Cultural History

Με αφορμή την άτυπη επέτειο εβδομήντα ενός χρόνων από την ιστορική διάλεξη του Μάνου Χατζιδάκι για τη «θέσιν και ερμηνείαν του σύγχρονου λαϊκού τραγουδιού», στο Θέατρο «Αλίκη», διοργανωμένη από το Θέατρο Τέχνης, στις 31 Ιανουαρίου 1949, γίνεται μια σύντομη κριτική παρουσίαση της προσφοράς του συνθέτη σε ό,τι αφορά την αναγνώριση και τον εκδημοκρατισμό τού -αρχικά παραβατικού και περιθωριακού- ρεμπέτικου και μεταπολεμικού λαϊκού τραγουδιού.
Η προσφορά του Χατζιδάκι προς αυτήν την κατεύθυνση εξετάζεται και αποτιμάται ως «πολιτική» πράξη, με κοινωνικές και πολιτισμικές συνέπειες, ενός συνθέτη με πολλές καλλιτεχνικές ταυτότητες: Έλληνας και παγκόσμιος, συνθέτης και ποιητής, παραδοσιακός και νεωτεριστής, αστός και λαϊκός. Πολιτισμικά δίπολα, που αντανακλούν τον νεο-ελληνικό πολιτισμό και την ελληνική μουσική παράδοση (λαϊκό υπαίθρου, λαϊκό-αστικό τραγούδι), την οποία βίωσε, μελέτησε, αναπαρήγαγε και εν τέλει κληροδότησε ο Μάνος Χατζιδάκις στις επόμενες γενιές συνθετών και ακροατών, πάντα μέσα από ένα πνεύμα αυτο-ερμηνείας και επιλογής.

Exhibition catalogue for 'As Handsome as the Chance Encounter' at RAM Galleri, 27 February-29 March 2020.

Content:
-Foreword, by Joakim Borda-Pedreira
-As Handsome as a Comparison, by Johanna Zanon
-Undressing Les Chants de Maldoror: from the rags of the Creator to the Riches of Mervyn, by Johanna Zanon
-Les Chants de Maldoror (excerpts), by Comte de Lautréamont
-In the Footsteps of Maldoror and Mervyn in Paris, 1869
-A Material Re-enactment of the Sixth Canto in the 21st Century, by Johanna Zanon
-Biographies

Until recently finding stone rollers next to ancient wine presses was considered a rather rare phenomenon. Even in the few instances when scholars mentioned such rollers, they deemed them to be an element unrelated to the wine press and the wine-making process and suggested they have a function that is not associated with the work of a wine press.
It seems the first one to deal with these stone rollers, indeed the kind that is specific to the Carmel, was L. Oliphant in 1883. He described the remains at H. Sumaqa on Mt. Carmel and wrote:

“I often found near these mills huge limestone rollers about three feet in diameter and seven feet long. On the sides of these were four vertical lines of sunk grooves, four or five grooves in each line. Taking 2.7 as the specific gravity of the stone, they must have weighed about two tons each. What their functions were, or whether they had anything to do with the olive-crushing process, I am at a loss to conjecture” (Oliphant 1887: 95).


Approximately 120 years later E. Netzer published installations used to produce date wine that he exposed in Jericho. He described a roller that was found in one of the installations as evidence that corroborates his conclusion that this was not a press for manufacturing grape wine because “a stone that is meant for crushing or pressing has no place in wine presses used to produce grape wine” (Netzer 2002: 73).
These two quotations, separated by 120 years, are sufficient to illustrate to what extent stone rollers were considered unusual and foreign to the landscape of ancient agricultural installations in the Land of Israel. It was against this background that we were surprised to discover, during study trips we conducted in southern Mount Hebron, a series of wine presses from the Roman period in the region of Susiya, in each of which there were a number of large stone rollers (Amit and Baruch 2007; Figs. 1-7). It was clear that these rollers are part of the wine press installations and are connected to the process of wine production. They were intended for crushing the grape skins and extracting the rest of the must from the fruit after treading on it by foot.

From a standpoint of the history of the research we should begin the discussion with the grooved stone rollers of the Carmel, which are a phenomenon unto themselves. It is possible that this phenomenon and its scope in that limited region is what diverted attention from the general picture of rollers in the other regions of the country and have delayed their study until now. The 19th cent. explorers of the Land of Israel have already expressed their opinion regarding the phenomenon on the Carmel. More than anyone else L. Oliphant, whose quotation is presented above, dealt with these rollers.
The largest concentration of such grooved columns (c. 30 items) is located at H. Sumaqa on Mount Carmel. The excavator of the site, S. Dar, discusses the grooved columns in the context of the production installations at the site and its vicinity, as well as at H. Raqit (Dar 1999: 77-94, 145-174; Dar 2004: 85-86). Dar surveyed a dozen installations which he refers to as “workshops” and excavated five of them. He dated them to the Late Roman period. The workshops where the grooved columns were used are different than the wine and oil presses that were found at the site and in its vicinity, although some of the components that are common to each of the agricultural production installations are somewhat similar. Because of this similarity Dar (1999: 77) first rejected the proposal put forth by R. Frankel and E. Ayalon (1988: 43) that these are wine presses. He also rejected his original suggestion that these are tanning installations because of the absence of any resemblance to known installations that were used for working skins. By way of elimination Dar proposed that these workshops were used to produce dye from the vegetation that grows on Mt. Carmel; however, he does admit the topic is still open to further discussion and even mentions the possibility that they were used for grape pressing (Dar 2004: 86).


In our search for parallels of the phenomenon, we were surprised to discover that the distribution of the wine presses with rollers is much more extensive than it seemed until now. It turns out that wine presses of this type are located in relatively dense concentrations and in defined regions that cover most parts of the settled country.

This article tends to shed some more light on historical events which marked the relations between Germans and Serbs from the early Middle Ages to the present day. The very choice of facts and their brief presentation in this paper is no accidental, because it aims to create as realistic picture as possible for the reader about the cultural-political conflict between the Germanic peoples and the Serbs - the corps of Slavic nations which emerged after the 7th century by separating from the Serbs (initially by natural and later by forced ethnogenesis). Their civilizational differences and opposing geopolitical aspirations will not be reconciled in the foreseeable future, and that is why we can only speak of the different intensity of these conflicts, but certainly not of their cessation. From the data provided here, the one can see exactly the depth and true scale of this centuries-old conflict (which in a literal sense, is never interrupted). Ac-cordingly, for the reasons stated, understanding the essence of German-Serbian relations throughout history can lead us to get a much clearer view of the present geopolitical position of the Serbs as well as their perspective into the future.

Rui Gonçalves, um jurista, publicou em 1557 Dos privilégios e prerrogativas que o género feminino tem por direito comum e Ordenações do reino mais que o género masculino. Estruturou a obra em duas parte. Na primeira, ocupando um terço do texto, expõe “algumas virtudes em que as mulheres foram iguais e precederam aos homens” e aí, tal como o Dr. João de Barros em 1540, refuta perentoriamente a propalada inferioridade intelectual e moral das mulheres. Para os cultores e apreciadores de Literatura e de História da Cultura e das Representações, ou para o leitor atual que não busca os meandros jurídicos da época, é a secção mais interessante do livro, mas para o autor não seria mais do que um prelúdio ao fulcro do seu trabalho, na segunda parte, que é uma aturada sistematização das leis e práticas que enquadravam juridicamente as mulheres portuguesas. Temos assim em mãos um compêndio jurídico e não uma obra literária e focar a atenção analítica e interpretativa na parte I, negligenciando a outra, pode ser esclarecedor dos interesses do crítico, mas não dos do autor estudado. As normas que Rui Gonçalves exaustiva e morosamente compilou – que não são prerrogativas ou privilégios das mulheres em relação aos homens, uma impossibilidade jurídica – configuram-se como instrumentos de que se podia lançar mão em situações práticas para tornar a vida humana menos injusta e mais digna.
Nesta apresentação do autor e da obra procurar-se-á também clarificar o que era o direito comum e o direito territorial e quais eram os regimes sucessório comum e de bens no casamento (ie, os direitos patrimoniais das mulheres enquanto herdeiras e enquanto esposas) vigentes no Antigo Regime português porque, com frequência, são mal entendidos.

Le présent article fait partie d’une recherche en cours sur la transition des sociétés de l’Europe du Sud-Est : celle-ci se traduit par l’institutionnalisation de la culture folklorique ou populaire de la fin du XIXe siècle aux années 1940 pour la formation d’une culture nationale. Dans les pays balkaniques, la notion de culture de masse correspond à la transformation des sociétés après la guerre et notamment après les années 1950 et 1960. Pendant cette période, l’évolution de la culture populaire et la consommation de ses produits n’étaient pas les mêmes pour les sociétés de la région. De fait, l’examen d’une petite partie des productions des Balkans montre que la région étudiée ne partage pas les caractéristiques de l’Occident ni avant ni après les années 1940. A l’exception peut-être de la Grèce, où la circulation du roman-feuilleton à partir des années 1840-1850 connait un succès remarquable auprès du public lettré, les sociétés balkaniques restent largement rurales jusqu’aux années 1940. Le passage de la culture populaire urbaine des années 1920-1940 à la culture de masse dans les années 1950-1960 n’est pas le même pour les pays du bloc soviétique et les pays du bloc occidental. L’évolution de l’industrie culturelle en Grèce et en Turquie nous offre une deuxième piste de recherche dans deux sociétés qui sont en train de se développer mais où les traditions en matière de mœurs restent très vives.

The Anastenaria festival is celebrated by descendants of refugees from the village of Kōsti in eastern Thrace, now in Bulgaria, who settled in Greek Macedonia by 1924, after the Balkan Wars. The festival is dedicated to saints Kōnstantinos and his mother, Elenē, depicted on holy icons brought from Kōsti. Participants’ primary focus is an ecstatic dance over red-hot coals while possessed by the saint. Proscribed by official Orthodox religion, it was formerly conducted in secret. Though the Church still considers the festival a combination of paganism and Christianity, tension between official religion and the Anastenarides has eased. Based on fieldwork in two villages inhabited by both Anastenarides and other ‘indigenous’ Greeks, this article explores how ritual spaces of the Anastenarides replicate the original space in Kōsti. Belonging to ‘former days,’ cultic practices constitute an ancestor cult linked to their original home, the ‘Thracians’ celebrating their ‘Kōstilidian’ identity through religious rituals.

Źródła włoskiej proweniencji dotyczące historii Polski, w tym przede wszystkim materiały wytworzone przez nuncjaturę apostolską, od bardzo dawna są obecne i efektywnie wykorzystywane przez rodzimą historiografię. Na większą skalę zaczęło się to-przypomnijmy-jeszcze w czasach oświecenia. Chęć, a zarazem intelektualna potrzeba napisania dziejów ojczystych na nowo, już wedle naukowych reguł, skłoniła Adama Naruszewicza i jego współpracowników, z Janem Albertrandim na czele, do poszukiwania w Italii nieznanych, a w każdym razie niewykorzystywanych dotąd materiałów. Notabene, tamtejsze źródła stawały się stopniowo coraz bardziej dostępne dzięki podejmowanym pracom inwentaryzacyjnym, które symbolizować może dzieło Giuseppe Garampiego, autora fundamentalnego inwentarza archiwaliów watykańskich; inwentarza, z którego korzystają także współcześni badacze. Wiek XIX, kiedy w realiach zaborczych wymiar patriotyczny działań edytorskich i inwentaryzacyjnych stał się jeszcze bardziej wyrazisty, przyniósł ogromny postęp w zakresie identyfikowania i wykorzystywania tekstów źródłowych włoskiej proweniencji. Mamy tu na myśli przede wszystkim dokonania Sebastiano Ciampiego i Jana Ursyna Niemcewicza oraz-nieco później-Aleksandra Przeździeckiego, Augustyna Theinera i Erazma Rykaczewskiego. W latach osiemdziesiątych XIX w., to jest zaraz po udostępnieniu badaczom Archiwum Watykańskiego, swoje kwerendy rozpoczął tam warszawski historyk Teodor Wierzbowski, a przede wszystkim-z inspiracji i początkowo pod przewodem Stanisława Smolki-zorganizowano tzw. ekspedycje rzymskie krakowskiej Akademii Umiejętności. W ramach tej inicjatywy kolejne grupy, a nawet pokolenia znakomitych badaczy eksplorowały, również w okresie II Rzeczypospolitej, włoskie kolekcje rękopiśmienne-ze zbiorami watykańskimi na czele. W efekcie powstawały kolejne teki odpisów źródłowych oraz wydawnictwa-reprezentujące coraz wyższy poziom edytorski. Powojenne generacje starały się to dzieło kontynuować, głównie jednak na emigracji.