Through Bulgarian and Ottoman documents, marginalia, travelers' accounts, art, and numerous secondary documents, the seventeenth century--considered by historians, as the nadir of Bulgarian national history--is examined as to the question of the Slavic society's continued existence despite centuries of foreign political, social and spiritual domination by the Ottoman Empire. The first part outlines the consequences for Bulgarian history of the Muslim Ottoman conquest. The second details the nature of the culture and the forms of expression. The third part consists of an overview of documented seventeenth century Bulgarian Orthodox expression.

This volume offers the first comprehensive collection of medieval Bulgarian sources in English translation. It includes literary works, documents, inscriptions on stone and metal, graffiti, as well as coins, seals and medallions, produced during the Middle Ages by and for Bulgarians of all walks of life.

Ivan N. Petrov’s The Development of the Bulgarian Literary Language: From Incunabula to First Grammars, Late Fifteenth–Early Seventeenth Century examines the history of the first printed Cyrillic books and their role in the development of the Bulgarian literary language. In the literary culture of the Southern Slavs, especially the Bulgarians, the period that began at the end of the fifteenth century and covered the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries is often seen as a foreshadowing of the pre-national era of modern times. In particular, the centuries-old manuscript tradition was gradually replaced by the Cyrillic printed book, which—after the incunabula of Krakow and Montenegro—was published in such centers as Târgoviște, Prague, Venice, Serbian monasteries, Vilnius, Moscow, Zabłudów, Lviv, Ostroh, and many others. Petrov shows how the study of old Slavic prints is closely linked to the processes that determined the emergence of modern literary languages in the Slavia Orthodoxa area, including the influence of the liturgical Church Slavonic language shared by the Orthodox Slavs, which was increasingly standardized and codified at that time. The perspective of a language historian brings new light to the complex and multidimensional issues of this important transitional period of Slavic history and culture.

Bulgaria is a country of extraordinary beauty, with high, wild mountains and gentle valleys, and with picturesque cities and idyllic villages. It’s bordered by Romania, Serbia Macedonia, Greece, Turkey, and the Black Sea. After many years of communist rule, Bulgaria adopted a democratic constitution and began the process of moving toward political democracy and a market economy while combating inflation, unemployment, corruption, and crime. The country joined NATO in 2004 and the EU in 2007. This third edition of Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria covers its history through a chronology, an introductory essay, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 700 cross-referenced entries on important personalities, politics, economy, foreign relations, religion, and culture. This book is an excellent access point for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about Bulgaria.

In its evolution from a synthetic to an analytic language, Bulgarian acquired a grammaticalized category of definiteness. The book presents the first attempt to explore in detail how this happened by comparing the earliest Modern Bulgarian texts with contemporary dialect and standard Bulgarian data. The basic units of analysis are the various types of nominal structures headed by nouns or pronouns. The analysis requires the strict terminological disentanglement of form from content and the adoption of a default inheritance model of definiteness that allow the exhaustive classification and tagging of nominal structures encountered in the texts. Tagging makes it possible to apply quantitative analysis to nominal structure and to assess the types available in the early texts from a current native-speaker perspective. Based on an S-curve model of language change, the study establishes that overt markers of definiteness were first made available to identifiability-based definites, then to inclusiveness-based definites, quantitative generics and unique referents. The overt markers of indefiniteness followed suit, separating indefinites from non-specifics and typifying generics. This progression of definiteness was directed by variables such as person, animacy, gender, number and noun-class, and started in contexts in which definiteness closely interacted with possessivity. Such an analysis leads to the realization that the two-dimensional S-curve model does not account for all language change and that there is a need for a three-dimensional model. It also demonstrates that, contrary to previous assumptions, there is continuity between the early Slavic marker of definiteness (long-form adjectives) and the Modern Bulgarian article. This discovery, in conjunction with geolinguistic arguments, sheds new light on the role that relations inside the Balkan Sprachbund played in the grammaticalization of Bulgarian definiteness.

The history of church singing in Russia constitutes an essential aspect of that nation's culture and musical history. For the first 650 years, from the Christianization of Rus' in the year 988, liturgical chant was the only documentable art music in that vast territory that eventually became the modern nations of Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. Indeed, in Russia before the revolution of 1917, "liturgical musicology" was a bona fide scholarly discipline, taught in conservatories, universities, and theological seminaries. All activity in the field came to a halt, however, during the 75-year "Soviet era," when the study and practice of sacred music was severely repressed for ideological reasons, with a resulting lack of published research and secondary material. Consequently, Russian and Western music historians, church musicians, and liturgical scholars (as well as ordinary church-goers), whose interest in Orthodox Christianity and its art has been increasing of late, have been deprived of reference works that would impart even a general knowledge of the history and development of liturgical singing in the Russian Orthodox Church. The present Volume, Russian Church Singing: Volume 2 is the second installment of Professor Johann von Gardner's monumental work to appear in English translation. The 396-page volume, translated and edited by Dr. Vladimir Morosan, considers the development and practice of liturgical chant in the Russian lands from a variety of aspects: its origins and the various cultural influences upon its formation; extant manuscripts; the evolution of the notation and the problematics of deciphering it into modern-day notes; the forces involved in its performance; its stylistic evolution from exclusively monodic forms to improvised and, eventually, notated polyphony; its earliest known composers and performing ensembles; its aesthetics in relation to liturgy, the language, and the various problems that arose over the centuries, resulting in the adoption of Westernized stylistic models around the year 1650, which marks the approximate end of the time period covered in this volume. Much of this information is made accessible for the first time to the English reader, and will be of interest both to the specialist and to the general reader, generating a healthy demand for further research and exploration into this fascinating and hitherto unknown field. Book jacket.

Tracing the evolution of the Bulgarian state and its people, from the beginning of the Bulgarian national revival in the middle of the nineteenth century to the entry of the country into the European Union, Richard Crampton examines key political, social, and economic developments, revealing the history of a country which evolved from a backward and troublesome Balkan state to become a modern European nation. The formation of the first modern Bulgarian state in 1878 played a major role in Bulgaria's evolution, determining its stance in the two World Wars. Seeing the collapse as well as the establishment and evolution of communist rule, Bulgaria survived an often painful journey from monolithic authoritarianism to representative democracy and the market system. This book follows this journey, and analyses the development of Bulgaria's political culture, examining the emergence of radical movements, both agrarian and socialist, as well as looking at the role of religion and the position of minorities. Crampton highlights the problems and dilemmas created by the country's position situated between east and west, problems which might not be entirely solved by the country's admission to the EU.

The volume, stemming from the long-term cooperation of scholars working on East Central European intellectual history, discusses the patterns of patriotic and national identification in the light of the multiplicity of levels of ethnic, cultural and political allegiances characterizing this region in the early modern period.

This volume explores the extent to which Turkish linguistic features became incorporated into, and influenced, South Slavonic literature, with attention to both religious and secular works of the seventeenth and eighteenth century.

The Oxford Symposium on Food and Cookery has been held annually since 1981. This volume of more than 40 essays presented in 1996 includes pieces on food suitable for travelling, food written about by travel writers and travellers, and food that has itself travelled from its place of origin. The topics range from the domestication of western food in Japan, cooking on board ship in the 17th and 18th centuries, the transmission of the Arabic culinary tradition to medieval England, the influence of travel writers on modern Australian cooking, and the travels of the peanut.