балкански

Travel writing's manipulations of Orient and Occident for a whole variety of purposes may have reinforced the concept of an East/West dichotomy dividing up the world, but especially by applying these labels within the writer's own society they have also helped detach notions of 'the West' from any geographical reference point. The Orient can exist within the very heart of Western Europe, its presence marked by burek, or the state of the toilets, while the Occident is everywhere by now. In this writing, 'East' and 'West' become the coordinates of a purely moral map, rather than a physical one, something which at least implies the possibility of choice and change. Similarly, cosmopolitan travellers may have denied the salience of the East/West divide in ways that only allowed a few to escape, but even such limited re-mappings of the world invite readers to imagine themselves as equal members of a more inclusive community. It's a starting point - modest, but real. Travel writing from the Balkans, in the end, is a hybrid genre in more that one way. It has perpetuated systems of difference that operate at the expense of others, but at the same time it has opened up different ways of seeing the world, mixing up margins and centres, positive and negative, both to reinforce and to challenge the travellers' own societies' social and political practices.

This paper aims to illustrate the functionality of the term "sites of memory" with reference to the study of two national canons with overlapping time-space continuum. I use the term as defined by A. Szpociсski (1986) but I give it a "territorial" dimension. By "sites of memory" I understand a past space-time continuum that embraces past events and their participants. Even in biblical times, places were named after events so to record for posterity their spiritual character (E. Dressler, 2003). The Akeda, or the offering of Isaac, took place on the Mount of "har-ha-Morija", which means "the Eternal One watches". Mount Morija, i.e. the site itself, is in this case treated as the witness of the event. The "sites of memory" analysed in this paper verbalise values that are treated by Bulgarian and Macedonian elites as an integral part of their identity. Owing to its connotations in both cultures, the concept of Macedonia determines the semantics of the image of Nikola Vapcarov, a poet belonging to both national canons. Vacparov as an image and symbol of the territory functions in both national circulations by token of his territorial association. Thus, the image of Vapcarov is a mythologem of Macedonia in two separate national canons, Macedonian and Bulgarian. An analysis of Vapcarov's poetry and his biography as part of the symbolic concept of Macedonia in both national cultures confirms at the same time the functionality of the term "sites of (collective) memory" with reference to phenomena, which emerge in the environment of cultural and ethnic contacts.

The text traces the memory of Islamisation in various Balkan narratives created and spread in different historical periods and in different political conjunctures. It seems that this process, thought of as the most traumatic (at least in Bulgarian memory), is interpreted by other national historiographies and folk narratives in a completely opposite way. Islamisation is remembered as the liberation from the aspirations of the Catholic and Orthodox churches (in Bosnia) or as a national awareness and cohesion (in Albania). Weather the different narratives choose as a motivation of the process the grievances of heretics ( the Bogomils thesis ) or the adoption of Islam primarily by the aristocracy which wanted to keep its property and privileges (class thesis) in most cases the conversion is presented as voluntary . Some isolated cases of violence are mentioned but a mass forced Islamisation policy of the Ottoman Empire is dismissed - with the exception of Bulgaria. The attitude of the non-Muslim majorities to the converts and the interconnection of the narratives with specific political conjunctures are also traced.