Images of Greeks and Albanians in the 19th Century European Painting (original) (raw)
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Turkish Yoke or Pax Ottomana. The Reception of Ottoman Heritage in the Balkan History and Culture, ed. K. Popek, M. Skrzeszewska, Kraków: Nowa Strona 2019, ss. 202. („Zeszyty Naukowe Towarzystwa Doktorantów UJ” 2019, vol. 24, no. 1, ISSN 299-2383) | The articles collected in the volume present the history and culture of the Ottoman Balkans from the arrival of the Turks to the Peninsula through the 19th until 20th century and the present reception of the Ottoman heritage in the region. Nevyan Mitev writes about the Bulgarian resistance against the Turkish invasion in the 14th and 15th century. The same period is the topic of the next article written by Krzysztof Dobosz, who tried to answer the question “Why were the Balkans so important for the Ottomans in the first half of the 15th century?” We moved to the 19th century, which is opened by text by Aleksandar Zlatanov, who presents the project of the Christian army of Sultan led by a Polish writer, political agent, and renegade Michał Czajkowski – Sadık Paşa. Mateusz Seroka analyses the relation between Croatian and Bosnian Muslim elites in the 19th century. We move ones again to the Eastern Balkans to see the effects of the collapse of the Ottoman rules and Muslim mass migrations on the Bulgarian countryside after 1878, which is analyzed by Krzysztof Popek. In the next article, Monika Skrzeszewska presents the stereotypes of poturice in the Serbian nationalistic discourse from the 19th to the 1920s. Agata Pawlina takes us in a little different reality of the “Turkish Five” – a group of composers whose works set out the direction for modern Western-style Turkish art music at the beginning of the 20th century. Paweł Michalak focuses on the image of Turkey in the public discourse of interwar Yugoslavia. Piotr Mirocha analysis the semiotics of the Ottoman bridge, focusing on the works of the Yugoslavian Nobel laureate – Ivo Andrić. The last but not least article by Angelika Kosieradzka is a reflection about the place of the Post-Ottoman architecture in the contemporary spaces of Bulgarian cities.
VISUAL CULTURE OF THE BALKANS: STATE OF RESEARCH AND FURTHER DIRECTIONS, Belgrade 2014, pp. 1-52.
VISUAL CULTURE OF THE BALKANS: STATE OF RESEARCH AND FURTHER DIRECTIONS In recent decades there has been a significant change in observing art and culture of the Balkans. One of the current issues is the study of visual culture of the Balkans. While in the Balkan countries the national historiographies still dominate, it is becoming quite obvious that the common social, political, artistic and cultural frameworks influence the creation of all forms of cultural life in entire Balkans. The Ottoman Empire, in which had lived majority of Balkan nations; formation of a Yugoslav state, as well as the similarity of political systems in Southeastern Europe all together have resulted in establishing a common Balkan culture. In these processes, visual culture has had a prominent place because it contributed to the creation of private and collective identity, and represents one of the most powerful communication tools between different ethnic, religious and social communities. Nenad Makuljević Department of Art History Faculty of Philosophy Belgrade University
This book examines the de/re/construction process of the image of the Balkans as a space embedded in the European discourse in different media from 1830 to the present days. According to the author, the Balkans have served as a stereotypical media paradigm for a simulacrum of particular western and eastern phantasms. Those phantasms had and continue to have effects on the process of recreating new cultural and political concepts of identity and space in the Balkans. Zimmermann analyses literature, travelogues, paintings and scientific writing to guide us between the different poles of the creation of predominantly negative and secondary Balkan stereotypes. As the Great Ottoman Empire slowly dissolved by the mid-19th century, two of the Great Powers (Russia and Austro-Hungary) saw an opportunity to increase their imperial influences. However, they discovered small, corrupt and bankrupt states at odds with each other. Soon this region would be called the Balkans Powder Keg. It is interesting to learn that the initial interest by both Western and Eastern imperial states were not the Balkans but the liberated Greece. However, for the travellers who met Greek liberation fighters, the fighters did not mirror the pre-constructed stereotype of Hellenic civilization, but were instead perceived as disorganized combatants and robbers. Hence, Pan German and Pan Slavic antagonistic discourses created a stereotype of fatalistic, primitive, devious and bloodthirsty Balkans. For instance, Alexander Sergejewitsch Puschkin and Michał Czajkowski sent their fictional characters to disappear into the Balkans void. When Bosnia became part of Austro-Hungarian Protectorate, the image of the Balkans slowly altered through e.g. travelogues, doctors' anecdotes and Freud's visit to " a space beyond the pleasure principle " , where pathological eroticism unites with thanatological phantasm. Later in the book Zimmermann links such Balkan phantasms with Baudrillard's theory of simulacra hyper-reality and video installations of Marina Abramović.2 The longest chapter is devoted to the analysis of Yugoslav identity creation under Tito and is well-founded on abundant media materials. As a reaction to the 1948 conflict between Tito and Stalin, the creators of Yugoslav identity tried to counter accusations of being primitive and backward by turning them into an affirmative multicultural model. Miroslav Krleža and Otto Bihalji-Merin, the leading intellectuals of that time, tried to construct Yugoslav identity based on a heretic sect of Bogomils, medieval religious dualists, who did not belong either to the Catholic or Orthodox Church. They converted to Islam by the mid-15th century and anticipated Bosnian multiculturalism. Bogomil symbolism reflects Yugoslav neither West nor East oriented religious-belief as well as Yugoslav position being related neither to Western Capitalism nor Eastern Communism. Zimmermann aptly succeeds in explaining how the ideas and concepts used to create this original, positive, and alternative image of Yugoslavia transmuted and then created the fertile ground for the break-up of Yugoslavia. The focus on peoples' folk art (e.g. Bogomil tombstones, medieval Macedonian frescos, naïve paintings, autodidacts, archaism, etc.) turned in the case of Serbia into nationalistic populism through the reawakening of the epics about Kosovo. Zimmermann analyses the transformation of the Kosovo myth that was used for the creation of the first Yugoslav project in detail. For instance, Ivan Meštrović's model for the Kosovo Tempel from 1915 was converted into a nationalistic Serbian propaganda instrument in the late 1980s. The author presents how the newly constructed, affirmative third way ended up in death and destruction. Subsequently the last chapter deals with thanatological phantasms and its post-Bosnian war (1992-1995) implications on visual media (self)perception that was caught between reality and fiction. Zimmermann's primary focus is on the influence of foreign images on the construction of identity among Slavic people who lived on the territory of the former SFRY. The author succeeds in presenting the Balkans' duality in a multidisciplinary way (literature, history, art history, memory and media studies), while her art-historic background (her first doctorate is in art history) offers the reader a superb analysis of various media examples of " inbetweenness " , such as Danatti all'inferno/The Damned Cast into Hell by Luca Signorelli as a source of Freud's simulacrum or Ron Haviv photo from Bijeljina in 1992 that inspired/provoked many artists and philosophers to write about it.
Selling the Otherness -the Stereotyped Image of the Balkan in Serbian Art of the Early 2000s
Contemporary Southeastern Europe 2024, 11 (2) Special issue: Visual Studies in and on Southeast Europe: Representation, Power, Memory and Gender in Photography and Film / Ethnologia Balkanica, Vol. 24 , 2024
The image of countries once constituting Yugoslavia, imposed by the West, was affected during the period of the dissolution in the 90s. This region was soon (again) perceived as a barbarian space, exotic and far away from civilized Europe, while the search for identity, the crash of value systems, and inflation influenced life within parted territories. Due to political circumstances, the art scene in Serbia was completely isolated, while simultaneously, the idea of art was standardized and shaped by the perspective of economically powerful Western countries. In this paper we will follow the generation of Serbian contemporary artists starting their career at the very beginning of the 21st century when the country finally stopped being in isolation. To become visible in the West, Serbian artists appropriated the image of exotic Other from the Balkans and played with it. Combining constitutive elements of Western art institutions with traditional Balkan cultural elements, these artists created an image the West wanted to buy. We will finally analyze if, when criticizing through the appropriation of the imposed gaze in their work, Serbian contemporary artists really succeeded in moving away from the Western image of the Balkans or simply supported it more.