Adam Michnik

Božidar Jezernik

Wydawnictwo Czarne

Gułag Tity

Naga wyspa

Combining comment with research abounding in historical and cultural detail, this book tells how from the 16th to the 20th century The Balkans have been perceived by west European travellers, many of whom have seen it as part of Asia and sought accordingly to inform their contemporaries of its exotic, outlandish and primitive ways.

The Balkans in the Gaze of Western Travellers

Wild Europe

o življenju Slovencev v italijanskih koncentracijskih taboriščih

Boj za obstanek

Balkan u očima putnika sa Zapada

Divlja Evropa

A human being is a symbolic creature and, to the same extent, an active inventor of otherness. Europe and Turkey, The West and the Balkans, are infinitely exploitable symbols. Any symbol, inherently polysemic and socially construed, is continuously contested and negotiated. The image of ‘the Turk’ as a ruthless plunderer is still vivid in European collective memory. Although it occasionally still verges on ethnic mythology, it clearly belongs to a past where, along with the plague and famine, this name used to be mentioned in prayers more frequently than that of God itself. In the past, the name ‘Turk’ implied the negative of the European self-image. ‘The Turk,’ assuming the role of the ‘defining other,’ was considered as everything a European was not (primitive, barbarian, savage vs. civilised). As such, this concept was one of the constitutive elements of European (Western) cultural identity. The aim of this book is nothing less than a better understanding of the European past related to the Ottomans. An intellectual traveller who takes his Orient Express at Victoria, however, will have to get off somewhere half-way and spend some time in the part of Europe set between the Alps and the Adriatic before ending his journey in Istanbul.

Imagining ‘the Turk’

Božidar Jezernik

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