tradition

This article is an expanded version of a lecture delivered in the autumn of 2016 upon receiving an honorary degree from the University of Sofia. The author focuses on the geo-cultural metaphor of the South in Polish and Bulgarian cultures. The starting point is the so-called keystone or dominant tradition, shaped in each case by the respective country’s monoculture of the “communist" era, which continues to exert considerable cultural influence in both countries. In her discussion of the metaphor of the South as an axiologically and emotively functionalized element of the two national imageries, the researcher tackles the way in which Romanitas or “Roman-ness” continues to be applied in modern contexts. In Poland, conservative circles tend to regard Roman-ness as something that’s been fully absorbed and incorporated into the philosophical fabric of “national” republicanism, whereas Bulgarian conservatives treat it as a component of the land’s material heritage, complemented in spiritual terms by the Thracian tradition of classical antiquity. Based on Rémi Brague's cultural typology, the author breaks new discursive ground by opening up for inquiry the cultural consequences of a nation’s various forms of interaction with its cultural roots and sources.