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The article presents the memoires of a Russian immigrant in Bulgaria - Dr. Sergey Rostovtsev. More than 20 years he worked in the border region of South-East Bulgaria and he tried to build the institutions of modern public health care there.
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In the correspondence of the archbishop Theophylact of Ohrid the contrast between the brilliant capital city of Byzantium and the Bulgarian country town of Ohrid was emphasized. But the negative attitude of the Byzantine author was not necessary due to his anti-Bulgarian spirit, but to the Byzantine literary fashion by that time.
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The paper examines the migration of the first academic women scientists from Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Greece in the first half of the 20th century. The main goal is to study the issue of academic migration as a factor for change of the status of outsiders, which women scientists obtain in their domestic research environments, and for their integration into the ‘scientific center’ (France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Austria, UK). Returning from study or specialization in their home countries, women scientists were becoming a kind of ‘research center’ to their home-educated colleagues, who could not work in leading research centers. This was the reason that women scientists, even pioneers in some scientific fields (nuclear physics, microbiology, biophysics, archeology, philosophy) were segregated in different ways: they were not appointed on academic positions, they obtained low positions and could not become professors, usually they were dismissed, their careers were stopped. This effectively put them in a status of "scientific periphery" within the domestic science, which in turn is also a "scientific periphery" to the leading research centers abroad, but paradoxically thought itself as a ‘scientific center’.
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A questionnaire was developed to obtain information of the respondents (most of them are students from the American University in Blagoevgrad) how they see the Balkans today. It combines easy questions concerning geographical and political dimensions of the Balkans with more provocative and controversial ones that are figuring eventual changes of the Balkans states. The respondents do not consider Balkans as a danger, or powder keg of Europe. The biggest challenges facing Balkans are the EU membership, the demographic crisis and the changes concerning the independence of Kosovo and the question of Macedonia and the recognition of its name. Some more conclusions came out: - Balkans are vital and in a permanent change; - Balkans’ centers and peripheries are political terms rather than geographical; - Macedonia could be constructed as a multicultural state based on the political and modern Macedonist ideology as developed since the WWII; - Albanians and Bulgarians could be figured as Balkan center and eventually as a main factor in the region; - EU could help the region but it is not a solution itself; - Kosovo should be mutually accepted by all sides; - Romania and Turkey are politically and economically in the Balkans.
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The author deals with the following questions: Southeastern Europe and the Balkan Peninsula - geographical, cultural and historical concepts. Identity and difference. The geographical and linguistic understanding of the Balkan languages. The Balkan Language Union (Sprachbund). Center and Periphery on the horizontal (synchronic) axis - linguistic continuity, areas of intensive language contact. Mosaic patterns of language interaction: language islands on the vertical (diachronic) axis. The incidence of Balkanisms (common Balkan linguistic features) in the center and the periphery.
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The purpose of this study is to trace and analyze the periodical press distribution in the Third Bulgarian Kingdom. The study is based on archives of paramount importance, which have not been used previously. The references also include various sources from the statistical and scientific literature, memoirs, and other periodical publications. The study encompasses a period of almost seventy years - from the Bulgarian Liberation to the nationalization of the distribution of the Bulgarian press in the communist Bulgaria. During this period, readers in Bulgaria received periodicals via subscriptions in the post offices and through the limited joints “Kurier” and “Strela”.
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The paper .A story in reverse - the experience of Bulgarian international truck drivers. investigates the still largely under-examined group of the international truck drivers in the context of the established border regime in Eastern Europe during the Cold war. At the core of the project is the Bulgarian international truck driver (and his truck) in the process of constant travelling across borders. Special attention is paid to the specifics of the drivers. everyday life, their experience on the road and their travelling stories. The drivers are analysed as a specific product of Cold war separation. The main thesis in the paper is that their specific ability to frequently cross not merely state borders but crucially - the Iron Curtain and to experience the life of the people living .beyond., enabled them to profit in a number of ways: officially as representatives of the Bulgarian economic and political system and non-officially as individuals performing their own private petty business, which in turn enhanced their social status and changed their identity and world-view. Thus, the mobility lifestyle of the international truck drivers as well as mobility itself in the context of the Cold war separation is seen as an important material, social and symbolical resource.
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The presented research has the non-ambitious aim to analyse the difficult process of transforming the Cinema in Bulgaria from the street, fair entertainment into one of the most impressive and common arts of culture, the everyday-culture. The analyses of the different phases in the cinematographer’s development gave the opportunity, the influence of the different economical, social and political factors in Bulgaria in the first four decades of the 20th century to be discovered. The research is based on archive documents kept in the State Archives - Blagoevgrad, articles from Film Periodicals, Scientific Researches and memories discovering the influence of the cinema upon the traditional country-side society in Bulgaria at the beginning of the past century.
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Bulgaria routinely locks up asylum seekers, despite EU and national laws banning the use of detention centres. Government officials acknowledge they are breaking laws, but insist they can only properly cater for just 400 asylum seekers at any one time in dedicated, open reception centres. While the state is already failing to properly manage its asylum system, many fear the situation could spiral out of control once the country finally joins the border control-free Schengen zone. On joining, the number of immigrants heading for Bulgaria is expected to rise dramatically, as the many thousands who currently cross illegally into the EU via the Turkish-Greek border may opt instead to slip into Bulgaria en route to the West. However, as long as Bulgaria focuses solely on stopping immigrants crossing its borders, rather than setting up a robust system to properly handle the flow of migrants, it seems inevitable it will fail to stem to tide of would-be refugees heading to the Western Europe. Now is the time for Bulgaria to properly close the gaps in the system, failing to act will lead Bulgaria into the same situation as Greece, something the Bulgarian public is most certainly not prepared for.
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The authors deal with the political atheistic ritualization of funerals in the 1970s -1980s imposed on Christians and Muslims by the totalitarian state and the resistance of Muslim to preserve the intimate religious notions of death and burial. The research is based on archive documents and oral interviews of persecuted Muslims.
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The City of Bursa is situated in the foot hills of ancient Olympus in Asia Minor, forty km from the Marmara Sea. In its mountainous-plain terrain, magnificent greenery and abundance of water, it resembles to a great extent the Balkan topography. Since the Russo-Turkish War (1877.1878), refugees and exiles have settled in Bursa and its surroundings, bringing with them both positive and negative traits of the Balkan mentality. Balkan writers, visiting the city at various time points in history, in their travel writings and memoirs, emphasize the fact that they feel at ease in Bursa, as if they were in their home country.
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Infertility is an important topic to bring forth, since it elicits multiple themes and cultural values having to do with the taken for granted life path, with gender roles and definitions of femininity and masculinity, as well as moral and legal issues. I am convinced that breaking the silence surrounding infertility experiences in Bulgaria is necessary. The lack of discourse on incapability to have a child is a very substantial moral problem in Bulgaria. I focused my attention on the personal stories of women who have suffered or are suffering from infertility in Bulgaria over the past decade with the purpose to identify the social construction of infertility in the national context. Putting the accent on two different discourses (bioethical and gender) based on personal experience, I considered infertility in the social frame of the application of in vitro methods in Bulgaria. I focused on the way in which culturally available discourses of the expected transition to motherhood and femininity plaid out in women’s live narratives. I followed the interpretations of the social situation that held for these women, and the ways in which they creatively appropriated, transformed, and resisted culturally available meanings in the process of constructing their personal narratives and identities. I carried out a detailed linguistic analysis of the communication situations, conversation strategies, thematic sets, narration schemes, and extra-linguistic factors to reveal the differences in the “similarity” of perceiving, experiencing and talking about infertility.
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The authors deal with the reconstruction of the gender roles as presented in the popular media in the process of transition from the communist regime to capitalism. Special attention has been paid to the new folk music (chalga), advertisement and entertainment industry. The critical discourse analysis of articles considering women in the most popular newspaper “Trud” revealed a new kind of sexism, an ambiguous mixture of traditional patriarchy and Neo-Marxist “liberating tolerance to women”.
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The history of Belarus was in the radius of Poland and Russia. During the XVII to the XIX century the Belarusians were mainly living in the countryside. The ones, who were living in the towns are distinguished as Poles or Russians depending on their religion - Catholic or Orthodox. By the end of the XIX and the beginning of the XX century literature started to be written in Belarusian. The Belarusian neighbors think that the stereotypic Belarusian is a quiet man, this conception is supported from the Belarusians themselves. Nowadays there is a specific occurrence in the urban speech called “trasianka”, a mixture of Russian and Belarusian.
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In the period 1947 - 1950 war “invalids” newsvendors were deprived by the Ministry of Labor and Social Assistance of the right to sell stamps, cards and papers in street kiosks as well as of their pensions. Information about their political views and activities were collected by the police and reported to the Social Ministry. More than 20 persons were deprived of their kiosks as well as of their pensions. They were accused to be both supporters of the opposition and enemies of the Patriotic Front. Social politicy was used by the Ministry of Labor and Social Assistance for political purposes. The deprivation of War “invalids” of their rights and pensions destroyed both the social support system and the local communication’s nets.
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This paper focuses on the urban landscape of cities in the Balkans in the Ottoman Empire before and during the modernization period. Recent research has critically evaluated traditional terms classifying cities of the Muslim world generally as “Muslim city”, of the Ottoman world as “Ottoman city”, or in the Arabic world as “Arabic city”. But also terms such as “Balkan city” and even more classifications such as “Bulgarian city” or “Serbian city” have become under critical scrutiny by attaching alleged specifics of the urban space of the late Ottoman Empire to emerging national states.
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