Boranovo Babushki
My latest favorite musicians are these fantastic singers from Russia. They are this year's Russian Eurovision entry.
Everything they do is magnificent, although I am less anamored of the covers of "Hotel California" and "Let it Be," even though the latter has some cute grandsons playing along.
On another front: Bosnia and Herzegovina abolished serfdom in 1918, and they weren't even the last ones -- that honor goes to Bhutan and Tibet -- 1959.
Also, there's this Ukrainian dance (also Romanian and a few other ethnicities), called "Arkan." My brother used to dance it as a young man. It's kind of the archetypical macho Eastern European dance, with stomping and high kicks and showing off and arms around the shoulders. Tonight I discovered that at least in some places there was this tradition where the men would kidnap boys and bring them to a bonfire where they would be made to dance this dance with the men and thus be initiated as an adult who could marry and tend sheep. I am not making this up. I couldn't make this up.
I also am now thoroughly confused about just who was expelling whom from which villages throughout the 20th century. There was a lot of it going on. The end result, at least in this one area I spent a lot of today reading about, appears to be vast tracts of utterly empty land with houses gone to ruin and the families scattered all over the globe. I already knew that there was a large area where several of the dialects could be and are equally justifiably assigned to Polish, Czech, Slovak, or Ukrainian, depending on the language ideology of the observer.
I also am more confused than ever about what it means to own villages in that region. I had this picture in my mind of a long-established nobility in at least part of the landscape, with landed folks claiming ancestry going back hundreds of years, but looking at these villages and the estates that claim them, with records going back to the 1500s, it looks like the ruling class had a complete turnover every two or three generations, with partial turnovers between.
Everything they do is magnificent, although I am less anamored of the covers of "Hotel California" and "Let it Be," even though the latter has some cute grandsons playing along.
On another front: Bosnia and Herzegovina abolished serfdom in 1918, and they weren't even the last ones -- that honor goes to Bhutan and Tibet -- 1959.
Also, there's this Ukrainian dance (also Romanian and a few other ethnicities), called "Arkan." My brother used to dance it as a young man. It's kind of the archetypical macho Eastern European dance, with stomping and high kicks and showing off and arms around the shoulders. Tonight I discovered that at least in some places there was this tradition where the men would kidnap boys and bring them to a bonfire where they would be made to dance this dance with the men and thus be initiated as an adult who could marry and tend sheep. I am not making this up. I couldn't make this up.
I also am now thoroughly confused about just who was expelling whom from which villages throughout the 20th century. There was a lot of it going on. The end result, at least in this one area I spent a lot of today reading about, appears to be vast tracts of utterly empty land with houses gone to ruin and the families scattered all over the globe. I already knew that there was a large area where several of the dialects could be and are equally justifiably assigned to Polish, Czech, Slovak, or Ukrainian, depending on the language ideology of the observer.
I also am more confused than ever about what it means to own villages in that region. I had this picture in my mind of a long-established nobility in at least part of the landscape, with landed folks claiming ancestry going back hundreds of years, but looking at these villages and the estates that claim them, with records going back to the 1500s, it looks like the ruling class had a complete turnover every two or three generations, with partial turnovers between.