The excavated foundations of a ninth-century sacral building in the northeastern suburb of Pohansko, an important centre of Great Moravia, and especially the find of the nobleman’s grave H 153, has focused scholarly attention onto the nature of the Mojmirid state and the reasons behind its sudden disintegration. In this volume, a group of archaeologists, historians and a natural scientist aim to incorporate this remarkable discovery into the wider frameworks of Moravian power, society, and culture, and thereby arrive at some surprising conclusions. Contributors: are Stefan Eichert, David Kalhous, Pavel Kouřil, Jiří Macháček, Vladimír Sládek, Ivo Štefan, Martin Wihoda, Roman Zehetmayer.
In The Nitrian Principality: The Beginnings of Medieval Slovakia Ján Steinhübel offers an account of the early medieval West Slavic realm which laid the national, territorial and historical foundations of Slovakia.
Assembles evidence from Frankish, Moravian, and Byzantine documents; from archaeological finds; and details of the terrain to buttress the view that the center of the Slavic Moravian empire was in what is now Serbia, much farther southeast than is usually thought. This interpretation explains how the Franks managed otherwise inexplicable military successes against the Moravians.
On the heels of the Munich Agreement, Hitler’s troops marched into Prague and established the Protectorate of Bohemia and Moravia. Nazi leaders were determined to make the region entirely German. Bryant explores the origins and implementation of these plans as part of a wider history of Nazi rule and its eventual consequences for the region.
67 texts, including hymns, manifestos, articles or extracts from lengthy studies exemplify the relation between Romanticism and the national movements in the cultural space ranging from Poland to the Ottoman Empire. Each text is accompanied by a presentation of the author, and by an analysis of the context in which the respective work was born.The end of the 18th century and first decades of the 19th were in many respects a watershed period in European history. The ideas of the Enlightenment and the dramatic convulsions of the French Revolution had shattered the old bonds and cast doubt upon the established moral and social norms of the old corporate society. In culture a new trend, Romanticism, was successfully asserting itself against Classicism and provided a new key for a growing number of activists to 're-imagine' their national community, reaching beyond the traditional frameworks of identification (such as the 'political nation', regional patriotism, or Christian universalism). The collection focuses on the interplay of Romantic cultural discourses and the shaping of national ideology throughout the 19th century, tracing the patterns of cultural transfer with Western Europe as well as the mimetic competition of national ideologies within the region.
This book offer a biography of a key East Central European ruler, Vladislaus Henry, who ruled the Margraviate of Moravia from 1198 to 1222 and, in cooperation with his brother, King Přemysl Otakar I of Bohemia, was involved in the transformation of the Holy Roman Empire into a free union of Princes. The study also describes the successful modernisation of Moravia and Bohemia during the 13th century, and reflects on the beginnings of the politically emancipated community of the Moravians, which was defined by land values. The work thus draws attention to a previously overlooked dimension of the European Middle Ages, including the history of not only states and nations but also of lands.
The Great Jewish Cities of Central and Eastern Europe: A Travel Guide and Resource Book to Prague, Warsaw, Cracow, and Budapest is the most comprehensive guidebook covering all aspects of Jewish history and contemporary life in Prague, Warsaw, Cracow, and Budapest. This remarkable book includes detailed histories of the Jews in these cities, walking tours of Jewish districts past and present, intensive descriptions of Jewish sites, fascinating accounts of local Jewish legend and lore, and practical information for Jewish travelers to the region.
English is the language of science today. No matter which languages you know, if you want your work seen, studied, and cited, you need to publish in English. But that hasn’t always been the case. Though there was a time when Latin dominated the field, for centuries science has been a polyglot enterprise, conducted in a number of languages whose importance waxed and waned over time—until the rise of English in the twentieth century. So how did we get from there to here? How did French, German, Latin, Russian, and even Esperanto give way to English? And what can we reconstruct of the experience of doing science in the polyglot past? With Scientific Babel, Michael D. Gordin resurrects that lost world, in part through an ingenious mechanism: the pages of his highly readable narrative account teem with footnotes—not offering background information, but presenting quoted material in its original language. The result is stunning: as we read about the rise and fall of languages, driven by politics, war, economics, and institutions, we actually see it happen in the ever-changing web of multilingual examples. The history of science, and of English as its dominant language, comes to life, and brings with it a new understanding not only of the frictions generated by a scientific community that spoke in many often mutually unintelligible voices, but also of the possibilities of the polyglot, and the losses that the dominance of English entails. Few historians of science write as well as Gordin, and Scientific Babel reveals his incredible command of the literature, language, and intellectual essence of science past and present. No reader who takes this linguistic journey with him will be disappointed.
An odyssey through the mind and memory of a washed-up writer, from one of Europe’s most provocative novelists, Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke Mysteriously summoned to a houseboat on the Morava River, a few friends, associates, and collaborators of an old writer listen as he tells a story that will last until dawn: the tale of the once well-known writer’s recent odyssey across Europe. As his story unfolds, it visits places that represent stages of the narrator’s and the continent’s past, many now lost or irrecoverably changed through war, death, and the subtler erosions of time. His wanderings take him from the Balkans to Spain, Germany, and Austria, from a congress of experts on noise sickness to a clandestine international gathering of jew’s-harp virtuosos. His story and its telling are haunted by a beautiful stranger, a woman who has a preternatural hold over the writer and appears sometimes as a demon, sometimes as the longed-for destination of his travels. Powerfully alive, honest, and at times deliciously satirical, The Moravian Night explores the mind and memory of an aging writer, tracking the anxieties, angers, fears, and pleasures of a life inseparable from the recent history of Central Europe. In crystalline prose, Peter Handke traces and interrogates his own thoughts and perceptions while endowing the world with a mythic dimension. As Jeffrey Eugenides writes, “Handke’s sharp eye is always finding a strange beauty amid this colorless world.” The Moravian Night is at once an elegy for the lost and forgotten and a novel of self-examination and uneasy discovery, from one of world literature’s great voices.
This book analyzes the creation of languages across the Slavophone areas of the world and their deployment for political projects and identity building, mainly after 1989. It offers perspectives from a number of disciplines such as sociolinguistics, socio-political history and language policy. Languages are artefacts of culture, meaning they are created by people. They are often used for identity building and maintenance, but in Central and Eastern Europe they became the basis of nation building and national statehood maintenance. The recent split of the Serbo-Croatian language in the wake of the break-up of Yugoslavia amply illustrates the highly politicized role of languages in this region, which is also home to most of the world’s Slavic-speakers. This volume presents and analyzes the creation of languages across the Slavophone areas of the world and their deployment for political projects and identity building, mainly after 1989. The overview concludes with a reflection on the recent rise of Slavophone speech communities in Western Europe and Israel. The book brings together renowned international scholars who offer a variety of perspectives from a number of disciplines and sub-fields such as sociolinguistics, socio-political history and language policy, making this book of great interest to historians, sociologists, political scientists and anthropologists interested in Central and Eastern Europe and Slavic Studies.
