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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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Focusing on selected bi(multi)lingual plays recently performed in the UK, the essay deals with the broader theme of intercultural communication and Polish migrants’ contribution to the local target culture. Grossman examines the possibility of creating a new transcultural form of theatre as an artistic means of facilitating mutual understanding and intercultural experiences. She suggests replacing the question of artistic merit by the shows’ function in reinforcing intercultural dialogue. The performances discussed are shown not only to strengthen the migrants’ integration but also to secure their feeling of emotional and cosmopolitan belonging to a globalized world without undermining their sense of human dignity and their belief in social equality.
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This article explores the role of the German in the literature of Lubusz Province in western Poland, which is treated as an exemplary Polish-German borderland. Mikołajczak argues that images of the Lubusz German evolve in a way that is contingent on transformations in national consciousness and the expectations of postwar politics, and that this development is also influenced by regional identity politics. What’s more, the German is both a regulator and a symptom of certain phenomena in the regional community. Finally, Mikołajczak points out three basic functions of this literary image – functions that are expressed at various stages in the development of Lubusz society, from Germanophobia to Germanophilia: integration, adaptation and compensation.
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Studies in large cities revealed that indoor air pollution concentrations are at such levels where it can cause serious health impacts. The main source of the release of substances in the environment is the emission of gases (produced during the combustion process) such as carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide, sulphur oxides, nitrogen oxides, ammonia and others. In this study the assessment of indoor air quality in 26 places in Prishtina city were investigated and the main objective of this study was monitoring of the air quality through the determination of gases concentration of C02, C0, N0x and S02. Also the ratio of CO2/CO2+CO was calculated. Concentrations of CO2, CO, SO2 and NOx were determined using “Dräger” instrument, model “X-am 7000 digital gas monitor”. Environmental risk assessment of air quality was done by comparing the obtained results with air WHO standards. During that period were found a permanent presence of some toxic gases in high concentrations in indoor areas. Results show that CO2 levels were ranged 300-4000 ppmv. The concentration of CO was ranged 0.6-17 ppmv and was reported to be under limits value in all locations. Also concentrations of SO2 and NOx (except air sample S6) were reported to be under WHO air limits value. According to gases concentration, many locations show values characteristic for highly and extremely contaminated indoor places.
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The regional approach in researching the social and cultural differences, multiculturalism and the dimensions of cultural development has been analyzed through the example of the population of Mumbai Metropolitan Area. Different aspects and dimensions of relations and connections between ethnic groups and communities in this large city, transfer of cultures in the traditional Indian society and influence of globalization have been indicated. The influence of globalization on the social and cultural changes in society from the aspect of regional geography has been discussed in a separate part of the paper.
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The article is dedicated to the travel notes on Bulgaria, Down the Donkey’s Path.Bulgarian Mosaic, written in 1978 in East Germany by the East German writer Kurt Bizalski and republished in 2001 in united Germany without any changes, explanations or supplements. Bizalski based the book on his experience in Bulgaria in 1977 when he paid an official visit at the invitation of the Union of the Bulgarian Writers.However, the Embassy of People’s Republic of Bulgaria in Berlin criticizes the travel notes, stigmatizes the author and recommends not to translate the book into Bulgarian.The Committee for State Security accuses the work in distorting the socialist reality and prevents its distribution in Bulgaria. This article presents Down the Donkey’s Path as a mobile book – restricted but not everywhere, prohibited but not completely,occupying the extra-national art space extended across the political borders within the socialist bloc from the 1970s and the 1980s. Analysing the author of travel notes as an anthropologist, Bulgaria as a field of research and the Bulgarian readers as a local critical public allows us to look at the problem of the relation between anthropology, literature and political censorship from another angle.
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This paper analyses the role of a village near Sofia’s football tournament and the football museum established in that same village as specific times and places of memory.The author’s interest is provoked by the fact that football occupies a significant part of the living world of the bearers of that culture; it touches them emotionally and their experiences related to it are extremely important to them. Football gives meaning to their workdays and holidays and at the same time, it becomes a kind of regulator of neighbourly and village relations. It also contributes to the adaptation of young people into modern society. The football occupations of the local people seriously influence their social life. By means of football, they provide themselves with the components of their local identity construction, which increase communal confidence and differentiate them from others.
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An attempt has been made to search for an explanation of the existence of a rock relief depicting animal heads near the town of Sliven through ethnology point of view. Initial specious speculation has been made in accordance with the se¬mantics of the depicted images. They were possibly part of an ancient rock sanctuary. The ancient origin of these depictions has been brought into question because of the lack of preserved information in the local knowledge, their topographic position, which distinguishes them and its immediate vicinity to the town of Sliven and to an ancient settlement. The appearance of an eventual contemporary “author” claiming that it is his work puts many questions for discussion.
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The five petal flower is not a simple decoration. It's an important heraldry. Looking at the old seal of Câmpulung, which, together with the seals of the cities of Baia (14th century) and Roman (15th century), are the only ones with a legend in Latin, we draw attention to a repetition - the presence of two times of the star and the semilune. The star and the crescent also appear on the coat of arms of Moldova. Next to these flowers with five petals. In order to find the meaning of the symbol, there are presented old and new examples of rosettes or flowers with five petals, respectively ten petals, if they are double lobes. The study looks at elements of architecture, urbanism and landscaping in setting up the whole area of Campulung with the two towers on which these flowers appear in stone sculptures, that of Negru Voda, the highest medieval center in Wallachia and SfGheorghe church potters. The location of these towers, taking into account the distances and landslides, reveals advanced astronomy knowledge. This type of construction and the tectonic discharge of the system, using semisferic arches and domes, leaving ample, free-at-ground ground voids, forming the triumph arcs, shows the personality of the imported rulers who ordered them. In the 14th century Câmpulung was the capital of Wallachia where, in 1352, it passed to the eternal, the Great Basarab I the Founder.
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The text refers to “memory non-sites” scattered around Poland: empty plots of land, its past known only to locals. These are former concentration camps, mass graves, or kirkuts. History becomes a hypostasis here where palimpsest seems insufficient to describe their complicated nature. Detritus is also not an accurate notion. Recent developments in history may allow to see them as geological structures. Plaszow concentration camp will be a case study example. The author offers a metaphor borrowed from geology to describe its singularity: a prism. With this term she tries to analyse the nature of non-memory places as “refuse dumps” of “tectonic” forces of nature, history, politics, etc.
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The article’s subject is a topographical turn in literary research, considered in association with the spatial turn in humanities. It in particular concerns contemporary reconfigurations, both in the area of new concepts of space and the discipline itself which is open today for circulation of ideas and notions from other areas. The essay indicates the main directions of interest of the research current in question, including e.g.: new regionalism; ecocriticism; literary urban studies; relations between literary representations of space and individual/collective identity; interrelations between literature and geography. Characterised are the basic determinants of new concepts of space, e.g. connecting spatiality with temporality, reinstated category of site, interest in hybrid(ic)/transitive spaces and heterotopias, and the fundamental shift in the perspective from a poetics of space to one of site.
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This article concerns the literature of “minor homelands” representing the territories that were included within Poland’s post-1945 borders. Preoccupied with a search of Otherness and with the concept of a multicultural borderland, this literature rose to popularity in the 1990s. Writers associated with it drew on the poetics elaborated in the context of Poland’s so-called borderland literature [literature kresowa] to rediscover traces of German culture that had been erased during the People’s Republic. By drawing on the poetics of retrospective utopia, however, this literature marginalizes the fundamental problem of forced migration. Siewior describes the strategies of masking that ‘migratory gap,’ i.e. the aestheticizing transfers of older (borderland) traditions, the return to the grandparents’ experience, or the reconstruction of the perspective of the Other. These narrative strategies suggest that this literature is unwittingly entangled in dominant discourses of identity and memory – discourses rooted in nostalgic postwar borderland literature.
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The article discusses postmemory landscapes, understood both as a spatial disposition of Eastern and Central Europe, and their cultural – especially photographic, filmic, and literary – representations. The author shows that those landscapes allow to reconsider two crucial problems in the light of memory and trauma studies: i.e. spatial dimension of remembering and the meaning of site/landscape for the experience of postmemory, as well as the reinterpretation of the archive of visual clichés related to the representation of space, which is marked by historical trauma.
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This article builds on and supports Roch Sulima’s claim that Miron Białoszewski’s works, saturated with anthropology, can serve as an inspiration to anthropologists of everyday urban life. Focusing on the poetics of space in Chamowo, Karpowicz examines how a literary relationship to urban spaces intersects with their artistic creation. This creation not only problematizes the experience ability of urban spaces, but it also represents an anthropological perspective in research on everyday urban life as postulated and realized by Sulima. Reading Białoszewski’s Chamowo through such lenses as anthropology of everyday life, auto-ethnography, contemporary research on urban spaces and geopoetics, Karpowicz demonstrates the enormous significance of literature for the study of urban spaces within the humanities. Her article also highlights the motif of the city and of the above-mentioned research contexts as key for the task of interpreting a work of literature that self-consciously thematizes its biographical and geographical rootedness
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Les photographies documentaires, mais aussi les photographies de presse, font appel à des femmes démunies en tant que personnages appropriés aux différents types d'illustrations de maux sociaux. L’attention portée à la situation précaire d’innombrables femmes devient un aspect récurrent chaque fois qu’il faut faire face à la précarité et à la pauvreté. Dans ce texte, nous observons comment les person-nages féminins sont décrits à partir d’une étude comparative des deux régimes: l’information et le documentaire. Nous avons cherché à comprendre comment leurs modes d'enregistrement permettent des expériences visuelles distinctes, ce qui attes-terait des changements dans leurs formes de représentation et de figuration dans la culture visuelle, mais principalement dans la manière dont ces femmes apparaissent. *** Documentary photographs, but also photographs of the press, refer to impoverished women as characters appropriate to the different types of illustration of social ills. The focus on the precarious situation of countless women becomes a recurrent aspect whenever one must deal with precariousness and poverty. In this text we observe how female characters are portrayed from a comparative study between two photographic regimes: the informative and the documentary. We sought to understand how their modes of representation and figuration enable distinct visual experiences, which would attest to changes in their forms of representation in the visual culture, but mainly in the ways these women appear.
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The mass media is a powerful and important instrument in the process of combating such a serious problem of the 21st century, as human trafficking. Covering this topic demands from representatives of journalism profession on having special experience and approaches, because it is connected with the process of difficult conversation with victims and accomplices of trafficking. It is on the one hand, but on the other hand – it is relative with intercourse with the representatives of law enforcement and power structures. Additionally, there is a row of characteristics and specifies of work with the sources of information, about which every journalist must be aware who is specializing on this topic, that was considered here. The article demonstrates the content analysis of these factors at the example of the materials of such newspapers and magazines of Russia as “Ogonyok” (“Light”), “Argumenti i fakti” (“Arguments and facts”), “Mir novostey” (“World of news”), “Migraciya XXI vek” (“Migration XXI century”) for 2009-2017 which were selected by the author.
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Five international expedition of the project “Cave research of the Holy Mountain Athos – Greece” took place in 2016 and 2017. This phase of the project was organized by the Bulgarian Caving Society (BCS). The explorations were focused in the surroundings of Bulgarian Orthodox Monastery „St. Georgi Zograph“. 46 natural and artificial caves with total length were explored and surveyed. 32 of them were artificial. From a functional point of view, artificial caves are divided into 4 categories: Water collection galleries Kariz, Ganats; Drainage channels; Fountains with tanks attached to them behind water; Tanks. The work analyses the construction of the underground structures. Description of the most important of them is given.
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