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The collapse of communism in Romania in 1989 has left its imprint also on the minority policies. The article tries to outline the factors that influenced the minority policies of the Romanian governments and their development over the past quarter of a century, while laying a major focus on education and the use of the mother tongue. The Romanian legislation in these fields in the post-communist period gives good grounds to conclude that there has been a considerable progress towards the extension of minority rights. A major role for that has played the need to harmonize the Romanian legislation with the European rules and directives. A significant factor for the change was also the active policy of the UDMR, which firmly defended the rights of the Hungarian minority. At the same time, it should be noted that while making numerous concessions, the Romanian government had made it clear that these concessions could only be made within certain limits.
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The loss of independence, and then the collapse of the national uprisings against Russia (1831, 1863) forced many Poles to emigrate. Many former military in emigration began working as engineers. A major center of the Polish immigration was the Ottoman Empire and the Polish engineers contributed to the modernization of the state. Some of them worked in Bulgarian lands, building telegraph lines, roads and railways. Several of them remained in Bulgaria after its liberation. Boleslav Anz served as Principal Engineer of Bulgarian railways and Sabin Halatkevich participated in the expansion and completion of the Bulgarian railway network until his death in 1935.
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Today, Bulgaria is both a political and a cultural member of Europe, while Korea forms a common areal with its neighbours, China and Japan. Throughout the centuries, however, both countries, located geographically on the road of intensive commercial and cultural exchange, experienced the impact of nomad peoples, like the Mongols and the Turks. This is why today we can find many similar elements in the culture of Korea and that of Bulgaria, which are the result of the centuries-long thread connecting Koreans, Mongols, Turks and Bulgarians. One of these elements worthy of academic research is the deified Heaven known as tengri, which most probably lies at the core of the names Tangra in Bulgaria and Tangun in Korea. The Korean Tangun is only mentioned once in the work of the Buddhist monk Iryeon from the 13th century as a celestial son, founder of the first Korean kingdom – Ancient Joseon. The name Tangra was deciphered by some scholars in Bulgaria from a Turkish manuscript which did not survive to this day and a somewhat illegible writing on a stone pillar. Throughout the centuries, there have been no traces in either country of people worshipping Tangun or Tangra. There is no historical, archaeological or ritual evidence supporting the existence of a religious cult of the two deities. However, in modern times, in both Korea and Bulgaria, Tangun and Tangra have been brought to public attention as the symbols of an ancient proto-Korean and proto-Bulgarian religion, respectively. For patriotic reasons, the two peoples have brought Tangun and Tangra to the foreground in opposition to the official religion. The aim is to derive a monotheistic religion from one main proto-deity to equate (and why not to precede) the official religions (Christianity in Bulgaria, and Confucianism and Buddhism in Korea). This study investigates the construction of the image of Tangun as a supreme national symbol in Korea and draws a parallel with Bulgarian Tangrism. It focuses on the transformation of the image of Tangun in Korea from a deified mythological hero into a historical figure, through a large-scale, well-coordinated and well-funded state policy. While the cult of Tangra in Bulgaria is a source of national pride for some Bulgarians, it has not received the strong state support the cult of Tangun in Korea has.
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Reviews of: - “Turski (Osmanski) izvori za istoriju Crne Gore”, Podgorica, CANU 2019, tom I-1, I-2, I-3, 1926 pages, review by: Ema Miljković - Zlatko Karač, Alen Žunić: “Islamska arhitektura i umjetnost u Hrvatskoj - Osmanska i suvremena baština” (Islamic Architecture and Art in Croatia - Ottoman and Contemporary Heritage), Arhitektonski fakultet Sveučilišta u Zagrebu, UPI-2M PLUS, Zagreb, 2018, 432 pages, review by: Rifat Alihodžić - Zuvdija Hodžić: „Kapija Prokletija – Gusinje i Plav u zapisima i putopisima“, Almanah, Podgorica 2019, 298 pages, review by: Draško Došljak - “Putovanje kroz boje Ibrahima Kurpejovića” (Sa otvaranja izložbe I. Kurpejovića u Historijskom muzeju u Sarajevu 24. aprila 2019. Godine), review by: Faruk Dizdarević - Husein Bašić: “Nedovršene tuge”, review by: Jasmina Srdanović - Izet Šabotić: “Čivčijski odnosi i promjena vlasništva nad zemljom u Bosni i Hercegovini (1878-1918)”, Centar za istraživanje moderne i savremene historije Tuzla, Tuzla 2019, 320 pages., review by Jasmina Jajčević
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Russian revolutions of 1917 still attract the attention of the historians. Was Russia able to avoid those cataclysms? Why was the Proletarian revolution accomplished in an undeveloped rural country? These and many other questions have answers sought in the perspicacious books of the Russian religious philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev. He is the man who saw the truth that the revolution was the internal destiny of the Russian people and that Bolshevism could only be defeated with intellectual overcoming and not with guns.
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The object of the present study is an unpublished account from 1632 preserved in the Propaganda Fide Archive in Rome. The source provides a detailed description of three miracles which occurred in Bulgaria, namely in Sofia, Trăn and Nikopol. The document is important because it offers new information which allows us to better understand the complex relations between Christians and Muslims in the Balkan Peninsula. The author of the study considers the Ragusan merchants from Sofia to be the spies who brought this fresh and updated information to the Imperial Court in Vienna. He argues that the unknown author of the account was most likely Ciriaco Rocci, the Apostolic nuncio to the emperor.
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We are examining the administration of the Greek-Orthodox community in Thessaloniki during the Ottoman period, and its evolution in the 19th century. We are observing self-governance institutions in place since the Byzantine era. Powerful Greek-Orthodox families of Salonica and the Church play an important role in the administration of the Greek-Orthodox community. By the 17th century, changes can be seen in the makeup of the community’s administration as new members from the city’s professional guilds become part of it. This development enhanced the role of secular elements in that administration. By the second half of the 18th century, the creation of a class of merchants in the Greek-Orthodox community helped it gain a leading role in the administration of its affairs. We are also examining, by relying on Ottoman documentary evidence, the districts inhabited by the Greek-Orthodox of Thessaloniki in the first half of the 19th century, and how these developed in the latter part of the century following the city’s new town plan. The changes brought about by the Ottoman authorities in the second half of the 19th century with respect to the administration of the Greek-Orthodox communities under Ottoman rule were significant. Nonetheless, socially and financially powerful groups continued to partake of the administration of the Salonica community. The participation of the Greek Orthodox (powerful financially and socially groups) in regional councils (the so-called vilayet idare meclisi) brought about changes in the relations of the Greek-Orthodox with the local representatives of the Ottoman authorities. By the end of the 19th century, these developments had led to the emergence of new socialities between communities, and new mentalities and behaviors.
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The article discuss the positions taken by the Polish press towards Polish-German and German-Soviet relations in the period directly preceding the outbreak of the war (August 1939). The supplementation of press views is information about the press policy of the authorities and the scale of freedom of political expression. The source basis are the most important political dailies, representing the views of the power camp and opposition groups.
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Bulgarian Golden Age is, on the one hand, a time of territorial expansion and significant presence on the political map of Europe; on the other hand, it is the period of the first major peaks in Slavic literature, and, probably, in arts and architecture. At its core, the Golden Age is joining the spirituality and mentality of the Byzantine world and adoption of the achievements of its centuries-old philosophical tradition. The Byzantine models in literature were borrowed by using two co-existing principles: copying and adaptation. The former might be observed in most of the works intended for non-liturgical individual or monastic reading, which were translated in full. The latter is found in miscellanies compiled from partial translations and excerpts, or in Old Bulgarian translations that were abridged, edited, or reworked. The article aims at examining the most important examples of such adaptation and its features, pointing out the role of the aristocracy and the ruler himself in guiding these processes.
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The article argues that speculation with the metaphorical use of the term “slavery”, which in recent years took over the Bulgarian public debate on the Ottoman past, is due not only to political and ideological reasons but also to the fact that the Bulgarian historical science does not pay enough attention to the study of the institution of slavery in the Ottoman empire. Very little, in particular, has been done for the research on domestic slavery, which was the most mass form of slavery in the Empire, including its Bulgarian provinces. Several themes are discussed in the text, the illumination of which undermines the popular myth of the total Bulgarian “slavery” during the Ottoman era: 1/ about the ethnic composition of slaves, its dynamics over the centuries and the exceptionally modest place of the Bulgarians among the slaves after the middle of the 15th century; 2/ about the significant difference between the status of slaves in the Ottoman Empire – on the one hand, and its non-Muslim subjects – on the other hand and 3/ about the presence not only of the non-Muslim but also of the Muslim slavery in the Bulgarian lands during the Ottoman centuries, as well as about slavery as an integral part of the history not only of the Ottoman Empire, but also of all southern Christian Europe until the beginning of the 19th century.
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The article aims to present in broad outlines and to make some remarks on the main aspects of the past and above all the present of the historical Bulgarian studies abroad or the study, teaching and popularizing of Bulgarian history abroad. Besides publications on the topic, the author has used the archival fund of the Center for Bulgarian Studies, which is stored in the Scientific Archive of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, information from websites and his personal observations. The stimulated and controlled upsurge of Bulgarian studies abroad during the period of socialism and its decline in the conditions of democratization is explained primarily by the direct connection between the Bulgarian state policy, on the one hand, and the Bulgarian studies, on the other. The topic of the historical Bulgarian studies abroad poses the question of the boundaries in the research on Bulgarian history. The boundaries imposed between the states by big politics, but also those established by the various professional and personal backgrounds and realizations of the historians, has resulted in a multitude of historical interpretations of the past. Therefore, the question of whether a history “without borders” is possible cannot get a positive answer. The common subjects and topics of research connect historians abroad and those in Bulgaria, and entail the need for their better mutual information and communication. The “external” viewpoints of the past sometimes confirm the “inner” ones, but in other cases they offer important correctives, such as: rethinking of the “closed” national visions of Bulgarian history; its more successful inclusion into the regional and world historical processes; enhancing the links of history with other sciences and the interdisciplinarity of research.
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The text problematizes the interpretations of contemporary history in the context of the world historiography as well as Bulgarian historiography. Special attention is paid to the conception of contemporary history during socialist times in Bulgaria. Back then contemporary history was associated with the Bulgarian Communist Party coming in power and ruling. Most historians examined the early period of socialist epoque during 1944–1948 and until 1958 as to avoid the obligatory glorification of the BCP and its government. Those who studied the period after 1958 were the party historians in the university ideological departments and in the Institute of BCP history. After the collapse of state socialism contemporary history included the whole socialist period. It was examined by state institutions and NGO on the rich archives base and from the point of view of liberal democracy. Now historians tend to avoid studying the transition period 1989–2007 because of the lacking temporary distance and accessible archives. It became the object of political science, sociology, economy and anthropology. A huge amount of such literature was accumulated from 1989 until 2017 and was classified in Catalog of the Literature of the Bulgarian Transition (1989–2007) that can be found in the site of the Institute for Historical Studies. The text analyses 1281 pieces of work of this Catalog thus arguing that history of the transition obtains a solid base to become already the object of the historical science.
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The investigation in question is recorded in a series of thirty-eight register entries on a case of financial malfeasance in recently-conquered Ottoman Egypt that was investigated by officials from Ottoman Syria. This case appears in the oldest existing mühimme defteri, a register of important affairs of the Ottoman Empire, and provides detailed information about how the Ottomans governed their provinces. It lists many of the taxes and revenues collected by the Ottomans and discusses the most important treasury personnel in the province and the documents they created. It also describes how the Ottoman state worked to control those personnel even at a distance and to induce these officials to adhere to concepts of just imperial rule. The article describes the issues in the case and identifies the provincial officials involved in the investigation, the documents they were supposed to collect or create, and the procedures they were commanded to follow. The conclusion examines the implications of the case for our understanding of the place of Syria and Egypt within the wider Ottoman Empire in the sixteenth century. This episode presents an instance of the Ottoman integration of newly conquered lands in a period when records are fairly plentiful (in contrast to the conquest of Rumeli, where most of our evidence comes from chronicles written at a later date). Beyond that, this case illuminates the whole issue of how an empire operates and challenges the stereotype of general Ottoman oppression of the conquered territories.
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The text contains elements from the history of the town of Pirdop and its` surroundings during the 19-th century. The codex of the local church community has been studied in detail. The accounting within was noted for two decades by the hand of the local notable, Simon. It starts from the decoration of the new church and further on contains data on the functioning of the church community as a microcredit institution. The core of local notable families was examined, as they were the leaders of the church community. More recent pre-Liberation ethnographic documentation, gathered by the teacher Simeon Aldov (Serdanov) was examined from a general anthropological, „patrimonial“, socioeconomical, ecological and geographical point of view in the frame of the region. Robbery and crime, local political unrest and their consequences have been mentioned in a cholistic perspective, in the spirit of local and regional studies.
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