Balcanica - Annual of the Institute for Balkan Studies

Reading the Subtext – Site Location and Settlement Systems in Roman Moesia

Lina Diers — 2024-12-26

This paper argues that there is a political, social, economic or even historical sub-stratum to the location and development of settlement that is significant to the diachronic understanding of settlement systems but may easily get neglected in favour of discussions of settlement hierarchy or single events in settlement history. Hence, it postulates that the factors for initial site location may not be the same as the factors for further settle- ment development, and that said substratum should be explored to fully grasp the reasons behind settlement dynamics. In doing so, it focuses on two categories of sites – so-called bridge-sites at significant geographical locations and legionary garrisons turned colonies. Settlements used as examples are Horreum Margi, Naissus, Scupi, and Ratiaria in Moesia Superior.

Antrešelj. An Early Romanian Remnant in Serbo-Croatian

Orsat Ligorio — 2024-12-26

The paper discusses SCr. antrešelj’ gap in the middle of a pack saddle’, a Balkan Latin loanword that was transmitted to Serbo-Croatian via either Dalmatian Romance or Romanian, and, based on formal criteria, advocates for the latter as the exclusive intermediary.

The Atlas of the Balkan Linguistic Area program

Evangelia Adamou — 2024-12-26

This article presents the Atlas of the Balkan Linguistic Area (ABLA), a French-Russian research program that created an online database of language contact phenomena documented in the languages of the Balkans. This resource will be open access after its launch in 2025, enriching the fields of Balkan and areal linguistics. Specifically, ABLA consists of 93 phonological, morpho-syntactic, semantic, and lexical features. Each feature is matched to a map covering 60 localities across Balkan countries. Each map is accompanied by a chapter co-authored by the project contributors. The paper offers some preliminary results for the feature “Infinitive: Forms”. The online database in Wordpress is hosted by Huma-Num in France. ABLA, to be published by de Gruyter, is not only the first online database for the Balkans, an area shaped by multilingualism in forms that are rapidly dis- appearing, but also an example for other linguistic areas in the world.

Urbanisation, Migration, Depopulation and Virtual Ritual Community – The Village Kurban as a Shared Meal

Petko Hristov — 2024-12-26

The paper deals with the specific use of collective rituals focused on blood sacrifice and a shared meal among Orthodox Christians in the Balkans, known mostly as kurban. In studying a variety of feasts, the analytical focus is on the collective gathering and the shared meal, which is celebrated by the small village community as its “homeland”, a sense of belonging to a virtual community consisting of people from all over the world. This paper pays particular attention to examples of the collective kurban in depopulated villages. Among migrants in big cities born in the same village, the kurban is understood as part of a common cultural heritage and a ritual that helps produce and/or re-produce a group identity within a broader national framework and urban social milieu. The kurban is also perceived by the participants as a ritual way of creating social cohesion for kinship-based and territory-based communities, beyond confessional attachment. In a selection of cases, the paper demonstrates how a blood sacrifice and a shared meal, as well as the symbolic use of the patron saint of a birthplace, recreates cohesion between the former members and the new migrants from the city to the village.

The Landscape of the Monastic Endeavour: The Choices of St Sava of Serbia

Danica Popović — 2024-12-26

This paper approaches the question of the selection of site intended for monastic ascetic pursuits taking the example of St Sava of Serbia. Sava’s choices were based on his masterful knowledge of Byzantine eremitic tradition and his own substantial monastic experience. This is evidenced by the hesychasteria he founded: he gave physical form to the concept of locus amoenus in the Karyes kellion of the monastery of Hilandar, while the concept of locus horridus was embodied in the cave hermitages of the monasteries of Studenica and Mileševa. The methodological framework of this research is informed by current landscape studies.

Latin-Byzantine Artistic Interactions and the Church of Saint Basil in Mržep (Montenegro)

Michele Bacci — 2024-12-26

The present paper offers some thoughts on and a new interpretive frame of the painted program of the small, single-nave church of Saint Basil in Mržep, in the vicinity of Donji Stoliv, in the Vrmac peninsula near Kotor, Montenegro. This monument stands out for the abundance of available information on its history, including the name of the painter (Mihailo), the identity of the donor (Stefan Kalođurđević) and even the date of its construction and pictorial decoration (1451). Nevertheless, the art-historical debate has been mostly puzzled by the mélangé, Latin-Byzantine character of the painted images, which has been explained as an outcome of the Union of the Orthodox and Roman churches declared at the Council of Ferrara-Florence in 1438–1439. The analysis provided here emphasizes the scarcity of indications about the impact of the latter’s resolutions on the arts and proposes an alternative interpretation that associates the choice of specific forms with the devotional strategies worked by Stefan Kalođurđević for his and his family’s spiritual health.

Debating Balkan Commonalities: Is There a Common Balkan Culture?

Slobodan G. Markovich — 2024-12-26

Analysing the contributions of Jovan Cvijić, Traian Stoianovich, Paschalis Kitromilides and a range of Balkanologists, the author attempts to summarise the debate on Balkan commonalities and answer if the debate was able to identify shared features that could be seen as a common Balkan culture. The author first deals with the emergence of Balkan studies, which he connects with the spirit of regional cooperation that appeared in the Balkans after 1928. The first efforts to answer the question of Balkan commonalities were made in the seminal work of this discipline on the Balkan Peninsula (1918). In this book, Jovan Cvijić provided evidence for a divided rather than a unified region. The efforts of Traian Stoianovich to define a “Balkan civilization” remained in the borderland between global history and Balkanology. Paschalis Kitromilides provided the most convincing arguments for a Balkan mentality but did not go beyond the early modern period and Balkan Orthodox Christians. In the paper the evolution of the term Balkanism has been analysed to retrace the change of focus in Balkan studies, which lost some its original drive from the 1930s for finding commonalities, instead growing more focused on political and cultural contexts. In the conclusion the importance of the whole debate on Balkan commonalities has been highlighted. Although strong evidence of Balkan commonalities was found only in linguistics, this discussion proved significant for Balkan studies and brought about important results for the discipline.

Beyond Nationalism? The Inter-war Period and Some Features of the Complex Transformation of Southeastern Europe

Alberto Basciani — 2024-12-26

In Southeastern Europe, the end of the First World War marked a profound geopolitical transformation and the start of an important and conflicting process of modernisation of the economic, social and political structures of the countries in the region. Agrarian reforms, changes in political structures, increasing urbanisation, population growth, and ad hoc legislation for minority rights protection were some of the most important issues addressed in those years. This essay aims to elucidate the main knots and contradictions in the internal and international life of the countries of Balkan Europe, showing how efforts to change political and social structures encountered enormous obstacles in the intrinsic weakness of those socio-economic structures, but also in the will of important segments of the Balkan ruling classes, especially those who had realised the nationalistic dreams of the decades before the Great War, to reassert the supremacy of their respective power and ethnic groups. Yet there were changes, and important ones at that. In foreign policy, for example, the Balkans was the only region in Europe where an attempt was made to turn the so-called ‘spirit of Locarno’ into a concrete achievement, albeit unsuccessfully.

Ritual Objects for the Feast of Sukkot: Theoretical Analysis of the Talmudic Prescriptions and Some of their Ethnographical Achievements in the Balkans

Madalina Vartejanu-Joubert — 2018-12-01

Can we think of the artifact as an integral part of an anthropology of life as it has developed in the wake of the anthropology of nature founded by Philippe Descola? Judaism clearly fits within this perspective since a vast body of normative texts, notably the Babylonian Talmud, defines and discusses the jewishness of artifacts – whether ritual or everyday – by endeavoring to determine their correct position on a graduated scale ranging from nature to artifice, understood here as emic categories. This article aims to support this reflection by studying two ritual objects related to the festival of Sukkot: the skhakh, the roof of the sukka hut, and the lulav, the bouquet of the four species. As we shall see, the making of the ritual object according to specific rules shows us its place in the encounter with the supernatural, the goal towards which any ritual device aspires. After a theoretical analysis of the Talmudic prescriptions, we will look at some of the practical ways in which the Sukkot hut can be documented photographically in the Balkans, in the broadest sense of the term. We will present examples from Greece, Romania and Bulgaria.

From “Religion” to “Spirituality” in Socialist Bulgaria: Vanga, Nicholas Roerich, and the Mystique of History

Galia Valtchinova — 2024-12-26

The article delves into processes unfolding in Bulgaria in the 1970s, centring around two figures: Vanga, known as the seer of Petrič, and the mystic painter Nicholas Roerich, to demonstrate the changes in the structure and meaning of categories related to religion that occurred in the period of “mature socialism”. The first section looks into the activities of the clairvoyant Vanga and her changing status to uncover the gradual process that transformed her from a local vračka (healer/witch) into the “Bulgarian Pythia”. The second and longest section is dedicated to the Nicholas Roerich Program of 1978, promoted at the highest level in the framework of the celebration of 1300 years of the Bulgarian state, and its impact on coining a peculiar concept of spirituality. The third and final part explores the links between Roerich, Vanga, the notion of spirituality, and a certain vision of history.

You are what you don’t eat – Fasting, Ethics, and Ethnography, in Serbia and Beyond

Nicholas Lackenby — 2024-12-26

This article examines Orthodox fasting in contemporary Serbia. It does so through the theoretical lens of ‘ethical affordances’, suggesting that food and fasting practices allow a range of people to articulate different ethical evaluations. Food and fasting generate diverse reflections on the importance of rules, spiritual growth, hypocrisy, and sincerity. Thinking anthropologically, we see that people with range of viewpoints on the Church are in fact united in making ethical evaluations. More broadly, the article speculates that thinking about the ethical affordances of food might be one way to develop the ethnography of religion after Yugoslav socialism more generally.

Ninety years of the Institute for Balkan Studies Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts

Vojislav G. Pavlović — 2024-12-27

To reach its ninetieth anniversary is no small feat for any institution. The Institute for Balkan Studies of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts has achieved this notable milestone despite the numerous challenges it has had to overcome. The Institute for Balkan Studies (Balkanski institut) was established in 1934 by two prominent men of letters, Ratko Parežanin and Svetislav Spanaćević, under the patronage of King Alexander of Yugoslavia. After the capitulation of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, the German occupation authorities decided to close the Institute in August 1941. The Institute resumed its work in July 1969, headed by the academician Vasa Čubrilović, who had been associated with the former Institute for Balkan Studies and had served as the inaugural director of the newly established Institute for Balkan Studies of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts (Balkanološki institut Srpske akademije nauka i umetnosti). Because the two Institutes’ names are identical in English, one may be led to think that the rebirth of the Institute had been foretold.