Eastern Balkans History

The Prague Spring Archive Project

The Prague Spring Archive project, a collaboration between the Center for Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (CREEES) and UT Libraries, is now live. This open access online archive is the first step in a longer-term initiative by CREEES Director Mary Neuburger to digitize significant collections of primary documents from the the Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library that shed light on the Cold War. While select documents from the LBJ collection can already be found online, CREEES is working to digitize National Security country files from the former Eastern Bloc in their entirety. Because these documents are open record, the LBJ Presidential Library has allowed unlimited scanning and open access presentation of such documents. The hope is that they will appeal to a wide and inclusive audience of students, instructors, scholars, and the general public.

Phase One of this project, largely comprised of National Security Files on Czechoslovakia, is nearly complete. The bulk of the documents in this collection focus on the so-called “Czechoslovak Crisis,” otherwise known as the Prague Spring, and its aftermath. The Prague Spring was one of the most dramatic and popular experiments in Communist Party reform, which took place in Czechoslovakia beginning in January 1968, only to be crushed by an invasion of Soviet and Warsaw Pact troops on August 21 of the same year. This event was a major turning point in the Cold War and the history of communism more generally as the wave of reforms brought such a high degree of hope and enthusiasm and its suppression precipitated such deep disillusionment in the region and among the global left. It was the end, in a sense, of any hope for the communist system to be reformed and as such could be seen as the beginning of the end for the system itself.

The LBJ Library documents on Prague Spring are a treasure trove for historical research as they chronicle the event through detailed intelligence reports and day-by-day commentary by US policy makers. They include briefs on global reactions to the crisis, which many at the time thought could precipitate World War III. These documents are valuable both from a US policy standpoint and for a deeper understanding of the events and developments within the region itself. As the documents are all in English, they have the potential to be used for everything from academic historical research to student research.

Helsinki demonstration against the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968 (via Wikimedia Commons).

Ian Goodale, the new Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies & Digital Scholarship Librarian, worked closely with graduate students from the School of Information at UT Austin and undergraduate students from CREEES to photograph the documents in the reading room at the LBJ. He then collaborated with the UT Libraries to process the images into archival-quality PDFs for ingestion into Texas ScholarWorks, the university’s digital repository. These PDFs were made machine-readable so that they are full-text searchable in the repository and Ian worked to create extensive metadata for each document to make the collection more discoverable. Finally, the students in Mary Neuburger and Vlad Beronja’s Graduate Seminar on Russian, East European and Eurasian Studies worked with Ian over the last semester to create a guide to the collection. Ian did an amazing job of building a Scalar website as a portal for the guide, which provides summary descriptions of most of the folders and specific links to some of the most interesting documents.

Careful attention was paid to making the site accessible both to academic researchers and to patrons conducting personal or non-academic research, with additional features planned that will extend the breadth of the site’s audience. A module that will include materials aimed at high school and middle school teachers and students, including sample lesson plans and educational activities, will be added in the future. For researchers who would like to explore what is available in the physical collections of the LBJ Library, the finding aid for the entire archival collection is also available on the site.

UT CREES is located in Burdine Hall (Zug55 via flickr).

The Prague Spring Archive portal is a resource that will continue to grow, with new content and features continually added and expanded upon. By providing open access to important primary source materials, the project will continue to contribute to international scholarly communities, utilizing practices and tools of the digital humanities to freely share its content in an attractive, easily navigable portal.

Digitization work on the larger Cold War project is ongoing, with new materials currently being photographed, processed, and added to Texas ScholarWorks by graduate student Nicole Marino and Russian, East European, & Eurasian Studies and Digital Scholarship Librarian Ian Goodale.

More by Mary Neuberger on Not Even Past:
Balkan Smoke: Tobacco & Smoking in Bulgaria.
The Museum of Sour Milk: History Lessons on Bulgarian Yogurt.

The Museum of Sour Milk: History Lessons on Bulgarian Yogurt

by Mary Neuburger

One evening this summer, I found myself careening down a country road at breakneck speed to the town of Studen Izvor on the Bulgarian border with Serbia. Stunning scenery enveloped a string of thinly populated towns, some peppered with socialist-era industrial ruins that somehow added to the charm. Edit, the wife of my friend and colleague Kiril, drove like a bat out of hell. The trip, after all, was Edit’s bright idea. She knew I was interested in the history of food in Bulgaria and so planned this little day trip for the three of us. But we were running late and there was no way that we were going to make it to the yogurt museum before closing time. We had lingered too long over a meal in a traditionally themed restaurant on the edge of Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, where I had ordered a rather salty filet of “brain” in the interest of culinary adventure. Clearly agitated, Kiril put in a call to the museum from the speeding car, pleading with the museum staff to stay open late for the “visitor who had come all the way from America.” Of course, they waited.

The Museum of Bulgarian Yoghurt in Studen Izvor, near the western border of Bulgaria (via author).

Finally we pulled into museum’s small gravel parking lot with a dramatic spray of pebbles. As we ascended into the sleepy mountain village with our Sofia license plate, the few elderly inhabitants followed us with their gaze from their courtyard perches. A Bulgarian woman, with a few family members in tow, warmly greeted us and we profusely apologized as they led the “American visitor” and her Sofia entourage into the small freshly painted rooms of their brand new museum. The yogurt museum is one in a string of small food museums—along with one for honey, and beans—that are scattered across rural Bulgaria. Created with EU funds, they are part of larger effort to develop “sustainable tourism” through local attractions that are depicted on the freshly published tourist maps of Bulgaria available in any Sofia kiosk. While the tourist draw is…well, still minimal, for me the museum of yogurt or “kiselo mliako” (literally, sour milk) was pure inspiration! A starting point to dig deeper into the history of this critical ingredient in the Bulgarian (and now global) diet.

Bulgarian yogurt served in a traditional dish (via Wikimedia Commons)

While yogurt is consumed in much of the world, in Bulgaria it is a staple, often a part of breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert. It is used as the base of cold soups and sauces with garlic or herbs, or with honey as a simple dessert. The per capita consumption is roughly 27 kg, which is 4 times that of the US. Though most often sold and eaten plain, unlike in the US, it never says “plain” on the label. And indeed, Bulgarian yogurt is far from plain—even in its barest of forms. With choices commonly available of cow, goat, sheep, or water buffalo—the consumer is usually choosing by the distinct flavors of region, season, or animal rather than added fruit or other flavors. Much of the flavor comes from the way it is produced, in small local farms, largely in mountainous areas, with grass-fed and free-range animals. In part, what makes it so delicious is that you taste the terroir (as the French would say of wine, cheese and other products), that is the soil, air, plants and general characteristics of the locale where the product originates.

Stamen Grigorov in 1918. He served as a medical officer in the Bulgarian Army during WWI (via Wikimedia Commons).

But the cult of yogurt in Bulgaria is not just about the flavor. It is also about the health effects of its unique bacterial flora. The visit to the little museum—which stayed open just for me—revealed the details of a key chapter in the history of yogurt. The village of Studen Izvor was the hometown of Bulgarian scientist and physician, Stamen Grigorov (1878-1945) who in 1905 first discovered and viewed through a microscope the bacteria used for the fermentation of milk into yogurt. Grigorov, apparently had brought a number of ceramic urns of the “sour milk” from Bulgaria to Geneva, where he earned his PhD in medicine under famous microbiologist Dr. Léon Massol (1838–1909). With Massol’s urging Grigorov presented his findings at the famous Pasteur Institute in France in the same year. The particular variety of bacteria was named Lactobacillus bulgaricus in his honor, often followed by (Grigorov) in early scientific references.

Ilya Mechnikoff in 1908 (via Wikimedia Commons).

A number of sources wrongly credit Russian immunologist Ilya Metchnikoff (1845-1916) for the discovery, as he was at the Pasteur Institute in 1905 and shared in the general enthusiasm for Grigorov’s discovery. Mechnikoff became famous for his work on immunology and aging and was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1908. Metchnikoff, though, was intrigued by the prevalence of centenarians in Bulgaria—people who lived to be over 100 years old—and famously linked this phenomenon to the consumption of yogurt. He is also credited with popularizing yogurt in turn of the century Europe and the US.

The process of milk fermentation originated among the Turkic herding tribes of Central Asia, who brought it to the Balkans with the Ottoman advance in the fourtheenth and fifteenth centuries. Until the twentieth century, its consumption was rather limited to the geographical extent of Turkic influence and beyond to South Asia. Grigorov’s discovery and Mechnikoff’s writings created a sensation in the growing US “health food” movement in the early twentieth century. Dr. John Harvey Kellogg—the well know vegetarian and proponent of whole grain foods—jumped on the bandwagon. Kellogg advocated the regular consumption of yogurt for cleaning your colon from the “putrefaction” caused by consumption of flesh. He also gave himself regular yogurt enemas, noting that if you “balance your intestinal flora” you will “live as long as the rugged mountain men of Bulgaria.”

I read more about Grigorov and yogurt or “kiselo mliako” (literally sour milk) after returning to Sofia. In contrast to Mechnikoff, Grigorov, chose to live out most of his life as a country doctor in Studen Izvor, where he continued to conduct research. Grigorov is remembered by few people inside or outside of Bulgaria, but his name does come up frequently in histories of yogurt and probiotics—from Wikipedia to a plethora of books on the subject. The yogurt museum—though probably visited by few—is a monument to his name.

The author outside the Museum of Bulgarian Yogurt (via author).

Because I arrived late, the museum was out of the yogurt usually offered to guests for an on-site tasting. I was not disappointed, as I had come to look more than taste and there was no lack of yogurt at any and every shop or restaurant in Bulgaria. Indeed, back in Sofia, I decided to do a taste test of local yogurts sold at a specialty shop for “local and organic” dairy products. Such shops are a recent response to the inroads of companies like Dannon and the growing commercialization of dairy products in the post-socialist period. I bought three containers of plain yogurt—cow, sheep, and goat. All three were delicious with quite distinct flavors, but the sheep’s yogurt was my hands down favorite. Of course it might have been the season, the region, or who knows what else.

Read more by Mary Neuburger on Not Even Past:

Cold War Smoke: Cigarettes Across Borders

On Tobacco and Smoking in Bulgaria

From Feasts to Feats (or Feet) on the Coals

Notes from the Field: From Feasts to Feats (or Feet) on the Coals

By Mary Neuburger

This summer I conducted research in, but also beyond, my regular haunts, namely the dusty old libraries and archival reading rooms of Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. After several days in Sofia, I took to the mountains to follow the paths of ethnographers, tourists, and pilgrims who have written about this distant borderland of Europe over the past 200 years. To this day, Bulgaria has remained a kind of distant terra incognita, beckoning “adventure” travellers to the edge of the European continent. All the more reason for travellers – foreign and Bulgarian – to record their journeys, to map the remote physical and cultural recesses of this Balkan periphery, always seemingly “backwards,” in transition, and “off the beaten track.”

The veritable sea of travelers’ accounts are among the sources that inform my current book project, a cultural history of food and drink in the Eastern Balkans, with a focus on Bulgaria from the 1860s -1989. Bulgarian foodways were clearly imprinted by the Empires that ruled or influenced the region, from the Ancient Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, to the Soviet.

Some of these travellers were Bulgarians, mapping their own homeland and defining their own nation as they went, with the culture of food and drink as important components. But many more were foreigners who consumed and assessed food and drink as sources of pleasure and anxiety. They mapped patterns of restraint and gluttony, as well as the connections of food with identity, healing and magic. They often used practices of food and drink—production, preparation, and etiquette—as a way of forming or confirming their own opinions about locals as savage and barbaric, or alternatively as vigorous and sensible. Such accounts include mouth-watering descriptions of home-cooked meals and local inn or restaurant fare from the days of treks on oxen-drawn carts. The denouement of the story is the 1960s and 1970s when cities of leisure grew out of the snake-infested sands of the Bulgarian Black Sea coast to accommodate millions of visitors from both sides of the Iron Curtain. My interest is in the ways that food and drink fit into old and new rituals surrounding leisure and pleasure. As critical to this story, I explore how foreign travellers and local tourists were part of the transformation of such patterns over the last century. I am also particularly interested in patterns of restraint and abstinence, whether they were intellectual movements of the interwar period or state-directed patterns of pleasure and leisure under communism.

One of my plans for this summer was to follow the well-worn paths of my traveller-authors. This led me to one particularly remarkable place, namely to the village of Bulgari in a spectacular mountainous region called the Strandja, which borders Turkey and spills down to the Black Sea coast in southeastern Bulgaria. I planned my visit to Bulgari carefully, so that I would be there on the feast day of Constantine and Elena, June 4 by the Julian calendar, the day when the nestinari or fire-dancers perform their well-known ritual. Numerous foreigners and locals have chronicled their observations of the nestinarstvo — the ritual of waking on hot coals — which reportedly dates back thousands of years to ancient Thracian times. Locals claim that the originally pagan ritual has been practiced more or less continually since that time. Eventually Christianized, nestinarstvo was also passed on to successive waves of Greek and eventually Slavic residents who moved into the region. The practice was once much more widespread, but Bulgari is one of the last places one can still see the practice in its most elaborate enactment.

1The Nestinarka or coal-walker (in white head scarf) swirls a small urn of burning embers in the air at the beginning of the procession with holy icons into the woods. (Village of Bulgari, in Southeastern Bulgaria, June 2015).

The Nestinarka or coal-walker (in white head scarf) swirls a small urn of burning embers in the air at the beginning of the procession with holy icons into the woods. (Village of Bulgari, in Southeastern Bulgaria, June 2015).

The morning of June 4, 2015 began with a series of prayers in the main church and the ceremonial removal of the icons depicting St. Constantine and Elena (The Byzantine Emperor, Constantine and his mother, Elena). The icons were taken in a solemn procession to the tune of a mesmerizing beat from a drummer and gaida (Bulgarian bagpipe) player. First, the local priest and a number of important participants, including the head nestinarka, or female coal-walker, led a small crowd to a chapel across the main square. There a series of rituals were performed, including a kurban or sacrifice of a sheep by the local priest. The procession continued, with the nestinarka carrying a vessel with burning embers, down a wooded path to a glen where a well and a small chapel were nestled. While blessings took place around the well, icons were placed in a small structure for those assembled to file pass, view, and kiss. Eventually the gathering dissipated until noon, when a huge bonfire was lit in the village square, with an accompanying horo (circle dance) to drumming and bagpipes. By evening folk singers and dancers were featured on an adjacent stage and the square begin to fill with hundreds of people, mostly Bulgarians. As live Bulgarian folk music was pumped over a loudspeaker, a line of hundreds of people snaked around the village square while the bonfire burned down to glowing coals.

2The kurban or sacrificial ram hangs from a hook, while being blessed by an Orthodox priest. The ram’s head is in the foreground on a chopping block. Village of Bulgari, in Southeastern Bulgaria, June 2015).

The kurban or sacrificial ram hangs from a hook, while being blessed by an Orthodox priest. The ram’s head is in the foreground on a chopping block. Village of Bulgari, in Southeastern Bulgaria, June 2015).

Finally, at a little after ten o’clock, the red hot coals were raked out into a starfish shape in the center of the square, with the crowd on all sides pushing against a protective rope. Suddenly the only music was the single drum and bagpipe and three women and three men began to dance across the burning embers. In a trance-like state they moved rhythmically back and forth across the coals to the drumming and bagpipes, icons in hand – held high overhead—a large crown oohing and ahing.

The hot coals are spread with a large rake in preparation for coal-walking ceremony to begin. (Village of Bulgari, in Southeastern Bulgaria, June 2015).

It may be possible to explain how people can walk on hot coals, but I am more interested in the layers of historical sediment that surround the event. First there is the notion that this ritual has been practiced for thousands of years and the current commitment to honor, if not partially reinvent, that tradition. But even more interesting for my current work is the ways in which the event became a site for the intrepid tourist pilgrimage. By the interwar period it is featured in numerous travelogues, and a form of the practice was featured at Black Sea tourist hotels in the communist period. As a site for local tourist observation and participation, the nestinarstvo was and still is deeply connected to food and drink. For example, as chronicled in Ikons and Oxen, Philip Thornton and his resolute party, traveling in 1938, bring to Bulgari a cook from their Black sea hotel and, “Ten pounds of lamb, a gallon of red wine, five bunches of onions and two of carrots, a bottle of butter, a three-pound bag of rice, and a pound of salt.” The salt, the cook explained to Thornton, was to trade to locals for use of their hearths to cook the hearty lamb stew, which they washed down with tasty local wine.

Food and drink were more than just sustenance and pleasure for the traveling visitors. They were (and still are) deeply implicated in the day’s events and rituals. Food was always central in pagan religious rituals and feasting and fasting were deeply embedded in Orthodox Christianity. St. Constantine and Elena Day was a feast day, in which locals pitched in to purchase the kurban, or animal for sacrifice, that was later eaten by the nestinari and others in attendance. Bread has also historically been part of the day’s ritual, and this time pieces of a large loaf were offered to all present at the morning ceremony. Today, a whole street of food vendors catered to tourists and pilgrims who ate and drank throughout the whole day. The ritual feasting included a lamb roasting all day on a spit, a range of other grilled meats, breads, traditional local salads of cucumber, tomato and feta, and generous amounts of local wines, plum brandy, and beer.

Wine has been produced in this region of Bulgaria, which is part of the larger region of Thrace, since ancient times. This is, in fact, the land of the cult of Dionysus (or Bacchus), the Greek (and Roman) God of wine and pleasure. Even more so than food, alcohol consumption is the subject of enjoyment, but also intense scrutiny by foreigners and locals in the period I study. In addition to the cult of Bacchus, this region was also the source of the 11th century Bogomil heresy – one of the first “Proto-Protestant” rebellions against the decadence of the established Christian church. Among other things, the Bogomils practiced temperance and vegetarianism, and as such were a cult of restraint in all manners of consumption. Eradicated by the Byzantines in the 13th century, the “Bogomil legacy” seemed to live on, according to foreign travelers, among other Slavic “fanatics,” including the largest Tolstoyan movement established outside of Russia in early twentieth century. In fact, the Bulgarian village of “Yasna Polyana,” was not far from Bulgari in the Strandja region. Bulgarians set up a commune here in 1908, naming it after Tolstoy’s commune and estate in Russia, Yasnaya Polyana and where they published many of Tolstoy’s works that were banned in Russia. This summer I visited Yasna Polyana, where a recently consecrated bust of Tolstoy presides on the main square.

Bulgari and Yasna Polyana serve as different kinds of markers on what Ivan Hadzhiiski, the founder of Bulgarian sociology, called the “moral map of Bulgaria.” His copious writings from the 1930s, charted the contours of Bulgarian everyday life.. As he rightly notes, the morals of “gastronomy” were defining features of Bulgarian tradition, as well as its transition to modernity. Of course this is not just for Bulgarians. As my favorite historian of food, Felipe Fernández-Armesto notes in his Near a Thousand Tables, food “matters most to most people for most of the time.” The words of Armesto, like Hadzhiiski, accompanied me on my tour, from town to town, from table to table.

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