Balkan Identities
Balkan Identities

Author: Maria Todorova

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2004-04

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9780814782798

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Balkan Identities brings together historians, anthropologists, and literary scholars all working under the shared conviction that the only way to overcome history is to intimately understand it. The contributors of Balkan Identities focus on historical memory, collective national memory, and the political manipulation of national identities. They refine our understanding of memory and identity in general and explore and assess the significance of particular manifestations of Balkan national identities and national memories in the region. The essays in Balkan Identities grapple with three major problems: the construction of historical memory, sites of national memory, and the mobilization of national identities. While most essays focus on a single country (e.g. Croatia, Romania, Turkey, Cyprus, Albania, Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia), they are in dialogue with each other and share an opposition to rigid isolationist identities. Illuminating and challenging, Balkan Identities demonstrates the ever-changing nature of a troubled and culturally vibrant region.

Balkan Identities
Balkan Identities

Author: Marii͡a Nikolaeva Todorova

Publisher: C. HURST & CO. PUBLISHERS

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 388

ISBN-13: 9781850657156

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Four main themes are concentrated on in this text, the construction of historical memories; the sites of national memory; the transmission of national memory; and the mobilisation of national identities.

Religion, Identity and Power
Religion, Identity and Power

Author: Ahmet Erdi Ozturk

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

Published: 2021-01-05

Total Pages: 264

ISBN-13: 1474474713

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This book examines Turkey’s ethno-religious activism and power-related political strategies in the Balkans between 2002 and 2020, the period under the rule of the Justice and Development Party (AKP), to determine the scopes of its activities in the region.
Ahmet Erdi Öztürk illuminates an often-neglected aspect of Turkey’s relations with its Balkan neighbours that emerged as a result of the much discussed ‘authoritarian turn’ – a broader shift in Turkish domestic and foreign policy from a realist-secular to a Sunni Islamic orientation with ethno-nationalist policies.
Öztürk draws on personal testimonies given by both Turkish and non-Turkish, Muslim and non-Muslim interviewees in three country cases: Bulgaria, North Macedonia and Albania. The findings shed light on contemporary issues surrounding the continuous redefinition of Turkish secularism under the AKP rule and the emergence of a new Muslim elite in Turkey.

Greece and the Balkans
Greece and the Balkans

Author: Dimitris Tziovas

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-07-05

Total Pages: 291

ISBN-13: 1351932187

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Greece and the Balkans explores the cultural relationships between Greece and other Balkan countries in the domains of language, literature, thought, translation, and music, and examines issues of identity and perception among the Balkan peoples themselves. The essays bring together scholars from across a range of disciplines: historians, anthropologists, linguists and musicologists with specialists on literature, translation, the history of ideas and religion. By raising issues of cultural hybridity, and nationalist or pre-nationalist interpretations of culture and history it lays claim to a place in the context of studies on nationalism and post-colonialism. Greece and the Balkans also contributes to a recognition of the Balkans as a site, like some postcolonial ones, where identities have become fused, orientalism and eurocentrism blurred and where religion and modernity clashed and co-existed. By approaching cultural encounters between Greece and the Balkans from a fresh and informed perspective, it makes a substantial contribution to the study of a rather neglected aspect in the history of a region which has suffered in the past from narrow-minded, nationalistic arguments.

Language and Identity in the Balkans
Language and Identity in the Balkans

Author: Robert D. Greenberg

Publisher: OUP Oxford

Published: 2004-03-25

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 0191514551

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Language rifts in the Balkans are endemic and have long been both a symptom of ethnic animosity and a cause for inflaming it. But the break-up of the Serbo-Croatian language into four languages on the path towards mutual unintelligibility within a decade is, by any previous standard of linguistic behaviour, extraordinary. Robert Greenberg describes how it happened. Basing his account on first-hand observations in the region before and since the communist demise, he evokes the drama and emotional discord as different factions sought to exploit, prevent, exacerbate, accelerate or just make sense of the chaotic and unpredictable language situation. His fascinating account offers insights into the nature of language change and the relation between language and identity. It also provides a uniquely vivid perspective on nationalism and identity politics in the former Yugoslavia.

A Modern History of the Balkans
A Modern History of the Balkans

Author: Thanos Veremis

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2017-02-28

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 1786731053

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The history of the Balkans has been a distillation of the great and terrible themes of 20th century history-the rise of nationalism, communism, fascism, genocide, identity and war. Written by one of the leading historians of the region, this is a new interpretation of that history, focusing on the uses and legacies of nationalism in the Balkan region. In particular, Professor Veremis analyses the influence of the West-from the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the rise and collapse of Yugoslavia. Throughout the state-building process of Greece, Serbia, Rumania, Bulgaria and later, Albania, the West provided legal, administrative and political prototypes to areas bedevilled by competing irredentist claims. At a time when Slovenia, Rumania, Bulgaria and Croatia have become full members of the EU, yet some orphans of the Communist past are facing domestic difficulties, A Modern History of the Balkans seeks to provide an important historical context to the current problems of nationalism and identity in the Balkans.

Developing Cultural Identity in the Balkans
Developing Cultural Identity in the Balkans

Author: Raymond Detrez

Publisher: Peter Lang

Published: 2005

Total Pages: 248

ISBN-13: 9789052012971

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The fundamental contrast between convergent and divergent tendencies in the development of Balkan cultural identity can be seen as an important determinative both in the contradictory self-images of people in the Balkans and in the often biased perceptions of Balkan societies held by external observers, past and present. In bringing together case studies from such heterogeneous lines of research as linguistics, anthropology, political, literary and cultural history, each presenting insightful analyses of micro- as well as macro-level aspects of identity construction in the Balkans, this collection of essays provides a forum for the elucidation and critical evaluation of an intriguing paradox which continues to characterize the cultural situation in the Balkans and which, moreover, is of undeniable relevance for our understanding of recent political developments. As such, it also provides a window into the actual state of scholarly interest in the rich interdisciplinary field of Balkan studies. This book contains a selection of papers presented at the international conference «Developing Cultural Identity in the Balkans: Convergence vs. Divergence», organized by the Center for Southeast European Studies at Ghent University on 12 and 13 December 2003 in Ghent.

Balkan Prehistory
Balkan Prehistory

Author: Douglass W. Bailey

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2002-09-11

Total Pages: 367

ISBN-13: 1134607083

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Bailey's volume fills the gap that existed for an archaeology of the Balkans and will be required reading for anyone studying the Neolithic, Copper and early Bronze Ages of Eastern Europe.

Balkan Heritages
Balkan Heritages

Author: Maria Couroucli

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2017-05-15

Total Pages: 271

ISBN-13: 1134800754

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This volume deals with the relation between heritage, history and politics in the Balkans. Contributions examine diverse ways in which material and immaterial heritage has been articulated, negotiated and manipulated since the nineteenth century. The major question addressed here is how modern Balkan nations have voiced claims about their past by establishing ’proof’ of a long historical presence on their territories in order to legitimise national political narratives. Focusing on claims constructed in relation to tangible evidence of past presence, especially architecture and townscape, the contributors reveal the rich relations between material and immaterial conceptions of heritage. This comparative take on Balkan public uses of the past also reveals many common trends in social and political practices, ideas and fixations embedded in public and collective memories. Balkan Heritages revisits some general truths about the Balkans as a region and a category, in scholarship and in politics. Contributions to the volume adopt a transnational and trans-disciplinary perspective of Balkan identities and heritage(s), viewed here as symbolic resources deployed by diverse local actors with special emphasis on scholars and political leaders.