Frontier lands” “

Countries – Serbia and Bulgaria – torn for centuries between Byzantium, the West and Moscow; peoples that experienced the evangelising mission of Saints Cyril and Methodius, but also the Turkish yoke and, in more recent years, Communist regimes. The next rendezvous with history will be with the EU… The 27th European Studies Week promoted by the Paul VI Ambrosian Foundation and the Catholic University of Milan is dedicated to the “religious history of Serbia and Bulgaria”. The meeting, to be held from 30 August to 3 September, will be attended by academics and experts from all over the continent. FROM CYRIL AND METHODIUS TO TURKISH RULE. Sante Graciotti, member of the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome, scientific coordinator of the conference, has briefed SIR about the issues to be discussed during the seminar. “Serbia and Bulgaria were formed as nations within the Byzantine Commonwealth; their first evangelization was the work of Byzantine missionaries in the 8th century. But their religious and ecclesiastical history only emerges into the full light of day with the appearance of Saints Cyril and Methodius, in the 9th century. They came from Byzantine-Slav Macedonia. Their mission of evangelising the Slavs, in the local language, would bear important fruits in their lands of origin”. With the birth around the year 1000 of a first Bulgarian empire, then re-absorbed by Byzantium, “a political and cultural exchange began between Bulgaria and Serbia – Graciotti explains – which would give rise to the creation of two splendid empires of political, religious, literary and artistic life, whose influence would also spread to the non-Slav Balkans and to the rest of Slav Eastern Europe, even after their fall under the Turkish yoke in the later fourteenth century”. The power of the Ottoman Empire would mark for the two countries “a different kind of development and also a growing backwardness, from which Serbia only began to emerge in the early 18th and Bulgaria in the second half of the 19th century”. HISTORIANS AND EXPERTS FROM ALL OVER EUROPE. Graciotto sees for Sofia and Belgrade “the task of finding a congenial intermediate role between Constantinople, Moscow and the Western powers. At the same time, they will have to come to terms with the problem of the increasingly secularised cultural models that come from the West”. Among other things, the seminar will tackle “important themes for Western Catholicism: the relations of the Holy See with the two Orthodox Churches of Serbia and Bulgaria, the existence in the two countries of Catholic communities and hierarchies both of Roman rite and Greek rite, and interconfessional dialogue”. A particular focus “will be reserved for the history of saintliness in the area: that of the monasteries of Athos, Serbia and Kosovo, Bulgaria and Macedonia; that of the canonized princes and bishops; and that of the martyrs of the faith”. The speakers, mainly historians, will include: Aksinia Džurova (University of Sofia), Gerhard Podskalsky (Hochschule Sankt Georgen, Frankfurt), Tanja Subotin (Belgrade), Vasil Todorov Gyuzelev (Sofia), Christian Hannick (Würzburg), Darko Tanskoviæ (ambassador of Serbia and Montenegro to the Holy See), Kyrill Pavlikianov (Sofia), and William R. Veder (Chicago). SEMINAL ADDRESS BY GIOVANNI BATTISTA montini. The Director of the Paul VI Foundation, Luciano Vaccaro, explains that the studies week (for information: e-mail fapgazzada@tin.it) forms part of a project born in the late 1970s, that aimed “to delineate a comprehensive picture of the religious history of our continent, through the study of the history of the individual nations and the particular characteristics of the various peoples”. The idea took its cue from a suggestion made by the then archbishop of Milan, Giovanni Battista Montini, future Pope Paul VI, who gave an address in 1958 that was to become famous and that today, in a delicate phase of stalemate of the EU, confirms all its actuality: “This union that is taking shape and that fluctuates, from year to year, between a conclusion that seems happy and a disappointment that seems fatal – said Montini about the recently established EEC -, is a fragile and precarious union”; “only on the day on which circulation of thought, of consanguinity and friendship, of a common culture, will fuse together the various peoples that compose this Europe that is still in disarray, will a spiritual union take place. We have a need for a single soul to compose Europe, if its unity is truly to be strong, coherent, conscientious and beneficent”. Twenty years later, in 1979, the experience of the Study Weeks began, under the guidance of a convinced pro-European , Henri Brugmans. “The programme – adds Vaccaro – continued with seminars on Germany, France and other nations, alternating with countries and peoples of Eastern Europe (the Balkan area, Russia, Poland, the Baltic states, Hungary), and those of the West, such as Portugal, Spain, England, the Nordic peoples, Austria, Greece and Ireland”. ———————————————————————————————————– Sir Europa (English) N.ro assoluto : 1406 N.ro relativo : 55 Data pubblicazione : 20/07/05