Pavlina Solachka. Trudovoto vsekidnevie na zhenite prez kasniya sotsi- alizam (Etnolozhko izsledvane po primera na Tyutyunev kombinat „Pi- rin“ – Blagoevgrad). Blagoevgrad: UI „Neofit Rilski“, 2025, 177 s., ISBN 978-954-00-0436-5
Wallachian Mobility and Settlement along the Carpathian Arc. Еd. by Mihai Dragnea, Miloš Marek, Grzegorz Javor, and John Pole- mikos. London & New York: Routledge, 2025, 236 pages. eBook ISBN 9781003502135
Milan Ristovich. Utishani glasovi. Iz istorije obichnih ljudi. Belgrade: Geopoetika, 2024, 174 pp., ISBN 978-86-6145- 439-4
Hans Erich Bödeker. The Process of Enlightenment: Essays by andinspired by Hans Erich Bödeker. Oxford University Studies in theEnlightenment. Liverpool University Press, 2024, 423 pages. ISBN1802071865, 9781802071863
This paper examines the methods and generative forces that led the Ottoman monuments of Thessaloniki to become invisible, as if they had stood still and gone unnoticed for almost the entire twentieth century and into the twenty-first century. Initially, a brief definition and description of the notion of monuments are presented, and the presentation then proceeds with a list of Ottoman monuments in Thessaloniki from the end of the sixteenth century to the present. Within this scope, an attempt is being made to record the listed monuments on the official platform of the Ministry of Culture, in parallel with an effort to decode the term 'post-byzantine' and the reasoning behind its adoption and use. Further, the reasons for the destruction and neglect of Ottoman monuments are outlined in terms of nationalisation and hellenisation. Finally, there are some final remarks on the transition towards recognition and a new negotiation with Thessaloniki's past and its remains, which have become evident over the last ten to twenty years.
In the 1980s many historical documentaries were made in Hugary that dealt with the collective traumas of the Hungarian past. My study is based on a such taboo-breaking, untold tragedy a documentary film by Livia Gyarmathy titled Egyutteles (Coexistence). The filmdirector discovered in Baranya County one Romeo and Juliet-like love story of the Bukovina Szekelys/Szeklers and the Danubian Swabians, overshadowed by historical tragedies. The Szekely Csibi and the German Pflug family live in the two neighboring settlements, Somberek and Palotabozsok, and their children, Zoltan Csibi and Maria Pflug, are preparing to get married. Both ethnic groups were first resettled in foreign countries in the 18th century, and then in the 20th century, the Vienna Decision and the war drove the Szekelys to Baranya County, where the Danubian Swabians viewed them as invading foreigners after 1945, as they were sometimes moved into the same household as the Germans or into properties taken from the deportees. The Szekelys and the Swabians were thus both victimized by the political systems of the time, those forced to live together turned against each other. In my study, I present what has happened to the couple over the past 40 years. I examine how their lives and their place of residence were affected by the regime change, which significantly increased the value of German language skills and German connections-all while successive Hungarian governments have consistently prioritized the preservation of the culture and identity of the Bukovina Szekelys.
This article examines identity transformations in the Balkan region, focusing on the dynamics of premodern identity fluidity and the conceptual ruptures introduced by the political modernity of the nineteenth century. It considers the interplay of imperial legacies, the rise of romantic nationalisms, and Western discursive constructions of "the Balkans", and evaluates their consequences for contemporary identity conflicts. Integrating intellectual history, discourse analysis, and trans-imperial social history, the article proposes a reassessment of how the region has been perceived and why these perceptions continue to shape politics and collective memory. It questions conventional "center-periphery" dichotomies and stereotypes about "the other Europe", explaining the identity structure of the Balkans in terms of ecumenism and transcultural interaction, as well as the rupture produced by romantic nationalism and the ethno-national idea. The article argues that the transformative break occurred with the nineteenth-century triumph of the modern principle of nationality-heavily influenced by German Romantic thought and propagated through education, print culture, diplomatic intervention, and the administrative rationalities of emerging nation-states. This ideology reclassified populations according to exclusive ethno-linguistic criteria, promoted new "fictive ethnicities", and reshaped previously fluid communal landscapes into bordered, competitive identity fields. By foregrounding sensus communis as a historiographical and analytical tool, the article challenges entrenched stereotypes of Balkan exceptionalism and reframes the region as a laboratory for understanding how flexible social worlds were remade into rigid identity regimes. Rather than idealizing premodern coexistence, it emphasizes how institutional structures and social pragmatism fostered multiple identities-identities that were later disrupted when nationalist elites, Great Power agendas, and state bureaucracies converged around the goal of producing homogeneous political communities. The article concludes by reflecting on the implications of this longue dur & eacute;e perspective for contemporary debates on memory, pluralism, and the reconstruction of civic coexistence in post-conflict societies.
This article examines a collection of manuscripts written in Arabic script discovered during a series of field researches conducted in the 1990s in several villages of Kardzhali region in Southern Bulgaria (namely Mak, Garbishte, Shterna, Sinchets, and Bogatino). The manuscripts, written in Arabic, Ottoman and Persian, represent valuable bibliographic sources reflecting the intellectual and religious life of Muslim communities in the Eastern Rhodopes during the Ottoman period. The study combines codicological description with historical contextualization. The author analyzes the physical characteristics, content, and provenance of the manuscripts, many of which were found in abandoned houses and mosques after the mass exodus of the local Turkish population in 1989. Their discovery is closely connected to the political circumstances of the late socialist period in Bulgaria, particularly the assimilation campaign known as the "Revival Process" (1984-1989). During this period many cultural and religious artifacts were deliberately destroyed, while others were hidden by their owners in order to preserve them. As a result, numerous manuscripts were buried, concealed in buildings, or left in deserted settlements. Among the materials examined are fragments and complete copies of the Qur'an, the oldest dating from the 16(th) c., as well as works of Qur'anic exegesis, compilations of hadith, texts dealing with religious duties, and Persian literary works. These manuscripts not only provide insight into religious practices and education but also demonstrate the cultural connections of the local Muslim population with the broader Ottoman intellectual sphere. Beyond their textual value, the manuscripts serve as material witnesses to a disrupted cultural heritage. Their survival highlights both the vulnerability of written traditions in periods of political repression and the importance of preserving the remaining evidence of the historical and cultural memory of the region.
The author sets out to read Bram Stoker's Dracula in relation to the nineteenth-century Eastern Question, a context largely overlooked in existing scholarship. It claims conjecturally that Stoker's Conservative politics and contemporary British debates over the declining Ottoman Empire may have shaped the novel's geopolitical imagination, even without explicit references in the text. Building on and reassessing Gibson's claim that Dracula tacitly justifies Ottoman rule in the Balkans, the paper situates Stoker within a longer English Conservative tradition that viewed Ottoman hegemony favourably. It introduces the concept of sensus communis to describe the Balkans as a region historically unified by overlapping imperial structures, later fragmented by modern nationalism. Overall, the study reframes the Eastern Question not merely as a geopolitical conflict but as a struggle over memory and historical consciousness, drawing on theories of historical time and collective memory to reinterpret Balkan history and Stoker's novel. The core argument is that while Balkan peoples shared the same institutional and cultural realities for centuries shaped by imperial legacies, the rise of modern nationalism fragmented how those experiences are remembered. By applying the theories of Reinhart Koselleck and Victor Neumann, the author reframes the "Eastern Question" as a crisis of conflicting memories and historical timing rather than just a simple geopolitical struggle.
This article examines the contested afterlives of the 1914 "Northern Epirus" episode as a classic case of common past/divided memories in a post-imperial Balkan borderland . Rather than revisiting the diplomatic history of the Autonomous Republic proclaimed in southern Albania, it analyzes how the episode has been integrated into two mutually exclusive national narratives. In Greek memory, "Northern Epirus" emerged as a modern political term of symbolic geography, framed as part of the unredeemed Greek patria. In Albanian memory, the same events were codified as attempted dismemberment, external intervention, and foundational trauma in the fragile birth of statehood. Drawing and post-Cold War political controversies, the article traces how these memories were institutionalized and periodically reactivated, from Cold War rhetoric to EU accession debates and diaspora mobilization. It argues that the dispute today is less territorial than epistemic: the border is internationally recognized, yet the symbolic geography persists. By situating "Northern Epirus" within broader debates on imperial collapse, nationalism, and memory regimes in Southeastern Europe, the study proposes pathways for memory de-escalation grounded in shared historical complexity rather than competitive victimhood.
This study examines historical memory and how it developed in early Balkan state formation. In the process a collective memory emerged which influenced people's understanding of the past and shaped their present and future. Using the example of a bona fide Greek nationalist and actor in the so-called Struggle for Macedonia, Athanasios Souliotis-Nikolaidis, this study will illustrate how nationalist attitudes evolved over the years and how they changed from seeking confrontation and domination to searching for cooperation and coexistence. This was the case which led this individual to seek cooperation with other Balkan people and the creation not of a Greater Greece but a federal state where Greeks, Slavs, and Turks, Christians and Muslims, could live and prosper in harmony. The picture that emerges then is not of a one-dimensional individual but a sophisticated thinker who through his experience understood the need for a better path to the future of the Balkans and the Near East; one who fought his enemy but in the process came to see that his enemy was in many was just like him. While such ideas existed before, they were dismissed as coming from special interests and the "other". But Souliotis-Nikolaidis, with his impeccable nationalist credential, cannot be so easily dismissed. In short maybe the past is not how we remember it; maybe it is time to realize that even some of the historical players did not view their actions and conditions the way we have been told they did. This might serve as a call to reexamine our knowledge and attitudes about our own histories.
This article examines intercommunal relations in Limassol, Cyprus, during the critical period 1960-1963 through oral history testimony from 25 Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot residents. Drawing on autobiographical interviews conducted over thirteen months, the study reconstructs everyday practices of social coexistence, economic collaboration, and cultural participation that characterized the city at the moment of independence, before the crisis of 1963-1964. By centering the voices of women-often excluded from nationalist historiographies-the article demonstrates how communities participated together in shared spaces (coffeehouses, cinemas, markets, religious festivals) while maintaining distinct communal identities and institutions. The concept of 'symbiotic city' describes both the genuine economic interdependence and cultural exchange between the two communities and the structural limits of integration, particularly evident in the absence of cross-communal private/domestic interaction and intermarriage. The article intervenes in three interconnected scholarly conversations: (1) the historiography of Ottoman-to-modern identity transformation in Eastern Mediterranean contexts; (2) the epistemological status of oral testimony in reconstructing experiences not included in official archives; and (3) the contested narratives of social coexistence in postcolonial Limassol. The study demonstrates how oral history can recover the lived experiences of communities marginalized in official historical records, while also highlighting methodological challenges in using retrospective testimony to reconstruct the period immediately preceding large-scale communal violence. The silences and selective emphases found in these testimonies-what memory chooses to emphasize and what it leaves unspoken-reveal how historical actors shaped meaning, negotiated identity, and defined belonging during a critical transition from colonial to postcolonial governance.
This article analyses the ways in which Ottoman heritage is represented in the museums of Nicosia, demonstrating how selective historical narratives inf luence memory in a divided city. It reveals that museums become spaces of struggle over identity and narrative dominance. The analysis covers institutions on both sides of the divide-Greek Cypriot and Turkish Cypriot-and highlights differences in the portrayal of the past, as well as the role of museums as actors of historical education.
This article examines the figure of the alafranga as a shifting cultural and moral category through which late Ottoman and early Republican literature negotiated Westernisation, national belonging, and historical memory in the Eastern Mediterranean. Focusing on two canonical novels-Ahmet Midhat's Felatun Bey ile Rakim Efendi (1875) and Yakup Kadri Karaosmanoglu's Sodom ve Gomore (1928)-it traces the transformation of the alafranga from a comical, Westernised dandy into a symbol of moral decadence, political betrayal, and sexual deviance. This transformation is situated within two historical impasses: the reformist crisis of the Tanzimat period and the nationalist rupture produced by war, occupation, and mass violence in the 1910s and early 1920s. Reading literary representations alongside broader Mediterranean debates on cosmopolitanism, nationalism, and moral regulation, the article shows how Istanbul- and particularly Pera-was retrospectively recoded as a space of civilisational exhaustion. In this process, gender and sexuality emerged as key sites for negotiating political loyalty, rendering the alafranga a repository for anxieties surrounding imperial decline. The article contributes to Mediterranean historiography by foregrounding literature as an active agent in the production of post-imperial moral and mnemonic regimes.
This article examines the Greco-Turkish War of 1897 as a formative moment in the immediate production of a divided memory across the Greek-speaking world(s) situated within an empire, a nation-state, and in the diaspora. Rather than treating memory as constructed in retrospective, it argues that divergence emerged in real time because of unequal regimes of narration shaped both by politics and censorship. Drawing from comparative analysis of Greek-language newspapers published in Athens, Constantinople, Izmir, Limassol, Alexandria, and New York, the study demonstrates how the same event generated distinct narrative trajectories depending on the political regime under which it was articulated. In the Greek kingdom, metropolitan newspapers rapidly moralized the military debacle, transforming thus military failure into ethical affirmation and national endurance. In the Ottoman Empire, the Greek-language newspapers adopted a strategy of self-censorship, refraining from interpretations and framing the conflict through administrative normalcy in order to mitigate political risk. While diasporic newspapers, operating at greater distance from political pressure, confronted defeat openly and included it within broader structural and diplomatic contexts. By reconstructing wartime journalism as a site of immediate meaning-making, this article shows that divided memories were not the product of later mythmaking but were embedded in the political geography of narration itself. The war of 1897 thus offers a transnational lens into how shared events fracture into unequal historical meanings under asymmetrical regimes of power.
This article presents a historical and contextual outline of Turkish literary culture that developed in Bulgaria between 1944 and 1969. Taking as its starting point the general lack of scholarly attention to this field, it examines Turkish-language literary production within the broader historical and cultural framework of the Cold War. The first section analyzes how Turkish literary output took shape under state-controlled publishing institutions, particularly within the scope of the communist regime's post-1944 educational and cultural policies toward the Turkish minority. The article highlights that nearly one thousand Turkish-language books were published during this period, including 113 original works by Bulgarian-born Turkish authors, most of whom remain little known today. This body of literature is evaluated through a classification into nine categories. The article proposes a new theoretical approach by using the concepts of literary space, Balkan literary zone, and Rumelian Turkish literature in analyzing the development of Turkish literature in communist Bulgaria. In this sense, it examines this literary production not only within the sociocultural and political context of the period but also in relation to the broader transformation of Turkish culture in the post-Ottoman Balkans. Ultimately, the article argues that Turkish literary culture in Bulgaria should be regarded as a source of comparative perspectives for the study of Turkish, Bulgarian, and Balkan literatures as a whole, as well as for Cold War studies, rather than merely as a local or minority literature.
This article analyses the role of standard language norms in shaping processes of unification and division in the former Yugoslav space. Tracing developments from the Vienna Literary Agreement (1850) through the Novi Sad Agreement (1954), the language declarations of the late twentieth century, and the Declaration on the Common Language (2017), the study demonstrates that standardization was consistently intertwined with political projects and struggles over national sovereignty. Although grounded in high mutual intelligibility and a shared Shtokavian dialect continuum, attempts to institutionalize a unified literary norm frequently provoked resistance and reinforced competing identity narratives. Incorporating sociolinguistic research on linguistic ecology and minority-language education in Croatia, Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, the article further shows that everyday communicative practice often remains more flexible than formal codification suggests. Minority-language instruction supports identity preservation, while acquisition of the state standard facilitates social integration.
The fall of communism in East-Central Europe in 1989 was the turning point that triggered the end of the Cold War. The transition from a totalitarian regime to a democratic system was not easy, particularly in countries such as Romania, where it faced significant challenges, ultimately leading to societal fractures. As the rule of law and democracy grew stronger and Romania's Euro-Atlantic choice became evident, especially after the dissolution of the Soviet Union, some significant projects to bring back to memory the anti-communist resistance began to take shape. This research examines the role of oral history in the context of the Sighet Memorial Project, which has inspired subsequent initiatives by various NGOs and governmental organizations. Initially, the project faced several challenges due to the reluctance of the newly established authorities in Bucharest in 1990. However, with the support of the newly born civil society, former political prisoners, and, last but not least, the Council of Europe, the Sighet Memorial became a reality and served as a model for Romania's young democracy. The representatives of this initiative are central to this analysis.
The relationship between intergenerational narratives and official history education concerning the 1974 Cyprus conflict, is explored in this paper, drawing from a doctoral thesis which investigates how Greek-Cypriot survivors interpret these events and share their experiences with younger generations. Through semi-structured interviews with 23 parents and grandparents of lower secondary school students in Cyprus, this paper highlights their concerns about the history textbook and teacher as tools of the government in promoting the State's selected view of the past. It emphasizes on how they conceptualize school history to be and how they transmit historical knowledge as they identify political involvement in school history, which blocks a bona fide representation of history. Thus, they adopt independent initiatives such as storytelling, witnessing funerals of missing persons, and visiting historical sites to reinforce family memory. These intergenerational memory practices enable youth to connect with the past and understand their place in society. Research findings underscore the need for further exploring family-driven historical narratives, as these can provide a cohesive understanding of history while also influencing children's perceptions by transmitting adults' recollections. This study suggests the importance of widening our understanding of family memory and sensitive issues in history education, particularly in post-conflict societies such as Cyprus.
