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The article sets out to discuss the distribution, typology and chronology of Lyngby type antler artefacts discovered in Northern Europe and the Eastern Baltic region for the first time in the Lithuanian scientific archaeological literature. Based on radiocarbon dating, the article makes a conclusion that the tools in question were used in the Eastern Baltic region both after the Last Glacial Period and before the Last Glacial Maximum. According to the latest research findings, two artefacts (Šnaukštai, Klaipėda district; Kalnėnai, Jurbarkas district) which were found on the Lithuanian territory are for the time being the only human-made artefacts dating to the period before the Late Nemunas Glacial Maximum, which were discovered in Lithuania and Northern Europe. According to radiological imaging, these finds were used both in the periods of existence of Neanderthals and Homo sapiens later. New findings in the research of Lyngby type artefacts enable us to understand the process of settlement in both Lithuania and the whole Eastern Baltic region during the Late Paleolithic. The research also resorts to ethniccultural parallels relating to the daily routine of the reindeer hunters of the 18th–19th centuries and the tools used by them.
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The Mosaic community of Rădăuți is among the oldest and most representative in Historical Bukovina. It was established in a similar manner to all other Jewish communities, such as the ones in Chernivtsi, Suceava, Siret, Gura Humorului, Câmpulung Moldovenesc or Vatra Dornei: the Jewish community’s dynamic role in the economy was appreciated and acknowledged by the local authorities. At the same time, Habsburg authorities wanted to colonize Bukovina and develop her economic, industrial and commercial potential.
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Sketching thin lines of the history of modern jewelry in Romania, this study focuses on the three main places where watches and jewelry shops resided. As the craftsmanship lives its emancipation, its center moves to Bucharest, where craftsmen and sellers will describe their audience and their products first by their position in the geography of the city: Victoriei Avenue holds the luxury shops, Carol street is the center of all watch sellers and famous Jewish neighbourhood streets cater to the emerging middle class and the simple people leaving in the capital. The study also provides a closer look on the most famous Jewish watch and jewelry craftsmen and sellers of Bucharest in the first decades of the XX century: Ignatz Roller and Heinrich Weiss.
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The research is focussed on the scientific carrier and life destiny of Hayriye Süleymanoğlu Yenisoy, lecturer of Turkish language at Sofia University, interpreted in the wider frame of the policies of the communist regime to Turks in Bulgaria. We followed how the political events in the second half of the 20th century in communist Bulgaria played a decisive role for the professional carriers of Turkish scientists and lecturers in the country. Their destinies were not exceptions on the background of the persecutions of ideologically unhandy persons by the regime. Our research is related to the entirety of scientific life in the totalitarian Bulgaria, but is focussed on the mechanisms of repressions of Turkish intelligentsia in the context of the policy of the communist power to Turks and other Muslims in Bulgaria. The paper considers the means of destruction of the educated Turkish elite after 1944 and the efforts of the communist regime to create politically loyal new elite among the Turks. But the short flirt of the communist power with the Muslim minorities finished up with the persecution of the elite of the Turkish community who suffered mostly of the increasing assimilation efforts. The regime did away with many representatives of this elite requiring impossible loyalty from them – refusal of their ethnic identity, changing their Muslim names, falsification of scientific facts. The Bulgarian – Turkish thematic dictionary created by Hayriye Memova was convicted of being espionage order from Turkey. She was dismissed from the academic institutions and compelled to survive by working as cleaner in a factory for 4 years. Against her an investigation was initiated by the State Security which lasted for 7 years and included 19 secret agents most of them her colleagues, students and random acquaintances. Nevertheless she defended her PhD and habilitated in Bulgaria, in Turkey where she emigrated in 1989 with thousands of Turks who were expelled from the country, her scientific degrees were not acknowledged and she had to habilitate again in Baku. Following the scientific and personal trajectory of Hayriye Memova who is a representative example of the resistance we followed the policies of the regime to scientific community focussing on the control of the repressive apparat of the regime over the Sofia University.
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The paper evokes the activity of the late architect, ethnographer and museum expert Eugen Bâzgu. The author highlights his cooperation with several scientific institutions and personalities from Romania. One also evokes the projects of ethnographical research, of restoration of historical monuments, that were accomplished in the Republic of Moldova, under the guidance or with the participation of Eugen Bâzgu. The author also sheds light on the social and political realities, on the streams of ideas from the Bessarabian society, a context in which Eugen Bâzgu worked. Using various publications for this topic, as well as unpublished information, from the family archive of the late architect, the author provides biographical contributions, as well as data for the history of the ethnographical science between Prut and Nistru.
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The swing has more definitions, forms and meanings linked with human existence, and it is common for different civilizations. The tradition of Easter swing was practiced in Romanian space, both in towns and in villages. Being installed in the center of locality, in open place, the massive wooden swing, with four or more chairs, attracted the whole community, especially young lovers – all wearing folk dress. Old people remember that they paid Easter eggs or money for swinging. Around the swing, the musicians were playing traditional instruments, while the villagers were dancing the traditional round dance Hora; in towns, the parties were completed with gambles, theatrical performances and other types of fun. Poets, writers, foreign travellers from XIX-XXI century (Vasile Alecsandri, Rudolf Șuțu, Dumitru Matcovschi, Lidia Grosu Gonța) wrote about the most spectacular Easter swings and Hora; and the joy of the community was painted by numerous Romanian artists from both banks of Prut river (Ștefan Luchian, Theodor Aman, Pan Pandele Ioanid, Ion Cârchelan). Even if the tradition of Easter swing was interrupted by the soviet regime installed in Bassarabia in 1940, today, fortunately, this custom revives in some localities, and it deserves to be promoted.
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The collection of the Museum of Folk Art “Dr. Nicolae Minovici”: artefacts, functions and contexts. Within a museum of folk art, one may see items that once had a utilitarian function in the Romanian areal. After their removal from this environment, items lost this funcion. Being brought in a museum, in a collection of items of folk art, exhibited according to aesthetic criteria, items bear just an aesthetic function. Visitors perceive objects only for their beauty and nothing more. Some recollect that they have seen them before, but a few know that the dowry chest or the wedding jar bore a distinct function, performed ritual, magic, symbolic and utilitarian functions. In this paper, I shall consider the collection of the Museum of Folk Art Dr. Nicolae Minovici. The subjects I shall treat in his paper are: Nicolae Minovici and the Museum of Folk Art “Dr. Nicolae Minovici”; Artefacts: stories and museification; The Dowry Chest; The Dowry Chest.
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Spiritual life was dominated by superstitions and incantations, that throughout time attracted the attention of foreign travellers. Superstitions, intertwined with bits of religious teachings, explained troubles, luck, diseases and death. Indeed, the rural, archaic, Romanian world hid many mysteries, and incantations and spells represented a fairly ordinary reality. People lived their lives following the seasonal cycle and monthly cycle. Respect for nature and land imbued them with harmony in everyday life, and from harmony and respect to magic is only a step. Herbs, spring water, fire and earth retain magical features and become all-important for the magician, who resorted to the four elements to wield one’s power and influence over everyday events.
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During the time, the importance of growing fruit trees had increased, and their presence had expanded from the village household to the shelter-households from the village border, in the perimeter of some orchards in the village estate until shaping of some fruit-growing regions. The particularities of some traditional occupations are poorly studied within the ethnologic and ethnographic studies from the Republic of Moldova. There are no integral research paper works to solve a certain area in this ethnographic compartment, or even they miss at all, as is the case of fruit-growing, but also of fishing, beekeeping, and so on. Therefore, in this study we perform an interdisciplinary research, choosing to synthesize and reveal the traditional fruit-growing practices from the perspective of their understanding as a material culture elements (household shelters and buildings intervention, folk fruit-growing technique and equipment, etc.), intangible heritage and intellectual capital (knowledge, beliefs, ritual practices related to the growing of fruit trees), to highlight their value as a resource for contemporary communities in order to use traditional patterns in ensuring a healthy and nutritious diet, preserve the identity of fruit-growing regions and their ethnographic heritage.
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In a traditional society, man's life was organized so that he could secure himself everything necessary for food, primary vital needs, to ensure the protection of his family. Some activities required great skill and craftsmanship and were performed only by craftsmen who specialized more narrowly. Other activities were divided according to the "male - female" principle (gender). But most of the day-to-day activities of various kinds were carried out in the house or in the courtyard of the peasant. But the construction of the house was an important work and a significant stage for human life. In this article we discuss the role and the place of collective work during the construction of the house through the prism of stages, superstitions and traditions related to this process to the Moldovan and native Bulgarians. This complex of rituals was bilateral, because it was associated with work and those classified as transition rituals, which aimed at transforming the "foreign" space into one "own". Analyzing some of these traditions, we find that in southern Bessarabia Bulgarians have preserved a large part of customs related to the construction of the house. But also we insist that interconnections and mutual influences over time have been inevitable.
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In the historiography of Slovaks in Southern Hungary/Yugoslavia/ Serbia, an important place is given to monographs of individual settlements occupied by Slovaks in most or a significant number. The monograph on Kysač describes in detail the process of settling Slovaks, but much more modestly the wider context of their social and political life until the mid-19th century. About this period, a fair amount of data offers Hronika of local Evangelical a. c. Church by the author František Jesenský, but also this resource is underutilized. Also, practically as historical sources about the history of Kysač at the end of the 18th and in the first half of the 19th century, the records of canonical visitations from 1798, 1810, 1818, 1825 and 1835 remained unknown and unused. The aim of this paper is to, by publishing a record of the canonical visitation from 1835 in both the original Latin and Slovak translation, make available to researchers a resource, which provides a wealth of data from the economic and social life of this national and ecclesial community.
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The topic of the paper is the modern method of identity–building that emerges in Bosnia and Herzegovina with the advent of the Dual Monarchy and is expressed through the emperor and dynasty, ceremonies, monuments, lands coats of arms and flags while promoting land identity; as well as the fate of these building elements in the regimes that followed. It starts with the idea, philosophy, theory and mystical–religious aspect of the Empire; ideology of imperial legitimacy; dynastic ideology and Habsburg mission, and comes to the functioning imaginary community united in an emperor with politically limited power embodied in a multiplicity of homelands; the Emperor with his lands and his peoples. The transformation of the Empire are followed, the development, the appropriation of the idea, the dissolution, rebirth, confrontation of national problems and the practices of their solving to the destruction of the Empire and its consequences which were tried to be justified with the creation of the myth of the dungeon of nations and eventually the revitalization of the imperial heritage as the idea of Central Europe. Bosnia (and Herzegovina)has been followed in the orbit of empires since the earliest ceremonial testimonies, through the establishment of a new of ceremonial paradigm through the artistic, sculptural and heraldic affirmation of imperial ideology with the advent of the Dual Monarchy and the revival of old Bosnian symbols. Within this, it is indicated to the apparent conflict between political and ceremonial, and to the relationship of Bosnia and Herzegovina and Bosniaks (of that time) to the Empire until the very end. After the Empire, in the three–tribe kingdom and the socialist federation, the oldvessels contain new contents, and the usage of imperial, formally negated, paradigm was continued by the Karadjordjevic dynasty and Tito, by taking over the imperial ceremonies in altered forms through new art, sculpture and heraldry enriched with completely new inventions, the until then unknown term peoples coat of arms and un heraldic socialist heraldry. Yugoslavia, by its multinationality, was very similar to the Dual Monarchy, and because of its successful management, Tito deserved the epithet of the last Habsburg. The notion of the emperor and his peoples is on the ideological plane replaced with the relationship without intermediary between the leader and the people, for which King Alexander, introduced the dictatorship as a formal justification, but the Tito officially did not. The loyalty to the leaders is shown by the people by the mass manifestations of bearing a torch or a baton. During this period, the artistic, sculptural and heraldic legacies of every previous regime were thoroughly destroyed, so the land coat of arms survived only in traces in the Land capital till today, and not so much of sculptures and paintings. In 1946.Bosnia and Herzegovina got a new flag, coat of arms and constitution. While the flag does not even have any of Bosnian herzegovinian symbols and indicates that it is subjected to and under the protection of Yugoslavia, one of the coat of arms proposals tried to give the breath of new life into the old land coat of arms, and the constitution itself insisted on the pattern of peoples as land subjects from the imperial era. Bosnia and Herzegovina was the remnant of the empire. The Constitutions that followed the one from 1946. adopted the ZAVNOBIH matrix and abandoned the one of land people. With the death of the people and the triumph of the nations and return to the millet system of an previous empire; the territorialization of nations came in exactly the same way as it did in the countries of Central and Southeastern Europe after the collapse of the Dual Monarchy. It was the final farewell of our country to its imperial heritage. The relationship to the order of remembrance, heraldic and sculptural heritage, as well as their treatment through the changing regimes that followed the imperial, continued in a new society without ideology; it had not much left to destroy; only one coat of arms of the Socialist Republic of Bosnia and Herzegovina.
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The town holiday is not a Bulgarian phenomenon but in Bulgaria it has become particularly widespread (there is only one town that does not celebrate its holiday). It developed mainly in the 1990s till the first decade of the 21st century. Its study would support understanding specific modern urban rituality and symbolism, which indicate the relationship between authorities and communities, the development of the public sphere, the processes of constructing traditions and heritages, and the mechanism for unification of localities. Furthermore, our paper proposes a classification of the town holidays in Bulgaria and presents in brief some case studies.
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This paper explores the Ottoman government’s Gypsy poll tax policy in the frontier province of Bosnia in the period between 1690s and 1856 by using unpublished archival sources to deconstruct the dominant historiographic narratives on this matter, as well as to answer several important, but still unaddressed questions. After reassessing the principal historiographic ideas and conflicting narratives on the political and legal background of the Gypsy poll tax, this study investigates the hitherto unknown regional variations in the Gypsy poll tax policy, financial importance of the poll tax at the provincial and local level, tax farming arrangements as well as changes in tax collection strategies. Throughout, it argues that previous historiographic works on these questions did not a man taxation policy as they lacked the materials to provide us with a more detailed insight. On the other hand, this research reveals the nuances of these financial changes and variations, which occurred over time, tracks down the central government’s efforts to mobilise the necessary resources and improve the state capacity, while it explains the connection of these changes with the wider economic crises and transformation processes in the Ottoman Empire.
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The relation between sister and brother in creative works is appeared since ancient beliefs and mythology. Marriage between sister and brother to ancient civilizations was considered perfect couple, thus implying the unification of the Sun with the Moon as a result of which flourished birth of creatures on earth. Pagan beliefs supported this relation until they were defeated by Christian epochs when it is thought that the sister-brother's couple may have become sacred to reach the pedestal of sanctification in monotheism, as it continues to be today. Ballads, which are also known as monuments of spiritual culture because they incorporate the essence of human spirit, preserve quite a bit of this legacy. By disassembling the ballads we can recognize many things about our cultural spirit. How does sister-brother relations appear in Albanian ballads? Where is the origin of the incest taboo among Albanians? What dimensions and layers can be detected by a ballad and what do they say about the complexity of the brother-sister relation on time?? Which explanation about this relation gives folklore today and which literature work can be understood by knowing the sublime love until the sacrifice of the Albanian sister for her brother? Issues like these will be treated in my paper, based on examples from Albanian ballads and folk songs, alongside anthropological theories built on family relationships, kinship, and cultural and religious influences in this relation.
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In this work are included the so-called highland songs or songs of mountaineers. These are folkloric creations who are not expanded in the whole Albanian areas. They are mostly practiced in the North folkloric zones and have their autonomy, conditioned or determined from the specifics of the way how it is practiced. During the whole work, the main features and characteristics of the highland songs or songs of mountaineers will be treated summarily. Along the treatment and argumentation of the theoretical plan, will also be realized several concrete analyses that will be elaborated to support our outcomes. We believe that in this manner it will be shown clearly, completely and generally the range of this special Albanian folkloric type. To achieve such a definition, we begin from the fact that the poetic of these songs is totally noticeable and special compared to the other types of Albanian historical songs in general. Among others, for this type of songs we can notice the way of singing, which is completely different and unrepeatable in the other types of historical songs, the poetic structure with a shortage of poems or with reduced verses, with the lack of pronunciation and comprehension of the poetic text in many cases.
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Emanuel Bălan, Neamțul prin călători străini. Secolele XV-XX, Piatra Neamț, Editura GraphEst, 2018, 164 p.
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