Irina Gigova
College of Charleston, History, Faculty Member
- History, Nationalism, History and Memory, Balkan Studies, Intellectual and cultural history, Eastern European history, and 15 moremodern Bulgaria, History of History, Urban History, Modernization, Bulgarian history, Sociology of Intellectuals, Nostalgia, Bulgaria, Post-Communism, Bulgarian Literature, Sofia, Women Intellectuas, Ancient History, Cultural History, and History of Communismedit
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except turn to the courts in Valetta, Rome and Venice in search of compensation and justice. And in those courts, and among the vast records that have survived, Greene finds an intriguing conundrum which faced Catholic lawyers and judges:... more
except turn to the courts in Valetta, Rome and Venice in search of compensation and justice. And in those courts, and among the vast records that have survived, Greene finds an intriguing conundrum which faced Catholic lawyers and judges: how to deal with a Christian subject of the Muslim Sultan, especially when the latter insisted that his subjects be protected, regardless of their religion. Many of the cases that Greene studies show how the Greeks occupied ‘an intermediary position because they were at one and the same time both Christians and Ottoman subjects’ (115). This unique position establishes the unique importance of the court records, because neither Muslims nor Jews could appeal to legal justice in the manner that the Orthodox did. For Greene, the situation of Christians being plundered by fellow Christians undermines the simplistic division of the Mediterranean along religious lines and demonstrates that, while religion was never forgotten, in the world of commerce and law a new, ‘secular’ (9) order was beginning to emerge. It was an order of trade and pillage, ransom and exchange, which made Algiers similar to Livorno. Greene ranges in her research across numerous archives and languages, showing how this new order was emerging from the midst of conflicts not only between Christians and Muslims, but also among Venetians and Maltese and Turks. Greene supports her argument with a wealth of examples from the courts and from naval and ecclesiastical records. Taking into account changes occurring in western Europe, she discusses the impact of the Counter-Reformation on Catholic naval zeal, the beginnings of the Protestant/English penetration of the Mediterranean, the seizure of Tangier in 1662, and the decentralization in the Ottoman administration, which opened the door for Greeks and other minorities to take part in sea trade and in European consular activity (especially as translators and intermediaries). Although Greene relies most heavily on legal sources, the narrative she weaves is engaging and widely informative. The book moves from the courts to the ships, and from pirates to clergymen, and from the dungeons of captives in Valetta to the corridors of financial power in Venice. Legal cases are studied for details about the places of origin of merchants, the cargo in which they traded, the currency they used, their family and business associations, and the arguments that they made in their suits for compensation. But perhaps most strikingly, Greene’s analysis of the cases shows that ‘the Orthodox Christians had their protector in the person of the Ottoman sultan’ (76).
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Remembering Communism: Private and Public Recollections of Lived Experience in Southeast Europe. Edited by Maria Todorova, Augusta Dimou, and Stefan Troebst. Leipzig Studies on the History and Culture of East-Central Europe, volume 1. Edited by Christian Lübke and Stefan Troebst.Budapest: Central...more
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After the Soviet invasion in August 1968, it seemed like Czechoslovaks and Soviets would never be friends again. Angry Czechoslovaks called Soviet tourists “occupiers” and “fascists” and vandalized their buses (161). State officials... more
After the Soviet invasion in August 1968, it seemed like Czechoslovaks and Soviets would never be friends again. Angry Czechoslovaks called Soviet tourists “occupiers” and “fascists” and vandalized their buses (161). State officials refused to show Soviet films in local theaters and authorized the screening of pre-feature shorts that supported the reforms and criticized the USSR. Membership in the Czechoslovak-Soviet friendship society collapsed; even its leaders stopped communicating with their Soviet counterparts. But the friendship project did not die. The reason, Applebaum argues, was that friendship had become essential component of Soviet-Czechoslovak relations. Normalization—the process of restoring calm and order after the upheavals of 1968—required maintaining the friendship project. On the surface, the effort worked. By 1977, membership in the Czechoslovak-Soviet friendship society had actually increased by 50%. Participation, however, was less a sign of enthusiasm than a badge of loyalty. Unlike some accounts of socialist internationalism that stress its failures, Applebaum emphasizes the ways in which the friendship project succeeded. The friendship project, she argues, was a technique of empire, but one that altered the texture of everyday life for both sides. Czechoslovaks and Soviet citizens may not really have been friends, but Applebaum’s excellent book shows us how they occupied a common socialist world, one that they built together.
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Looking at Bulgarian society and cultural life of the first half of the 1900s, this study scrutinizes a common belief in the high public esteem reserved for poets and writers in eastern Europe. It demonstrates that the creators of... more
Looking at Bulgarian society and cultural life of the first half of the 1900s, this study scrutinizes a common belief in the high public esteem reserved for poets and writers in eastern Europe. It demonstrates that the creators of literature (and the national arts in general) occupied a precarious position in a society without a sustainable cultural market. The predicament of Bulgarian writers, however, was that of many European literati in early 1900s competing for readers’ attention with a rising mass culture. Placing Bulgarian writers in a broader interwar framework, this article explores the various non-literary strategies they pursued in affirming the public value of national literature. In the process, it suggests that the lore of “the writer as a national hero” was the deliberate work of social actors seeking to correct an unsatisfying reality and not an expression of an organic relationship between nation and writers (and intellectuals more broadly).
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This article reconstructs the history of the Bulgarian section of the International PEN. The PEN (initially standing for Poet, Essayists and Novelists) remains a global society of writers, founded in London in 1921, with the intent of... more
This article reconstructs the history of the Bulgarian section of the International PEN. The PEN (initially standing for Poet, Essayists and Novelists) remains a global society of writers, founded in London in 1921, with the intent of promoting international understanding and higher social standing for writers and literature. The Bulgarian PEN was formed in 1926 by authors seeking to break the international isolation of Bulgaria, a former member of the Central Powers. The International PEN enabled Bulgarian literati to engage as non-state agents in cultural diplomacy of their own and to expand their intellectual and professional networks. Based on a variety of sources, the article analyzes the hopes, real limitations, and actual achievements of the Bulgarian PEN until its closing in 1941. It uses the organization’s interwar history to examine the workings in eastern Europe of what Akira Iriye called “cultural internationalism.” It demonstrates that while global literary and cultural...
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Remembering Communism: Private and Public Recollections of Lived Experience in Southeast Europe. Edited by Maria Todorova, Augusta Dimou, and Stefan Troebst. Leipzig Studies on the History and Culture of East-Central Europe, volume 1. Edited by Christian Lübke and Stefan Troebst.Budapest: Central...more
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Remembering Communism: Private and Public Recollections of Lived Experience in Southeast Europe. Edited by Maria Todorova, Augusta Dimou, and Stefan Troebst. Leipzig Studies on the History and Culture of East-Central Europe, volume 1. Edited by Christian Lübke and Stefan Troebst.Budapest: Central...more
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This article reconstructs the history of the Bulgarian section of the International PEN. The PEN (initially standing for Poet, Essayists and Novelists) remains a global society of writers, founded in London in 1921, with the intent of... more
This article reconstructs the history of the Bulgarian section of the International PEN. The PEN (initially standing for Poet, Essayists and Novelists) remains a global society of writers, founded in London in 1921, with the intent of promoting international understanding and higher social standing for writers and literature. The Bulgarian PEN was formed in 1926 by authors seeking to break the international isolation of Bulgaria, a former member of the Central Powers. The International PEN enabled Bulgarian literati to engage as non-state agents in cultural diplomacy of their own and to expand their intellectual and professional networks. Based on a variety of sources, the article analyzes the hopes, real limitations, and actual achievements of the Bulgarian PEN until its closing in 1941. It uses the organization’s interwar history to examine the workings in eastern Europe of what Akira Iriye called “cultural internationalism.” It demonstrates that while global literary and cultural relations remained inherently unequal, as discussed by Pascale Casanova, the International PEN did afford opportunities to smaller nations and literatures to establish regional and global contacts and become integrated in continental literary networks.
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Looking at Bulgarian society and cultural life of the first half of the 1900s, this study scrutinizes a common belief in the high public esteem reserved for poets and writers in eastern Europe. It demonstrates that the creators of... more
Looking at Bulgarian society and cultural life of the first half of the 1900s, this study scrutinizes a common belief in the high public esteem reserved for poets and writers in eastern Europe. It demonstrates that the creators of literature (and the national arts in general) occupied a precarious position in a society without a sustainable cultural market. The predicament of Bulgarian writers, however, was that of many European literati in early 1900s competing for readers’ attention with a rising mass culture. Placing Bulgarian writers in a broader interwar framework, this article explores the various non-literary strategies they pursued in affirming the public value of national literature. In the process, it suggests that the lore of “the writer as a national hero” was the deliberate work of social actors seeking to correct an unsatisfying reality and not an expression of an organic relationship between nation and writers (and intellectuals more broadly).
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Abstract: This dissertation explores the experience of a little known cohort of interwar Bulgarian poets, novelists and critics at the intersection of two historical periodsthe authoritarian 1930s and communist-dominated 1950s. As a... more
Abstract: This dissertation explores the experience of a little known cohort of interwar Bulgarian poets, novelists and critics at the intersection of two historical periodsthe authoritarian 1930s and communist-dominated 1950s. As a study of intellectual life through the prism of the ...
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The article inquires why the Allied bombing of Sofia in the winter of 1943/1944, the most devastating trauma to hit Bulgaria's capital city, left no permanent mark on public and historical memory. It reconstructs the little-known events... more
The article inquires why the Allied bombing of Sofia in the winter of 1943/1944, the most devastating trauma to hit Bulgaria's capital city, left no permanent mark on public and historical memory. It reconstructs the little-known events of early 1944 and then analyzes how specific social and cultural factors combined with political and international realities to delineate the boundaries within which the bombing could be collectively remembered and commemorated. The author argues for the importance of studies of the Allied bombing campaign in Eastern Europe for a proper understanding of World War II and the postwar history of the continent.
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This article untangles the history of the Bulgarian capital city from that of the state to analyze how the development of Sofia between 1934 and 1944 embodied the achievements and weaknesses of midcentury Bulgaria. During this period,... more
This article untangles the history of the Bulgarian capital city from that of the state to analyze how the development of Sofia between 1934 and 1944 embodied the achievements and weaknesses of midcentury Bulgaria. During this period, Sofia embarked on an intensive project of urban planning and renewal. Municipal leaders and intellectuals aspired to transform the cluttered and chaotic city into a modern and attractive “European” capital on the one side and the heart of national existence on the other. This bifurcated vision of the nation—rooted in the past yet forward and Westward looking—failed to convince Sofia’s growing citizenry to stay and defend their city during the Allied bombing campaign of late 1943/early 1944. The wartime fate of this Axis capital revealed the shortcomings of the Bulgarian state and the nationalism it promoted. When residents did return to the bombed city, it was not out of patriotic duty but because it still appeared more “European,” more “modern” than any other place in the country. Therefore, one could interpret Sofia’s rapid and continued growth as a popular rejection of the traditions of Bulgarian rural existence and a desire for a different type of nation: convenient, democratic, dynamic, and modern. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]
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Presentation of my book project at the 10th Bulgarian-American conference ''Beyond the borders'', which took place in Sofia on June 27-29, 2016.