‘If you are a girl, stay at home’ - an ethnographic examination of female social engagement from the rural 19th century to contemporary political protests in Macedonia

Balkan history has been presented, in gender terms, as a history of oppressed women, stark patriarchy and male domination. This narrative has rarely been questioned, its echoes still lingering in the corridors of those disciplines that helped its creation and promotion. Being one of them, ethnology can, and should play a central role in the deconstruction of the role of women in the so-called traditional cultures, thus establishing a potential continuity between their past and their present struggles.

MILITARY ENCOUNTERS AND DIPLOMATIC AFFAIRS IN THE NORTH BALKANS DURING THE REIGNS OF ANASTASIUS AND JUSTINIAN

Balkan history in the late 5th to 6th c. A.D. period is viewed by scholars as, at best, a respite from a series of devastating barbarian raids and, at worst, as another stepping-stone on the path to the inevitable loss of imperial control over the region. This paper redresses these perceptions by portraying the reigns of Anastasius and Justinian as a period in which the Romans/Byzantines were taking the initiative and ‘winning’ in their military and diplomatic dealings with the barbarians. These emperors devoted considerable political energy and economic and military resources to restoring imperial military authority in the northern Balkans.

“Yugoslavia in 1989 and after”: a comment

V.P. (Chip) Gagnon, Jr. (2004, 2010) has provided a useful corrective to what he has called the “Myth of Ethnic War,” the notion that what was Yugoslavia was torn apart by primeval communal hatreds. He is not alone in this. Maria Todorova's variation on Edward Said's “Orientalism” take on the same question, and edited volumes put together by Dušan Bjelić and Obrad Savić and by Raymond Detrez and Pieter Plas have also attacked the problem posed when public intellectuals and politicians paint a crude caricature of Balkan history. The readers of this journal no doubt have their own favorites when it comes to the sport of bashing this particular myth.

Reflecting on Illyrian helmets

The so-called Illyrian helmets, with a rectangular opening for the face, are a frequent topic in archaeological literature for several reasons. They are distributed over a large territory - on the Balkan Peninsula and beyond, so many archaeologists from various countries were involved in their study. Then there is the great diversity of forms, where each type or subtype represents a theme in itself posing various questions, and finally new Illyrian helmets appear all the time, even in regions far from their main concentration areas, or with unfamiliar details, demanding new analyses and explanations. The author discusses their division into types and subtypes, chronology, variants, and comes to the conclusion that a proper study of this theme will be possible only when various aspects of their appearance, including ancient written sources as well as the material culture of this period in particular regions, are taken into consideration because of their complex and versatile role in ancient Balkan history.

Dimitri Dimitrievich Obolensky, 1918–2001

By the time that he completed his fiftieth year, Dimitri Obolensky had been Professor of Russian and Balkan History at the University of Oxford for nearly seven years and had achieved distinction in a number of fields. But it was a work then in progress that drew together his literary and historical talents to spectacular effect, offering a new vision of the development of East European history across a thousand-year span. A well-paced narrative and reliable work of reference within a clear conceptual framework, The Byzantine Commonwealth is likely to remain indispensable for anyone interested in exploring the pre-modern history of Europe east of Venice and the Vistula. The distinctive texture of the book not only derives from its blend of careful scholarship and bold advocacy of an idea. There is also a tension, well contained, between the scrupulous presentation of the facts and possible interpretations arising from them and passionate recall of the religious affiliations and values that once had underlain eastern Christendom.

The Pomaks: A Religious Minority in the Balkans

A religious minority of Bulgarian-speaking Muslims, the Pomaks now live dispersed in five Balkan countries: Bulgaria, Macedonia, Greece, Albania and Turkey. A living legacy of the complexities of Balkan history, the Pomaks represent a perfect case to study interstate political intricacies around the unsettled identity of small inter-communal groups. An examination of this community should enrich the knowledge about the nature of Balkan Islam that stands on the periphery of the Arab-Iranian-Turkic Islamic heartland, the three peoples who carried the major burden of Islamic history.