COURAGE

povezivanje zbirki

This collection combines different types of materials in three groups: oral stories from different generations of Roma individuals, written testimonies from representatives of the Roma population (e.g., petitions, institutions) and government documents regarding the Roma.

The objective of the book, through emphasizing individuals’ life stories, is to present the Roma not as simply objects of history, but as subjects of historical action. Here the personal experiences of major historical events are regarded as "an important starting point in the search for a common historical memory across the generations" of the 20th century. The volume emphasizes the importance of Roma culture to the development of Bulgaria’s overall historical memory.

The second part of the book consists of transcripts of selected documents written by Roma members which are kept in archives. This part mostly includes official applications, and petitions. The published documents highlight important cases where Roma interacted with institutions, especially with regard to the Bulgarization of names and other violations of the traditions and dignity of the Roma. They also highlight the strategies that Roma pursued in their attempts to preserve their rights. The editors of the collection highlight the small number of such documents as an indicator of the "absence of dialogue between the population and the institutions"

The third part of the book gives an overview of the policies of the socialist state towards minorities in general and the Roma specifically. It shows the goals and means of state policies and the attitudes of the authorities towards the Roma minority during communism. These policies have had a broad public impact which continues to this day.

The Pugwash Conferences on Science and World Affairs (popularly called the Pugwash Movement) is an international organisation of scientists and intellectuals who advocate world peace. It has emerged as an international conference on science and global problems, and at the time it was “a significant international factor and channel of communication among scientists,” (Knapp, 1995, 71), primarily discussing the dangers of the development of nuclear weapons.

After each conference, the presented papers were published, but this was not the case with the first conference held in 1957. Only in 1982, on the twenty-fifth anniversary, were the proceedings published with all papers and almost all materials that were then discussed. The first conference was attended by 22 participants (of whom sixteen were physicists, two chemists, one biologist, two physicians and one lawyer) from ten countries (seven from the USA, three from the USSR, three from Japan, two from the United Kingdom, two from Canada, and one each from Australia, Austria, China, France and Poland) (Rotblat 1982, 11).

The first conference ended with a joint warning from scientists from all five countries that had or were developing nuclear weapons that the potential nuclear war would end as a “world catastrophe, with hundreds of millions people killed instantly, and hundreds of millions more dying in the aftermath” (Knapp 2013, 88-89). Croatian scientist Ivan Supek was the first man from Yugoslavia who joined the Pugwash Movement and promoted its ideas. At that time, due to plans on the possibility of developing a nuclear program, the Yugoslav authorities received the ideas of this anti-nuclear movement with scepticism. Thanks to Supek's advocacy, the Yugoslav public became aware of the movement and their activities.

Between 1964 and 1975, employees of the Museum of Folk Techics in Sibiu rescued five windmills from Dobrogea, which were at risk of being destroyed by the communist regime’s agricultural modernisation drive following the completion of collectivisation in 1957. A key role in this endeavour was played by Hedwig Ulrike Ruşdea, a museologist working at the museum, who in the mid-1960s specialised in pre-industrial Romanian windmills. The Museum's team not only rescued and reassembled windmills in its open-air exhibition, but also conducted extensive research on their history and on their social and economic role within the communities, and collected stories told by local inhabitants about windmills and their former owners. Ruşdea later wrote several academic papers on windmills from Dobrogea based on her research findings. Some of them, such as “Morile de vânt din Dobrogea – România: Descriere şi tipologie” (Windmills of Dobrogea – Romania: Description and Typology), are available in manuscript in the scientific archives of the ASTRA Museum. After a short introduction to the history of windmills in Romania, Ruşdea discusses in this paper their evolution in Dobrogea and notes the devastating impact that the region’s rapid economic modernisation had on these essential artefacts of the cultural heritage of the region. While in the early twentieth century there were over 740 windmills in the region, by the beginning of the 1980s their number had decreased to only three. In addition, the study presents a typology of windmills according to structure and operating principles, and compares windmill technology in Dobrogea with that in other parts of Europe.