Carnival of the Balkans

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?