ABSTRACTS:
Assigning National Identities: British travel literature and the emergence
of the Balkan nations
Throughout the 19th century, the polyphony of standpoints on the Eastern
Question increased with the rise of political interest in the East European
part of the Ottoman Empire. The intensifying activities for political sovereignty
of the Balkan populations, hitherto subsumed under the common term Ottoman
Christians, brought a gradual change of the perception of the Balkans from
that of subservient Ottoman provinces or sites of classical history to a
distinct geographical and cultural entity, and triggered a whole new discussion
around the multiethnic population of Turkey-in-Europe as to which territories
should be assigned to the future countries. Politically engaged people and
historians, aware of the complexity of the demographic distribution within
the Balkans, pondered on the question of how “ethnic belonging” was to be
defined in cases of cultural intermingling. On the basis of which criterion
(criteria) should communities be separated? Finally, and most importantly,
what constitutes a nation?
The popular demand for more information by the 19th-century British reading
public resulted in the publication of a significant amount of travel accounts
about the Balkans and an ongoing dispute in the press on the importance of
cultural continuity and historical heredity, language and religion for assigning
"nationality". This paper examines the variety of opinions and diverse voices
in the Victorian publications in an attempt to reconstruct the 19th-century
British definition of national identity as applied particularly to the central
Balkans, referred to as "the Bulgarian territories". 19th-century travel
accounts reveal it to be a region where national identities were, for the
most part, weakly held ("Bulgarian" was used to signify both social status
and ethnic affiliation) and where languages blended into a medley of dialects
and no obvious linguistic boundaries existed to mark off one ethnic group
from another. The emerging nation(s) had little immediate appreciation of
their physical limits as ethnic communities and since ecclesiastic institutions,
such as the Bulgarian exarchate, were established late in the 19th century,
for the traveling ethnographers, national mythologies yielded historical
frontiers which served (at times) as putative political boundaries.
Travel Literature on the
Internet: The Contribution of the Digital Medium to
the Developent of the Genre of Travel Literature
'A notoriously raffish open house where very different
genres are likely to end up in the same bed', is how Jonathan Raban
fittingly calls the hybrid genre of travel literature, for it subsumes diaries,
autobiographies, personal narratives, fictional and non-fictional works
of exploration and adventure as well as guides and accounts of sojourns in
foreign lands. The Internet with its new means of graphical presentation,
animation, sound effects and hypertext, broadens even more the genre by
allowing elements of the photo essay or the comic strips, even film, to pervade
it. Accessibility, affordability of “publishing”, immediacy and rapidity
of distribution of the digital media appeals to many non-professional, “occasional
writers of travel literature”, who, fulfilling the only requirement of having
some technical means and knowledge, find an open forum to post their experiences.
This paper is an analysis of online travelogues and explores the contribution
of the Internet medium to the development of the genre of travel literature.
Besides looking into the new “affiliation” with other genres, I investigate
the shift of emphasis in conveying meaning from the purely semantic level
to the visual level of fonts, character colors, images and animation effects,
and inquire into the symbiosis of text and image that the web-travelogue
is. I examine the role of the pictures as a means of conveying atmosphere
and rendering emotions (two aspects which, quite characteristically of
the digital media, the text per se tends to lack) as well as a means of
compressing the site’s message on a minimum text and space, making the
reading time more appropriate to fit the medium of the Internet. Lastly,
I analyze how the linking (the spatial structure) of the hypertextual travelogues
affects the temporal frame of the narrative.
The role of class, ethnicity, and religion in
the cuisines of the European Ottoman Empire.
An analysis of late 19th-century British
travel accounts
This paper deals with 19th-century British travel accounts about
Constantinople and its European hinterland, the Balkans, and argues that
the culinary culture of its various nations was defined by three factors:
class, ethnicity, and religion. I will discuss the extent to which these
factors prevailed over the levelling influence of the dominant Turkish
culture, and how far their different weight shaped, by processes of differentiation
and identification, the nutritional choices of the populations of the
Danubian principalities (the Balkans).
In Constantinople, the accumulation of wealth enabled selectivity
of foodstuffs and promoted social competition. 'Class' contributed most
to the formation of an elaborate haute cuisine in the capital. Remote from
the court and Ottoman high society, and suffering from a sharp discrepancy
in the distribution of resources between capital and hinterland, the peoples
in the Danubian principalities evolved a cuisine of simple dishes and restricted
variety. Theirs was a culinary culture characteristic of people of small
means and low standing. The main factor accounting for this state was not
so much the lack of wealth, as would have been expected, but the absence
of strict class distinctions. Since the Balkan provinces frequently served
as areas of punishment for exiles, even representatives of the highest class
did not possess the wealth of their Constantinopolitan equivalents. Besides,
the levelling laws of the Tanzimat (an era of major reforms between the
years 1838 and 1876) additionally blurred the differences between social
layers. As a result, Balkan society gradually became relatively undifferentiated
and unhierarchical, and consequently subsisted on a plain, socially homogeneous
cuisine. However, some culinary differences existed, indicative of major
incompatibilities between the nations' dietary practices, the diverging
forces being ethnicity and religion. The Muslims slaughtered animals according
to their religious rules; the Bulgarians were famous for eating pork, the
Jews did not combine meat and milk products in their cooking. Since how and
what people ate was a potent factor of national and social stereotyping,
food metaphors often represented national (ethnic) affiliation, and culinary
items stood for the culture itself.
“Authentic” voices from the Balkans: 19th-century
British travels in the European Part of the Ottoman Empire
This paper deals with 19th-century British travel
accounts about the Balkans and argues that many experiences presented as
authentic are in fact to a great extent constructed, invented.
During the 19th century, the only dark spot left on the European
map was the Balkans. Being at the time a part of the Ottoman Empire and
thus of the Orient, they were associated with superstition, immorality, and
cruelty but also with wealth, fantasy and adventure. It was a place where
the Victorians sought refuge from their social dogmas.
To the Victorian mind far lands meant strange, irrational
customs, reminiscent of ancient, even mythical times. Painters visited
them to get “authentic” settings for their biblical scenes. They painted
projections of male fantasies in “true” representations of harems and baths
crowded with bare female figures, which, hypocritically enough, were openly
enjoyed by the British public. I argue that, because they were written by
Victorians and for the Victorian public, despite their documentary character,
the 19th-century travel books display the same amount of fictitiousness.
In fact, they supplied “factual” evidence of the irrationality of the Balkans,
nourishing the reader’s imagination with folk stories of vampires and werewolves,
and, had their wives been admitted to the private rooms of the Oriental ladies,
the travellers provided second hand (thus interpreted and distorted) information
about the intimate side of the Oriental character. I will also present instances
where the narrator’s character is constructed in order to meet the expectations
of the Victorian reader, or so that his story gains more credibility.
Finally, I will dwell on the issue of first impressions authenticity.
Frequently the authors put their thoughts on paper upon their returning
home. As a result memory gaps were filled in; the narrator’s voice was checked
against the public opinion and a constructed experience replaced the authentic
one.