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This article focuses on the basic question of what axiological perspectives are found in Polish and German deportation narratives from the second half of the twentieth century. Chwin also asks what kinds of axiological challenges mass deportation and expulsion has posed (and still poses) for literature. Numerous writers and chroniclers – witnesses as well as participants – have tackled the issue, and their writings continue to be published in Poland and in Germany. Chwin presents a preliminary typology of axiological perspectives that give direction to narratives of deportation in Polish and German literature of the second half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. He isolates the following basic perspectives: 1. the Nemmersdorf axiology, 2. the axiology of biographical recapitulation, 3. the axiology of deportation and of the ‘ideological fatherland’, 4. the axiology of historical recapitulation of deportation and 5. the axiology of ‘alternative history’. The article passes over the axiology of reconciliation in Polish literature after 1989 – a topic that deserves a separate study.
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This article aims to clarify the reasons that necessitate the preparation of orders, messages and statutes regulating marriage, premarital and marital agreements. The information is collected from Codes of bishoprics record books of Bulgarian parishes and correspondences from the National Revival press. The study shows that regulations and orders issued by all institutions of authority, suggesting the existence of a common vision for the development of society. The main goal of the requirements is to establish a balance in relations by freeing poorer families from the financial burden of the wedding.
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After Bulgaria’s Liberation, Perushtitsa, during the late 19th and early 20th century, endeavours to revive its traditions in the economical and spiritual development, inherited from the Bulgarian Revival Period. The statistical data and the lists of students in the school books of the three schools in Perushtitsa at that time, show the striving of Perushtitsa’s population for education. The Council of Elders, with its insisting on the procurement of textbooks and other school materials, and most of all, the hiring of well-educated teachers, practicing educational techniques contemporary for the time, predetermine the optimal results in the schools and the appearance of the village.
More...(По примера на Закона за населяване на ненаселените земи в България)
The aim of this research is building up a concept in Bulgarian legislation during the period of 1878–1912 concerning the immigration policy. The major conclusion of the analysis made is that during the researched period, the Bulgarian lawmakers still lack consistency in the implementation of this policy as a factor concerning the demographic development of the country.
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The aim of this paper is to make an inquiry into the structure of Introduction to Bulgarian author and diplomat Simeon Radev’s book of history Builders of Modern-day Bulgaria (1910). The inquiry conceives a certain problematization of the supposedly self-evident meaning of the text by showing its irreducible ambiguity. The paper tries to propose a new theoretical framework for future analyses on nationalist discourse in Bulgarian context.
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The anthropological image of criticism (the image of the individual filtering truth from untruth) focuses on the power and meaning of the gesture, which seems more essential than merely ‘conceptual’ philosophical categories. Negative dialectics proposes a new definition of criticism: in view of the catastrophes of the twentieth century we need a vision of criticism that makes it possible to voice our despair and to create a ‘sad science’ in the place of Nietzsche’s ‘gay science’. To make this possible we must draw on the imagination and the image, for it is images that are brittle enough to elude the totalizing power of conceptualization and at the same time strong enough to become agents of criticism.
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Bilewicz applies notions borrowed from the psychology of emotions to understand collective (im)memory in Poland, with a particular focus on defensive reactions to new historical data on Poles’ negative behaviour. Based on James Gross’ concept of emotion regulation, Bilewicz elaborates a model of downregulating collective moral emotions (such as guilt and shame). He then applies this model to the debate on the Jedwabne pogrom. He also outlines systematic social psychological studies that support his proposed emotion downregulation model. The article concludes with a discussion of alternative ways of presenting negative history – ways that overcome those defensive emotion regulatory processes.
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The Jewish Holocaust has a special place in Polish discourses on memory. It would be hard to overestimate its importance in constructing a model of Polish identity. But Leociak points out a weakness in Polish Holocaust memory – one that appears especially in narratives about saving Jews. The rhetoric, poetics and metaphors of these discourses – both private and public – are astonishingly durable, given the changing political context. This article is a preliminary exploration of a certain type of Polish discourse on Holocaust memory, one that has a long tradition but is now gaining prominence. It could be described as a Catholic-national discourse, where both elements have equal weight, affirming its rootedness in the ideology of the prewar Catholic National Democracy formation (also known as ND or ‘Endecja’).
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Zaremba demonstrates how insurrections and revolts were commemorated in the 1970s, how those traditions were reproduced, and who remembered them. The article begins with a description of the events of December 1970, which would become important reference points for ideas on oppositional activism. Discussing the Poles’ collective memory of March 1968 and October 1956, Zaremba emphasizes the significance of World War II: a code of resistance and cooperation has emerged as a long-term consequence, resounding most clearly and most frequently in the myth of the Warsaw Uprising. The article concludes with a discussion of what Adam Mickiewicz called książki zbójeckie (robbers’ books) – a term Zaremba applies to writers such as Bohdan Cywiński, Andrzej Kijowski and Marian Brandys. They were robbers’ books because they altered the atmosphere of public life in the 1970s, reclaiming memories of political thought that had no official place in the Polish People’s Republic.
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Dauksza examines the status of non-Jewish Polish concentration camp survivors. Their wartime experience and the way in which they functioned after the war has always been and continues to be different from the Jewish experience. Based on empirical studies, Dauksza argues that the problem is that their experience is ‘an experience without a name’: unable to name it, they are also unable to experience what happened to a significant group of Poles during the occupation. The question concerns not only actual former prisoners and their relatives – as the framework of post-memory transfer would suggest – but also individuals who for several years lived in fear of being deported, as well as those who witnessed the deportation of others, including Jews.
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25 years ago, Polish gentiles were interviewed on the disappearance of their Jewish neighbours. Kapralski re-examines those interviews in order to revise current attitudes to this kind of memory. He presents memory as a product of current constellations of the remembering subject’s interests, whereby the subject is embroiled in existential efforts to construct mnemonic safety, which in turn is the basis for processes of reconstructing collective memory. These processes were particularly vital in the context of the uncertainty that marked the transformation in the 1990s – a transformation that Kapralski frames in terms of a structural trauma that shapes memories about historical trauma. Such a framing of memories of the Jews means that they have been publicly commemorated in Poland, but they are not remembered within the structures of communicative memory.
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In 1990, The Day of Liberation of Bulgaria from Ottoman Yoke was proclaimed a national holiday, which is honoured on 3 March. On this date (19 February after the old Julian calendar), in 1878, the Peace Treaty of San Stefano was signed, which put an end to the Russian-Turkish War. A quarter of a century already, instead of playing the function of a symbol of national unity, this national holiday turns into an arena of acute confrontation between the political powers in the country, polarized between euroatlantism and russophilia. The retrospective overview of the commemoration of this holiday of the Bulgarian national calendar since 1878, provided by the paper, reveals that it has always been so. During each relatively detached period of Bulgarian historical development, the holiday on 19 February/3 March has always been used as an instrument to split Bulgarian society and State between East and West.
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Hrisant Samokovsky (1800–1871) is one of the few well known Bulgarian Renaissance churchmans. He studies at the Theofilos Kayris School on Andros island and serves in the Patriarchate of Constantinople. From 1847 to 1858, Hrisant is the Archimandrite of the Greek Ekaterininski Monastery in Kiev. In this period he is the most influential Bulgarian in Kiev and supports a lot of Bulgarian students at the Kiev Spiritual Academy. Archimandrite Hrisant is mentioned in letters and memories of the renowned Renaissance brothers Miladinovi, brothers Mustakovi, Ivan Seliminski, Vassil Cholakov and Stanislav Dospevski. Unfortunately there is no specific study about him. Therefore, based on indirect information from published sources, and mainly unpublished documents from his personal fund (Stored in the Bulgarian Historical Archive of the National Library “St. St. Cyril and Methodius” in Sofia), we are trying to recover his biography.
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The years after the Ilinden Uprising put to the test the overall work of the Exarchate in Macedonia. One of the levers by which the Ottoman authority tried to sabotage the process of consolidation of the Bulgarian element in the provinces was the principle of preserving the ecclesiastical status quo. After the uprising many villages started leaving the Patriarchate and passing under the jurisdiction of the Exarchate. That was an increasing trend which pushed to the fore the question of the ownership of churches and schools. For many years the problem remained unsolved by the government, whose policy was to maintain the idea on confrontation between patriarchists and exarchists. And after the Young Turk revolution of July 1908 the issue remained on the agenda and the government continued to apply the familiar tactic of delay and transfer of responsibility in this case to the parliament. The decision was taken as late as the summer of 1910 with the adoption of the Law of contentious churches and schools. Although its provisions did not fully meet the legitimate expectations of Bulgarians, they regulated a solution to a problem which albeit artificially created and maintained by the government was quite pressing for the population in the provinces.
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Through the prism of Bulgarian church history and its links with the Roman Catholic world, the author outlines the wide range of issues that were addressed at the Second Vatican Council (XXI Ecumenical Council of the Roman Catholic Church), which largely shaped the development of theological thought in the second half of 20th century. The article also focuses on the Vatican’s active diplomacy during the period under review and on the internal discussions between the local Orthodox churches, which led to a more open dialogue and increased interest in the work of the Council.
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Bulgaria and Slovakia, as well as their diplomatic, military and political, economic and cultural relations are an integral part of the history of the Southeast Europe during the Second World War. The two countries and their relations are experiencing strong influence of a complex set of factors in the arbitration and the dominant role of German policy. German plans for world domination and a new order in Europe affect almost all aspects in the old continent life – state, international relations, economics, coexistence of different ethnical communities that are historically formed. In Central and Southeast Europe German policy led to the formation of a mosaic of allied, semi-independent and satellite regimes of Germany, on whose development and relations, it continues to affect the entire period of the war. The study of the relations between Bulgaria and Slovakia – bilateral and after the accession of both countries to the Tripartite Pact – allied, gives new perspectives on major events and developments in the war, but especially to the national-territorial problems in Central and Southeast Europe and attempts for their solving during the war years.
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The article traces the development of German historiography after the Second World War until the 1980s on the problems of the politics of Nazi Germany. In this connection, the main concepts of the nature and objectives of German policy in Southeast Europe have been considered.
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Usually we search for the relation between the archives and the access to the archival information and historical research. The article changes the perspective analyzing the opposite effect – the historical guild and history production on archival practice. Underlying this attitude is the functioning of the memory modes giving rise to the nature of historical research and their requirements for programs and practice of archival institutions. In the new and modern Bulgarian history there are periods of intensive construction and re-composition of the value matrix. With its help and around it the historical picture of the past is built. This includes “secondary” historical documentation – a phenomenon which seeks to compensate for the characteristic deficits. One of the target periods is related with the processes of nation-building in the decades before and after the establishment of the modern Bulgarian state. The creation and the maintenance of archival centers in Bulgaria bears the burden of modern national construction, including writing an official history. After World War II the public system in Bulgaria authorizes the history with important functions governing the society. Created in the early 50s of the XX century system of the state archives must meet the needs of repeatedly increased (and increasing) bureaucracy, but also – the special treatment of the new power to history and historical knowledge. The state archives commit more tangibly with the academic and the ideological institutions dealing with the interpretation of the past. Largely this attitude determines the policy of acquiring documents and, of course, providing access to archival information. In these conditions, historical studies are becoming an important factor for the development of the archival system and practice in Bulgaria.
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Based on unpublished Ottoman tax registers (tapu tahrir defteri) kept at the Ottoman archives in Istanbul, the article examines the process of transformation of the Byzantine town of Adrianople into the Ottoman Edirne; the change in the architectural and ethnical and confessional layout of the city; the location of a part of the Muslim and Christian population and of the urban quarters inhabited by them; the Jewish communities and the dynamics in the quantitative indicators of the registered households; the condition, designation and functions of the ancient and medieval fortress of Adrianople and the way in which it fitted into the new Ottoman urban setting. Having surrendered voluntarily the fortress of Adrianople to the Ottoman, the Christian population was granted the right to continue to reside in its quarters in its interior. In the 16th century massive communities of Christian citizens inhabited the space among the fortress walls of the Byzantine fortress and the majority of their neighborhoods were situated around churches and bore the name of the respective church, while others were named after their current or former priests. Upon the conquest of the city by the Ottoman troops some of the churches in the fortress were turned into mosques for the purpose of demonstrating the dominant position of Islam and meeting the spiritual needs of the Muslim population. After the takeover of Edirne the Muslim population settled outside the walls of the ancient and medieval fortress, where it set up its neighborhoods. Besides Muslims and Christians many Jews continued to live in the city as well. They included romaniotes as well as Jews from the sepharadim and ashkenazim groups.
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