Stamatia Fotiadou (Relevance of the Humanities Fellowships, March – July ’23) will present her research on:

Greek and Bulgarian Perceptions of National Catastrophes (1919-1922). A Comparative Approach

on 01 June, 2023 (Thursday) at 16:30 h.

Moderated by Slavka Karakusheva.

Abstract: Notwithstanding the fact that the ideological framework of Balkan nationalism as well as it’s implications in the redrawing of the political boundaries in the Balkans have been intensively studied, the way nations perceived events which led to ideological crisis and/or had disastrous consequences for their expansionist policies undermining their Great Ideas still remains overlooked. By the same token, equivalently unexplored is the issue of a comparative approach with respect to analyzing how nations that shared common paths in their national-building process perceived their national catastrophes. In this respect, this project will attempt to shed light on the vacillations of Greek and Bulgarian national narratives in periods of national disaster, that is the second Bulgarian national disaster of 1919 and the Greek national disaster of 1922, also known as the Asia Minor Catastrophe. The research, which is mostly based upon analysis of the Bulgarian and Greek press, focuses on two main aspects; the intranational and the comparative approach. The intranational approach will attempt to answer the following questions: A) Do national catastrophes have the same starting point in both Greek and Bulgarian as case studies? B) According to the definition we gave above, does the national catastrophe have the same features in both cases? C) Are there any signs of internalization or externalization of the national catastrophe? D) The emotional reactions with regard to the national catastrophe was instant or lasting?
Based on the results of this intranational research the comparative approach will detect convergences and divergences in the way Greeks and Bulgarians perceived their national catastrophes.