Call for papers Anniversary Celebrations in Central and Eastern Europe

You are cordially invited to participate in a panel entitled "Anniversary Celebrations in Central and Eastern Europe", which we are organising as part of BASEES Conference 2022. (8-10 April 2022, Univeristy of Cambridge). 

Paper submission

From the nineteenth to the twenty-first century, lavish celebrations of various anniversaries were essential elements of creating modern national identities in Central and Eastern Europe and the historical politics of particular states.

Although our project concerns the celebration of the millennium of Christianity in Central and Eastern Europe, it has and may have a broader dimension. It is part of a particular model of creating a modern community - corresponding to the needs of a current state, nation, and religious group.

The subject of our interest will be the influence of such anniversary celebrations on the culture of particular countries or nations of Central and Eastern Europe and the opposite perspective: the form (and content) adopted by (during) these events based on a specific cultural model. The transnational dimension and cross-fertilization between countries will also be an essential element of our interest. 

Various kinds of celebrations, anniversaries, commemorations, parades, and state and church ceremonies played a significant role in all these projects. They are an essential part of what Terrence Roger and Eric Hobsbawm once called "invention of tradition". 

In the case of Central and Eastern Europe, however, it is associated with the ongoing processes of the emergence of modern nations in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and nation-states in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

The history of these events can be inscribed both in the history of politics of memory, the building of national identities, the marriage of Church and state (and sometimes mutual competition), as well as the presentation of specific values (e.g., national) or (political) beliefs.