Communist Gourmet presents a lively, detailed account of how the communist regime in Bulgaria determined people's everyday food experience between 1944 and 1989. It examines the daily routines of ...acquiring food, cooking it, and eating out at restaurants through the memories of Bulgarians and foreigners, during communism. In looking back on a wide array of issues and events, Albena Shkodrova attempts to explain the paradoxes of daily existence. She reports human stories that are touching, sometimes dark, but often full of humor and anecdotes from nearly one hundred people: some of them are Bulgarians who were involved in the communist food industry, whether as consumers or employees, while others are visitors from the United States and Western Europe who report culinary highlights and disappointments. The author made use of the national press, officially published cookbooks, Communist Party documents, and other previously unstudied sources. Illustrated recipes of dishes typical of the period and an extensive set of archival photographs are special features of the volume.
Gerald W. Creed analyzes contemporary mumming rituals in rural Bulgaria
for what they reveal about life after socialism -- and the current state of
postsocialist studies. Mumming rituals have ...flourished in the post-Soviet era.
Elaborately costumed dancers go from house to house demanding sustenance and
bestowing blessings. Through the analysis of these rites, Creed critiques key themes
in postsocialist studies, including understandings of civil society and democracy,
gender and sexuality, autonomy and community, and ethnicity and nationalism. He
argues that these events reveal indigenous cultural resources that could have been
used both practically and intellectually to ease the postsocialist reconstruction of
Bulgarian society, but were not.
In The Cold War from the Margins, Theodora K. Dragostinova reappraises the global 1970s from the perspective of a small socialist state—Bulgaria—and its cultural engagements with the Balkans, the ...West, and the Third World. During this anxious decade, Bulgaria's communist leadership invested heavily in cultural diplomacy to bolster its legitimacy at home and promote its agendas abroad. Bulgarians traveled the world to open museum exhibitions, show films, perform music, and showcase the cultural heritage and future aspirations of their "ancient yet modern" country. As Dragostinova shows, these encounters transcended the Cold War's bloc mentality: Bulgaria's relations with Greece and Austria warmed, émigrés once considered enemies were embraced, and new cultural ties were forged with India, Mexico, and Nigeria. Pursuing contact with the West and solidarity with the Global South boosted Bulgaria's authoritarian regime by securing new allies and unifying its population. Complicating familiar narratives of both the 1970s and late socialism, The Cold War from the Margins places the history of socialism in an international context and recovers alternative models of global interconnectivity along East-South lines. Thanks to generous funding from The Ohio State University Libraries and its participation in TOME (Toward an Open Monograph Ecosystem), the ebook editions of this book are available as Open Access volumes from Cornell Open (cornellpress.cornell.edu/cornell-open) and other repositories.
"Post-Stalinism--the last three decades of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe--gave birth to new political ideas and social struggles, which reshaped socialist societies and forged new ...global imaginaries. With a focus on socialist Bulgaria, Restless History traces the dynamic polemical and social shifts that took place during this period. With anti-Stalinist and humanist visions, socialist societies rebuilt their material and social worlds around social-reproductive needs such as care, housing, education, leisure, rest, and access to culture and the arts. In the sphere of global politics, they created anti-racist, feminist, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist solidarities that challenged Western hegemony and reordered the global geographies of power. Yet the changes of the period also took some troubling directions: humanist imaginaries of socialist progress, modernity, and nationhood welcomed ideas of national and social homogeneity, opening the doors to ethnonationalism. Following the promising as well as troubling moments in the history of Bulgarian post-Stalinism, Zhivka Valiavicharska brings to life the complexities of real lived socialism. Restless History re-examines the post-Stalinist period in Bulgaria, Eastern Europe, and beyond--in all its tensions and contradictions--to offer the socialist past as an unfinished history, one that cannot be easily put to rest."--
'Nationalism from the Left' examines the nationalist discource of the BCP in many domains of political life and explains the reasons why the communists resorted to nationalism in the 1940s.
Who owns the past? Kaneff, Deema
2004., 20040115, 2004, 2004-01-15, Letnik:
21
eBook
In the decades since the collapse of socialism in eastern Europe, time has been a central resource under negotiation. Focusing on a local community that was considered a "model" in the socialist ...period, the author explores a variety of state-sponsored and unofficial pasts - history, folklore, and tradition - and shows how they "fit" together in everyday life. During the socialist period, the past was a central dimension of local politics and village identity. Post-socialist development has demanded a revaluation of temporality - as well as public and private space. This has led to fundamental changes in social life and political relations, reduced local resources, threatened village identity and transformed political activity through the emergence of new political elites. While the full implications of this process are still being played out, this study underlines some of the fundamental processes prevalent across eastern Europe that help explain widespread ambiguity vis-B-vis post-socialist reform.
Bulgarien Kostakeva, Maria
MGG Online,
08/2021
Reference
I. Historischer ÜberblickDie Entwicklung Bulgariens im Laufe der Jahrhunderte ist durch die besondere geographische Lage des Landes im Kreuzweg verschiedener Kulturen geprägt. 450 v.Chr. gründete der ......
Modern humans appeared in Europe by at least 45,000 years ago
, but the extent of their interactions with Neanderthals, who disappeared by about 40,000 years ago
, and their relationship to the ...broader expansion of modern humans outside Africa are poorly understood. Here we present genome-wide data from three individuals dated to between 45,930 and 42,580 years ago from Bacho Kiro Cave, Bulgaria
. They are the earliest Late Pleistocene modern humans known to have been recovered in Europe so far, and were found in association with an Initial Upper Palaeolithic artefact assemblage. Unlike two previously studied individuals of similar ages from Romania
and Siberia
who did not contribute detectably to later populations, these individuals are more closely related to present-day and ancient populations in East Asia and the Americas than to later west Eurasian populations. This indicates that they belonged to a modern human migration into Europe that was not previously known from the genetic record, and provides evidence that there was at least some continuity between the earliest modern humans in Europe and later people in Eurasia. Moreover, we find that all three individuals had Neanderthal ancestors a few generations back in their family history, confirming that the first European modern humans mixed with Neanderthals and suggesting that such mixing could have been common.
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