of unknown provenance, and confrontation with the Soviet army entering from the East.
More...
Leszek Wisłocki is a famous music theorist and composer. For many years he has been a Professor at the Academy of Music in Wrocław. However, before he started working for the Academy, he spent some time living in Jelenia Góra, where for 4 years he attended the Stefan Żeromski Co-educational Gymnasium and Grammar School. These school years are the subject of Wisłocki’s account. It is a detailed description of Professor’s pre-war life, as well as his and his family’s war experience, and in particular of his father’s military service. Wisłocki clearly explains the reasons for his family coming to Lower Silesia and settling in Jelenia Góra. Equally clearly Wisłocki recalls his teachers, school friends and important events which influenced the school life as well as the life of the local society, such as existence of the underground independence movement in 1949. He tells anecdotes about excursions to the mountains or his first performances as a musician staged at school. Wisłocki underlines the importance of this first, post-war period – not only for him, but also for his friends who later, having graduated from grammar school, went on to become professors or achieved other socially significant posts. Finally, Professors pays a lot of attention to returns and school relations – still vivid and close after more than seven decades. Annual school reunions and extensive correspondence exchanged by the ex-pupils serves as a proof that the short period of education, which lasted only 4 years, had a great impact on the life of this generation.
More...
The paper presents an individual and group reaction of the population in the town of Pernik during the earthquake of May 22, 2012, in the context of its local and national projection. The text analyzes the causes of the earthquake and the efficacy of the meas¬ures for prevention and overcoming the results of the disaster in the context of their official interpretation and on the level of everyday culture. The conclusions show the shaken trust of the Bulgarian in the political and economic stability of the state; the crisis of life, including as a result of a natural disaster, is comprehended as something permanent and inextricable. The opinion that over the last several years in Bulgaria the complete lack of security in national aspect should be measured on the Richter scale rather than the earthquakes settled permanently in the public space in the region.
More...
The functioning of informal practices as a part of the labour culture and entrepreneurship in two different economic and political regimes is discussed in view of the case of the Borovets Resort. This paper focuses attention on the participation of women in the tourist business in the resort and discusses the thesis that Bulgarian women working in the sphere of tourism are among the ‘winners’ in the transition, in contrast to men working in other fields of the economy. The ethnographic research carried out in the resort in the winter and summer of 2012 and the comparison with previous observations in the same field do not provide evidence to support such a thesis. Viewed in the broader socioeconomic context, the situation of women employed in the tourism sector does not differ considerably from the situation of women employed in other spheres. They live within and are a part of the same gender regime: a common gender ideology and culture. The problematic development of the formal economy, including the field of tourism (regarded as successful), compels men as well as women to search for additional income by working in the informal sector (e.g. the household farm, hourly labour without a contract, self-employment, and so on). Women retain high employment by combining work in the formal and informal economy; however, their situation could hardly be considered a ‘success’. Those working in hotels, the self-employed, and those employed in family businesses evaluate the situation as ‘coping’ or ‘surviving’ in a long-term and harsh economic situation. In order to overcome the unpredictability of this situation, they use all available resources – their cultural, social, and economic capital.Some of the informal practices which are known from the socialist period lose their meaning under the conditions of the new market economy and free access to goods, but others – such as party patronage, personal loyalty, and purchasing access to sources of income – gain new power and produce an exclusion (of those who are ‘not our people’) from the presumably free market and widely accessible formal procedures.
More...
This paper presents a study of the formation and transformation of subcultural group identity in postsocialist Bulgaria. A number of stylistic orientations are presented (punk, hardcore, skinhead, casual), along with related ideological dispositions (‘extreme left’, ‘extreme right’, apolitical). Both paint a real picture of the development of these youth movements as being bound to a distinct class background and to a specific form of opposing the dominant culture. The maintenance of subcultural identity is related to several compulsory prerequisites: clothes, music, presence in a defined real or virtual space, and the practising of specific activities (having tattoos, attending concerts and/or football games, and participating in street protests). The current field material is based on participant observation in the groups carried out in Plovdiv between January and October 2012. In addition, the author discusses some of the prejudices connected to the distinctiveness of these subgroups, whose access to work and education is dif¬ficult. The study is part of the project ‘Youth Subcultures in Postsocialist Bulgaria’, financed by the National Science Fund’s ‘Young Scholars – 2011’ competition.
More...
This text is based on an ethnographic study on the protests and civic initiatives that initially took place in 2013 but then continued with varying intensity throughout the following years. While applying the method of participant observation during “the Gezi events“ and conducting interviews with individuals who had taken part in the protests, a main goal of this study was to grasp the transformation in the identifica¬tion, articulation and presentation of important and secondary topics and problems that had been brought forward throughout the public discussions. The initial moti¬vation of this study was the idea that after the first demonstrations and clashes, the interpretation of the political projects’ turbulence, of the reinvention of urban spaces, of the success or failure of diverse protest and resistance practices, gradually modi¬fies the way the aforementioned events and ongoing processes are being thought and talked about. The research questions tackle respondents’ participation in protests, the constitution and disintegration of communities, the “diagnosis“, “prognosis“ and “rationale“ elements in respondents’ and informants’ microdiscources and their acts in relation to diverse initiatives. The text attempts to systematize the observation data and the collected “narrative fragments“ within four “narrating modes“: transforma¬tive, subjective, argumentative, and topological.
More...
The antimonopoly protests in 2013 were the most popular in the last 16 years; at their height, between 100 000 and 150 000 people crowded the streets of over 35 cities. Although in only two weeks the government was overthrown as a result of these events and a few days later four new parties emerged from the streets, from the very beginning until today the revolts are being described rather as a spontaneous and non-organized moral and economic indignation. The present article questions this viewpoint by applying a deep analysis of the genesis and the development of the structures within the movement, particularly in Sofia, of the struggle for legitimacy of various groups, networks and leaders. By means of participant observation and in-depth interviews with central figures and protestants the text searches the answers to the questions who and how creates the events, the choreography, the route and the claims. The basic tool of the study is a series of „ideal types“ of the protest among which a negative and a positive type.
More...
This study represents the second part of an analysis focusing on Aktionsgruppe Banat and its members’ endeavors to reconstruct their pre-1989 common past. Based on documents from the archives of the former Securitate; this study addresses the concerted efforts of the Aktionsgruppe members to unmask all individuals who supplied the communist secret police with information about their activities in order to delimit themselves as a group from such wrongdoers. While their case was at the time interesting enough to be turned into teaching material for the secret police staff; their current endeavors to revisit their pre-1989 past with the help of documents from the Securitate files illustrates that Aktionsgruppe was a collective victim of this infamous institution; which proved unable to turn any of the group members into its collaborators.
More...Kulturelle Verschränkungen zwischen deutschsprachigem und südslawischem Raum
Cultural intertwining of the German-speaking with the South Slav regions has persisted to this day. In this article, I analyze three war narratives (of the Bosnian War 1992–1995), a narrative of nation building (by Leopold Ranke in 1829) and narratives of different imperial types (by Peter Handke in 1986 and primarily in 2002) in order to show that the South Slav region does not occupy a special status in South-Eastern Europe. However, the intertwining of different economic and cultural spaces in the imperial zone of transition between the Ottoman and the Habsburg Empires yields narratives which can also be considered as paradigmatic for other cultural spaces. It is therefore possible to make generalizations about them.
More...