Wonderful! As it happens, I'm re-reading Patrick Leigh Fermor's The Broken Road, about Bulgaria and Romania - and seeing a reference to the atrocities of the April Uprising (1876), looked them up, and was horrified and saddened...the events must have left deep scars on Vazov and his generation. Also, it seems in Romania (where I have visited and have friends), the distant Roman-Dacian heritage offers a way of living with the past which can stitch together some of the 19th-20th-century divisions into Hungarian, German, Romanian, Transylvanian, and Roma - not to mention the recent communist memories.
W. F. Ryan’s The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia (1999) makes this clear in its examination of Russian folk culture. Here we find that bathhouse was a marginal structure, often built at the edge of the village, and spiritually liminal: a place between good and evil, life and death. . . . What Ryan shows us is that the bathhouse was never just about washing. It was a threshold space
Thank you Benny Goldberg, for this beautiful plunge into "wet metaphysics" and "hydrosocial spaces" of Bulgaria. In opens up an entire Slavic world I had no idea of : what bathing can mean in terms of identity, history and politics. And how the bathing tradition is deeply ingrained into the people's bodies.
Wonderful! As it happens, I'm re-reading Patrick Leigh Fermor's The Broken Road, about Bulgaria and Romania - and seeing a reference to the atrocities of the April Uprising (1876), looked them up, and was horrified and saddened...the events must have left deep scars on Vazov and his generation. Also, it seems in Romania (where I have visited and have friends), the distant Roman-Dacian heritage offers a way of living with the past which can stitch together some of the 19th-20th-century divisions into Hungarian, German, Romanian, Transylvanian, and Roma - not to mention the recent communist memories.
W. F. Ryan’s The Bathhouse at Midnight: An Historical Survey of Magic and Divination in Russia (1999) makes this clear in its examination of Russian folk culture. Here we find that bathhouse was a marginal structure, often built at the edge of the village, and spiritually liminal: a place between good and evil, life and death. . . . What Ryan shows us is that the bathhouse was never just about washing. It was a threshold space
Thoughtful, or pensive?
Thank you Benny Goldberg, for this beautiful plunge into "wet metaphysics" and "hydrosocial spaces" of Bulgaria. In opens up an entire Slavic world I had no idea of : what bathing can mean in terms of identity, history and politics. And how the bathing tradition is deeply ingrained into the people's bodies.