Carnival of the Balkans

Carnival edition #6

2006-01-26T15:11:00.000Z

The Sixth edition of the Carnival of the Balkans is up on Estavisti.

Carnival of the Balkans Archives

2006-01-17T05:40:00.000Z

CotB #1 on Balkania

CotB #2 on Science And Politics

CotB #3 on East Ethnia

CotB #4 on Science And Politics

CotB #5 at YakimaGulagLiteraryGazett.

CotB #6 at Estavisti.

Carnival of the Balkans is up!

2005-12-15T15:28:00.000Z

Heard the Word of Blog?

Carnival of the Balkans #5 is up on YakimaGulagLiteraryGazett. Go feast on the Southeastern European literary cuisine!

Carnival of the Balkans - call for submissions

2005-12-04T06:37:00.000Z

Heard the Word of Blog?

The fifth edition of the Carnival of the Balkans will be posted on Yakima Gulag Literary Gazette on or around December 15th. If you are from the Balkans, or currently in the Balkans, or write, at least occasionally, about the Balkans, please submit your posts. Watch Yakima's blog for further instructions.

Carnival Logo

2005-11-18T01:45:00.000Z

If you go to Word of Blog and do a search for Carnival of the Balkans you can get a piece of code that allows you to place the logo of the carnival on your blog. Clicking on the logo will bring you here.

Heard the Word of Blog?

Carnival of the Balkans #4

2005-11-13T06:00:00.000Z

The fourth issue is now up! Go check it out!

Fourth edition - call for submissions

2005-11-06T03:15:00.000Z

We'll resume with the Carnival soon. The Fourth Edition will be hosted by Bora at Science and Politics next week. Send your entries (or suggestions about other people's entries) to Coturnix1 AT aol DOT com by Saturday, November 12th at 8pm EST. The Carnival will go up on Sunday.

Carnival of the Balkans #3!!

2005-04-19T18:56:00.000Z

Every time I try to compile the Balkan Carnival, blog.hr goes down! it happened again today, but they seemed to recover fairly quickly. Drax points out that technical reliability is not the service's only problem--they are also worried about acquiring a non-serious image, as blogs are not respected by mainstream media in the Balkans. But we respect one another (yes?), so here is another selection of this month's favorite items from Balkan blogs.

Yakima Gulag realized that it had become a Balkan blog, and explained to readers how and why. At Science and Politics, the variations on identity come together with a religious, political, and scientific reflection on how the heck our kids get so smart. It makes for an interesting reflection on identity and its pleasures and problems, and also at least by implication on ways in which Balkan identity can be chosen.

The issue of identity and its being chosen or rejected came up again in relation to the question of language. Filologanoga offered a linguistic-historical reflection on the new recodification of the Croatian language, contrasting concerns about uniqueness with enthusiasm for creativity and diversity. Meanwhile a completely different take on linguistic diversity is offered by 20-month old David Muir. The final word on the question of identity comes, as it should, from an advertisement by a sweets manufacturer.

Economic conditions remained challenging in the region, as Drax reports that they are threatening even establishments for gambling on sports matches. In Croatia, Seesaw reports that tourists are finding that Serbian agencies offer the best prices for coastal destinations in Croatia. However, there may be an incipient growth market for Bosnian snail farmers.

Not all of the economic and political improvements are moving at a snail's pace, though. Seesaw reports that >Romania and Bulgaria are expected to lead the Balkan charge into the EU. And Serbia-Montenegro was susrprised to get a favorable feasibility study which nobody seems to have got around to translating. The trifecta of developments led to a debate on whether Balkan neighbors are pleased by one anothers' success in dealing with accession to the EU.

While CNN continued a daily osvrt on the scandals of Croatian public life. On scandals elsewhere in the region, Morpheus informs us of the plan for war criminals to be captured by Pierce Brosnan. And East Ethnia followed war-criminal developments on other fronts.

It was a good month for Balkan musicians. The Bosnian supergroup Bijelo Dugme announced reunion plans, a fact which Bosny celebrated with a song translation. And "Crvena jabuka" is now 20 years old. Chuck Berry is older still, but the Partibrejkersi will open for him in Zagreb. In the folk-jazz department, electronic harmonikas Belinda Bedelkovic was featured in an interesting video. In the folk-crime department, Ceca tried to do a foreign tour but was denied visas by Canada and Australia.

The local and global competed in a pro-sljivovica poster provided by Novala, while spring was hailed by dandelion salad recipes from Yakima and from the eastern part of Ethnia. At Gulistan, there was food porn for lovers of squid.

Several Balkan blogs offered new features and changes. "The Glory of Carniola" tried a design change in the spirit of April 1, and then changed the page design anyway, from the touristy to the newspaperish. Kushtrim Xhakli put up a new interactive map of his regular destinations in Prishtine. And quiet for a while, Dvevnik ulice is back. The Burekeaters are also moving to a new home. We hope it will be large enough to hold the creation that breaks the record for the world's largest burek. In the news about bloggers, Mat Savelli is headed to grad school. And Teekay faces the technical and cultural shock of moving from Sarajevo to some distant place. Had he gone to Britain, he may have got some benefit from the advice that was found by URLanje.

A few new blogs made their appearance, including Hamburek and investigative journalism by Zeljko Peratovic. Let's keep seeing more as the blogosfera gets wider and more well rounded.

Carnival of the Balkans #2

2005-03-06T02:17:00.000Z

The second issue of the Carnival of the Balkans is now online:
http://sciencepolitics.blogspot.com/2005/03/carnival-of-balkans-2.html

Enjoy the diversity of interesting voices.

Who is going to host next month?

Carnival of the Balkans

2005-02-22T03:13:00.000Z

This is the first call for submissions for the second monthly
Carnival Of The Balkans.

If you are from the Balkans, or currently in the Balkans, or write, at least occasionaly, about the Balkans, please submit your posts.

The Carnival will be posted on Science And Politics, on March 7th 2005.

You can e-mail Bora Zivkovic at coturnix AT gmail DOT com or coturnix1 AT aol DOT com. Scroll down to check the "rules" and the previous carnival.

Carnival of the Balkans #1: BALKAN ARTS AND MUSIC

2005-02-07T20:34:00.000Z

Welcome to the first Carnival of the Balkans! This project grew out of the realization that there are more good sites from Southeastern Europe every day, and that one nice way to follow their development and bring attention to them would be by offering an occasional showcase of some of the best, most interesting and most amusing writing going on. The first edition is on the theme of Balkan music and arts, broadly defined.

Our first edition is smaller than some of the more established blog carnivals, but larger than the average studio apartment. Posts were nominated either by submission or because the editors had seen something wonderful. With any luck, as the Balkan blog sphere grows and more people become aware of it, future carnivals will be bigger, louder, and more diverse.

The world of theatre and film was approached through nostalgia by Science and Politics with a remembrance of a great performance of Fiddler on the Roof at the National Theatre in Belgrade. Balkan-scissors shared with us the observations of stage and screen legend Eva Ras, who has published an autobiography. The Burekeaters let us in on the release of the new Macedonian film Bal Can-Can, while Drax set up a new site to be a repository for his film reviews.

In Balkan television, Burekeaters shared news of the exciting project to link Balkan cities with one another musically through MTV Adria, and let us in on the internet launch of the great Macedonian comedy group K-15. Drax continued to chronicle the spread of “reality TV” in the region, showing again how local patterns make their way into a global commercial form.

The world of music continued to oscillate between joyful nostalgia and willful forgetting. Drax chronicled the misfortunes of Nova TV in Croatia, which thought it could score a commercial coup by broadcasting an interview with turbo-folk diva and political lightning rod Ceca Raznatovic. The Burekeaters appreciated the music of Bojan Zulfikarpasic and the Kocani Orkestar. Balkan-scissors took a trip through earler Balkan rokenrol with a brief history of the New Primitives and of Zabranjeno Pusenje, and an appreciation of the archives of the old pop magazines Ritam and Dzuboks made available by the new pop magazine Popboks. The Glory of Carniola offered glorious and curious old Yugoslav album covers, introduced us to the interesting to look at Slovenian group Atomik Harmonik, and shared with us the worst-ever performance of the Ode to Joy. East Ethnia hoped for the Balkanization of America by noting that Edo Maajka was coming, so no sikiriki.

The basic Balkan source for literature and the visual arts remained quod scripsi, scripsi with its daily features on visual artists, writers, and places, much of it supplemented at the author's new multilingual blog. Visual enjoyment of places also continued to be enhanced by Novalas with their ongoing series of “Postcards from the Past.” Among the painters with notable web presences these past few weeks have been Aghim Muka and Bujar Asllani. The last month also marked the departure of Edo Murtic, noted by Quod. Meanwhile the fate of cultural institutions was observed by Ludost's continued chronicle of Bosnia's Zemaljski muzej.

Balkan cuisine travelled the world as the Burekeaters ate burek (what else?) in Palermo and East Ethnia brought the joy of sour cabbage to benighted and snowed-in western Massachusetts. Rijecanka taught the world to make krostule, and Seesaw offered us first a picture, then a recipe for bosanski lonac.

Some of the best Balkan humor was on the theme of political culture. The Centralni komitet showed the (d)evolution of political culture in Montenegro. Ludost invited addicts to join Ethnoholics anonymous, and the Burekeaters contributed the Glory of Croatia with a stadium wrapped in a necktie --Croat/cravat, you see.

The list of excellent Balkan blog productions also includes many that are not mentioned or linked here. Join in, submit your pieces to the Carnival of the Balkans – what is blogging for but to get the word out?

What is a blog carnival?

2005-02-01T20:31:00.000Z

Some people might be asking: what is this carnival business? On the continuum between competition and digest, it is closer to digest. But rather than try to explain, let me link to a few examples:

Blog Tower
Carnival of the Philosophers
Tangled Bank
Bonfire of the Vanities
Carnival of the Godless
Carnival of Bad History

Each one of these sites has links to more carnivals, and the number is rapidly growing! One of the reasons is probably that with so many blogs out there, it can be helpful to find pointers to good and relevant writing.

Submissions are welcome!

Balkan Carnival #1: CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

2005-01-31T18:24:00.000Z

The first edition of Carnival of the Balkans will be coming on 7 February. The Carnival's purpose is to showcase good writing from around the web about the Balkans. The theme for the February 2005 edition is:

BALKAN MUSIC AND ARTS

Submissions should be in the form of blog or forum posts from anywhere on the internet, published at any time. Please send your favorite posts (your own or another person's) on the topic to Eric Gordy [eastethnia at gmail dot com] by Friday, 4 February. Posts may be in any language, but if they are in a language I do not know I will ask someone else for help.

What constitutes a post about "Balkan music and arts"? The fact that the person who submits it thinks it ought to be considered in that category.

Let the submissions arrive!

Developing...

2005-01-30T20:44:00.000Z

New editors to be joining soon.

The only change to what is below that comes to mind is that it may make more sense for each month's editor to choose their theme rather than setting up themes months in advance. I'll stick with the plan for February's theme to be Balkan music and arts -- send submissions to eastethnia at gmail dot com.

Announcing the Carnival of the Balkans

2005-01-30T13:20:00.000Z

The Carnival of the Balkans is designed to showcase the best, most interesting, most thought-provoking and amusing posts from weblogs or internet fora related to the Balkans. Its purpose is to promote information and discussion and to bring attention to the work of good writers around the world.

1. The carnival will publish monthly, with the first edition coming out on 7 February 2005.

2. Each month's edition will be organised around a theme. The following themes are suggestions:

February 2005: Balkan music and arts
March 2005: Religious politics and religious heritage
April 2005: Interculturality
May 2005: ?
June 2005: ?

3. Selection of posts is by nomination. A call for submissions will be posted here and on East Ethnia, and reproduced on whatever sites whose owners choose to reproduce it. People will be invited to submit any post on the announced topic, their own or somebody else's, for inclusion. The editors will choose 15-20 of them.

4. Posts may be in any language that is used on Earth and its satellites to discuss questions related to the Balkans.

5. Each issue will have a primary editor. I volunteer to be primary editor for the first edition, but hope that someone else will be willing to do it for the next one. Ideally, the job should rotate among the members of the editorial skupina.

Members of the editorial skupina TBA -- write to me if you would like to be one.

2005-01-30T11:03:00.000Z

This site will be the host of the Balkania Blog Carnival. Watch this space for updates.