Journal articles: 'Travel / Europe / Eastern' – Grafiati (2024)

Abstract:

An Irish Nationalist Perspective on Eastern Europe: William Smith O’Brien’s Travel Journals, 1861-1864 The travel journals of Irish nationalist politician William Smith O’Brien, challenge the claim by Lar-ry Wolff of a general western European condescension towards eastern Europe from the eighteenth century onwards. Hostility towards British rule in Ireland led Smith O’Brien to celebrate and identify with the Hungarians and Poles in their struggles against their imperial rulers during his travels in the 1860s. He concluded, however, that the Irish suffered more under Britain than these nations under either Austria or Russia.

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Eastern Europe is among the major sources of migrants who travel for work to other European nations. In this research, in-depth interviews and analysis of legal cases of migration in Bulgaria reveal that the typical kinds of human trafficking in the region are sexual exploitation, labor exploitation, forced servitude, and trafficking of pregnant women for the sale of their babies. For each type, I examine victim profiles, recruitment strategies, transportation, and the types of control and exploitation that traffickers use. Comparisons are drawn between the Bulgarian findings and patterns in other Eastern European nations.

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During the Twentieth Century, foreign travel underwent a process of democratisation. Increasingly, through the development of package holidays to ever more far-flung destinations, leisure tourism for the first time allowed ordinary people to experience different cultures first hand. With the increased availability and affordability of foreign travel, actively promoted by travel agencies with strong left-wing political affiliations and supported and facilitated by international friendship societies, the number of western tourists visiting Eastern Europe multiplied through the 1960s and 1970s despite the Cold War. This paper will explore western tourism in Eastern Europe during the Cold War in a Scottish context through the material culture of travel collected during this period, focusing on the collection of Miss Eileen Crowford (1913 - 1990) held by National Museums Scotland. Miss Crowford was a life-long Edinburgh resident and an avid collector. Her collection spans the 20th century and includes a significant collection of costume jewellery, mass-produced decorative arts and travel souvenirs. Drawing upon previously unresearched material in the archive and objects acquired on her travels, both items that she bought and things that she was given or obtained as part of the travel experience, provides a case study through which to explore engagement with communist culture and politics in a Scottish context. This paper discusses how these trips were being marketed to prospective Scottish travellers, and how souvenir production and distribution, as well as conditions of access, reflect an often-mediated experience of the Soviet East.

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The French romantic poet Alphonse de Lamartine traveled to the East—namely, Syria, Palestine, and parts of the Balkans—in 1832–33, with his wife and daughter. His account of these travels, the Voyage en Orient, was published in 1835 and went on to become one of the major Eastern travel-narratives of the nineteenth century. Edward Said was scathing about it in Orientalism: “What remains of the Orient in Lamartine's prose is not very substantial at all … the sites he has visited, the people he has met, the experiences he has had, are reduced to a few echoes in his pompous generalizations” (179). I would not dissent from this assessment. But Said was not the first to remark on the nature of Lamartine's representations of the Orient. In 1859, twenty-four years after the French poet's visit to the East, a young Beiruti poet and journalist, Khalīl al-Khūrī, made an Arabic translation and commentary, with some sharp criticisms, of one of the poems included in Voyage en Orient.

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Abstract This study is dealing with the travel notes and diaries in Hungarian and German from the 1950s and 1960s. The two examined authors are Karl (Károly) Kerényi (1897–1973) and Gábor Devecseri (1917–1971). Kerényi’s travel notes and diaries reveal the thoughts of a very wide-ranging scholar. Devecseri’s volume Crickets of Epidaurus, Sing (Epidauroszi tücskök, szóljatok) is actually a collection, condensed into the history of four trips: three to Greece and one to Italy. The present study examines the characteristics of these two perspectives, namely, the Western vs. the Eastern, the classic scholar’s vs. the scholarly poet’s using the contexts of travelogues and cultural memory as a point of departure. While for Kerényi, travel is a natural way of life, Devecseri travels and uses his idea based on his reading experiences as starting points. In the texts of both authors, we are confronted with both the archival and the current way of life of cultural memory.

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Focusing on the development of travel between the borderlands of Ukraine and Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe, this article explores what it meant to be Soviet outside the Russian core of the USSR between the mid-1950s and the mid-1980s. The cautious opening of the Soviet border was part of a larger attempt to find fresh sources of popular support and enthusiasm for the regime's “communist” project. Before the Prague Spring of 1968 in particular, official policies and narratives of travel thus praised local inhabitants who crossed the Soviet border for supposedly overcoming age-old hatreds to build a brighter future in Eastern Europe. By the 1970s, however, smuggling and cultural consumption discredited the idea of “internationalist friendship.” This encouraged residents of Ukraine to speak and write about the continuing importance of the Soviet border. The very idea of Sovietness was defined in national terms, as narratives of travel emphasized that Soviet citizens were inherently different from ethno-national groups in the people's democracies. Eastern Europe thus emerged as an “other” that highlighted the Soviet character of territories incorporated into the USSR after 1939, helping to obscure western Ukraine's troubled past and leading to the emergence of new social hierarchies in the region.

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This auto-ethnographic/biographical account deals with the experiences that a non-flying Northern-Ireland-born anthropologist living in the Baltic States has of mobility, infrastructure and connectedness, in particular with reference to academic and personal life. The article considers the movements which a career as an academic anthropologist requires, as well as the difficulties and intricacies that being located in Eastern Europe has for such land travel. Based on years of experience, it questions travel time and cost with particular reference to the seeming need to travel towards Western Europe in order to remain connected to the discipline’s main ‘movements’. The article also examines solutions such as the Via Baltica, and looks forward to improvements that new infrastructure (such as high-speed railways) can bring.

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This essay tackles the problem of spatial imaginations, representations, and "mental maps." Its main point of reference is Larry Wolff's thesis that the division of Europe into an Eastern - backward and uncivilized - part, on the one hand, and a Western - modem and civilized - part, on the other, can be traced back to the late-eighteenth century. In the Enlightenment, according to Wolff, philosophers, writers, and above all travelers created this normative and value laden inner-European dichotomy. From the perspective of German travelogues on Poland and France published between roughly 1750 and 1850, Europe and its inner division appears in a completely different light. The perceptions, for instance, of travel infrastructure, rural life, and small provincial towns are widely identical. From the perspective of a bourgeois, educated, mostly Protestant traveier, originating from an urban background, the main dichotomy around 1800 was not the division between Eastern and Western Europe. The cleavages followed the division between urban and rural culture, bourgeois and peasant milieu, or between denominations, such as Protestantism and Catholicism.

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Abstract: This essay tackles the problem of spatial imaginations, representations, and "mental maps." Its main point of reference is Larry Wolff's thesis that the division of Europe into an Eastern - backward and uncivilized - part, on the one hand, and a Western - modem and civilized - part, on the other, can be traced back to the late-eighteenth century. In the Enlightenment, according to Wolff, philosophers, writers, and above all travelers created this normative and value laden inner-European dichotomy. From the perspective of German travelogues on Poland and France published between roughly 1750 and 1850, Europe and its inner division appears in a completely different light. The perceptions, for instance, of travel infrastructure, rural life, and small provincial towns are widely identical. From the perspective of a bourgeois, educated, mostly Protestant traveler, originating from an urban background, the main dichotomy around 1800 was not the division between Eastern and Western Europe. The cleavages followed the division between urban and rural culture, bourgeois and peasant milieu, or between denominations, such as Protestantism and Catholicism.

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In his landmark study Inventing Eastern Europe (1994) the historian Larry Wolff documented the first attempts to partition the continent imaginatively into western and eastern domains. This partitioning, he argues, was undertaken by writers from the hubs of the European Enlightenment, who traveled into Imperial Russia and wrote about their experiences abroad. In their accounts of travel these writers “intellectually combin[ed]” easterly geographies and peoples “into a coherent whole” and compared that whole with westerly spaces, thereby “establishing the developmental division of the continent.” While Wolff's analysis retains a central place in discourse on the Enlightenment, I suggest that its picture of Europe's mapping is limited by its ocularcentric readings of period texts, and that a different picture emerges if we consider what travelers heard alongside what they saw. Focusing on accounts of listening provided by such travelers as Johann Gottfried Herder, the Hebraist Johann Joachim Bellermann, and the grammarian Gotthard Friedrich Stender, I discuss the way in which the aural registers of their experiences alternately enrich and confound ocularcentric accounts of Europe's imaginary partition. Where travelers saw foreign peoples and scenes, they sometimes heard familiar musics; where they saw an undifferentiated mass of individuals, they often heard a diversity of voices. Drawing on work in sound and media studies, anthropology, and ethnomusicology, I suggest that travelers’ habits of listening deeply inflected their ethnographic imaginings, and vice versa—a situation that reveals the inventing of Eastern Europe to have been a more complex and conflicted project than is generally acknowledged today.

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Angiostrongylus vasorum and Crenosoma vulpis are parasites in the respiratory tract of domestic and wild carnivores. Recently, an increasing number of lungworm infections in dogs has been recognized in Europe. In this report, the results of the first copro-epidemiological study of A. vasorum and C. vulpis in dogs from Slovakia are presented. The Baermann technique and the modified flotation method with zinc sulphate solution (specific gravity 1.2) was used for lungworm detection. In addition, conventional PCR was performed for species confirmation. The majority of lungworm infections were found in the eastern part of the country. A relatively high prevalence (4.13%) of A. vasorum was detected in different parts of Slovakia. Infection was detected most frequently incidentally in asymptomatic dogs. Within this study, crenosomosis was detected for the first time in dogs from Slovakia. Since one infected dog had no travel history, the case is considered autochthonous. An autochthonous case report of angiostrongylosis in a Hanoverian hound puppy from central Slovakia is also described.

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In this paper I utilise Edward Said’s framework of Orientalism in order to investigate how the regions that the European explorers have mistakenly or negligently identified in their imaginaries as “the East” are brought into the colonial order through an a priori assumption of their inferiority to the West. I turn to South America and Eastern Europe as the two frontiers which make these operations visible. Through the analysis of primary sources such as travel journals and letters from Spanish explorers and conquistadors during the age of encounters, as well as the writings the English and French travellers made during their visits to Eastern Europe during the Enlightenment, I demonstrate how the Western European Orientalist imaginaries remain persistent through the ages despite the geographical explorations and geopolitical changes, and instead of disappearing, migrate to create the new orients as the realms of European otherness.

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The Bukovina as an island of “Deutschthum” in the East? The diffusion of German culture and its perception in travel reports from the 19th centuryThe following seminar paper outlines the description of the Bukovina, a part of the Habsburg Monarchy, in selected travel reports from the 19th century. It explains why the authors of these reports perceived the Bukovina as an island of German culture in Eastern Europe, which was otherwise labelled as barbaric and underdeveloped. It will be shown that the authors’ subjective observations are not compatible with up-to-date findings of historical research.

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Purpose. The presentation of results and analyses regarding on the journeys of ethical, cultural and social provenance in narratives available in contemporary Polish literature illustrated by chosen examples. Method. To prepare the presentation, qualitative methods were used together with the analysis technique of the content/plot of novels of autobiographies of contemporary Polish prose writers and travelers. The author analysed representative texts of such highly-regarded figures as philosophers by profession – Marek Kamiński, Joanna Bator, Krzysztof Środa – and wellknown writers: Andrzej Stasiuk, Krzysztof Varga, Ziemowit Szczerek and others. Findings. Research showed the authors’ great interest in history, culture, ethical and social issues during their numerous peregrinations all over Poland, Southern Europe and Central and Eastern Europe. The narration of the chosen author-travelers contains numerous reflections of existential-philosophical and cultural-social nature, focusing on sociological analysis. The interpretative framework in the works of the discussed authors fluctuates around local, global and glocal problems. Research and conclusions limitations. The study concerned only the works of Polish authors and concentrated on their journeys all over Poland, Southern and Central and Eastern Europe; borderlands, peripheral and cross-border areas. The phenomenon of the journeys of the analysed authors lies in the fact that their experiences are subjective, and their expeditions are undertaken to a considerable degree in mental space, a depicted world; they are unique imaginary adventures. Practical implications. Reading the works discussed in the article expands knowledge on culture, history and the society of countries where the authors undertake their ethically responsible travels. Their books can successfully become an element of literary/cultural tourism. Originality. In literature on the subject works concerning individual authors discussed in the article are dispersed. The advantage of the presented text is the depiction and analysis of the creative output of the examined authors in one place, including the characteristics of their journeys: spiritual, culinary, pilgrimage, cognitive and escape. Type of paper. The article is a review and a scientific, reflective essay.

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The Roma/Gypsies are the largest, poorest and youngest ethnic group in Europe. During the past decade, the Roma from Central and Eastern Europe were of considerable public concern due to a large inflow of Roma emigrants into Western European countries. Applications for international protection submitted by the Roma from the Western Balkans became a substantial part of the asylum case-load at the EU level. More recently, however, a new wave of migrants, mostly from Syria, Iraq and Afghanistan, has found its way to Europe. As Serbia is classified as a safe country, Serbian nationals have limited chances of being awarded refugee status. Nevertheless undeterred, the Serbian Roma/Gypsies continue to travel to and apply for asylum in Western European countries. Using data from original fieldwork conducted among Serbian Roma women, we argue that their desire to travel and possibly reside in one of the more affluent Western European countries is connected to the fact that they have extensive kinship ties in those counties. Kinship ties, in brief, explain much of current Roma migration practices.

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In the twenty years since communism’s collapse, scholars of postcommmunist Central and Eastern Europe have increasingly converged on the insight that long-run continuities reaching back to the nineteenth century are crucial in shaping some of the most important contemporary macro- and micro-level political outcomes in the region. Today’s political cleavages, political discourses, patterns of partisan affiliation, institutional choice, and the quality of democracy itself all appear to correlate to a remarkable degree with patterns from the “deep past.” To date, social scientists, however, have not sufficiently reflected on what might explain this finding and how to study the impact of the general phenomenon of the long-run in the region. This article makes two contributions. First, we contend that in general, long-run continuities may ironically be more important in contexts of discontinuous institutional change such as in Central and Eastern Europe since frequent institutional disjunctures paradoxically open chasms between formal and informal institutions, preventing gradual change and producing patterns of institutional mimicry to cope with institutional ruptures. This insight may travel to other contexts of weak institutionalization. Second, we reject efforts to identify “deep causes” of contemporary outcomes without specifying how intervening events and crises intersect with these longer-run patterns. The article resuscitates Fernand Braudel’s notion of the longue duree to propose a new cumulative approach to the study of the long-run that complicates accounts that too starkly juxtapose precommunist and communist-era “legacies” on the present and argues that scholars should study how these periods reinforce each other and jointly determine contemporary outcomes.

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In terms of climate related security risks, the region of South-Eastern Europe (SEE) can be identified as one of the world’s hot spots. As weather-related hazards continue to increase in numbers and spatial distribution, risk perception in the tourism industry becomes even more important. Additionally, people’s perception of natural hazards is one of the key elements in their decision-making process when choosing a travel destination. Although a vast number of studies have examined aspects of risk perception, an integrated approach which considers both objective and subjective factors related to the tourism industry and hydro-meteorological hazards remains relatively scarce. This pioneering study inspects the causality between objective perceived risks, as well as subjective risk factors. A methodological approach and the obtained results present a certain novelty since the previous conceptualized Psychological Preparedness for Disaster Threat Scale (PPDTS) was applied for the first time in the tourism industry. The obtained results reveal the presence of a statistically significant relationship between objective risks and certain subjective risk factors (gender, age, education, prior experience, anticipation, and awareness). Therefore, this study may offer a conceptual platform for both theoretical and practical implications for enhanced approaches oriented toward more qualitative risk management at a given travel destination, in regions prone to hydro-meteorological hazards.

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Most stimulating — for this Anglophone historian, at least — has been the reintegration of religious history into mainstream social and political history generally, and also the heightened sense of an international movement embracing an entire continent and beyond. We no longer make artificial distinctions between the Reformations of the Atlantic Isles and those on the mainland; we can see more clearly what is local and what is part of an international phenomenon; and we can also appreciate the artificiality of considering Protestantism in isolation from reform movements in both the Pre-Reformation Western Church and Post-Tridentine Roman Catholicism. I commend the advantages of emancipating religious history from specific religious commitment. I also discuss the effect of the breaking down of barriers to travel and research in the wake of the 1989–90 revolutions in the recovery of our sense of the importance of Reformations in Eastern Europe, and also highlight our realization that a heritage of Southern European dissent shaped the heterodoxy that dissolved Reformation certainties.

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The travel and tourism industry has numerous components that contribute to the economy and create new jobs since it is a service sector that incorporates other service networks. Furthermore, it acts as a catalyst in sustaining investment attractiveness and economic indicators such as closing the current account deficit. The Travel and Tourism Competition Index utilized in this research has four dimensions and fourteen indicators. In this research, the Entropy-based VIKOR approach, which is a Multi-Criteria Decision-Making method, Spearman Correlation analysis, and K-means clustering analysis were employed to propose a methodological novelty in this field. The study analyzed the competitiveness of significant European and Eurasian nations based on key indicators. According to country evaluations, Spain, France, Germany, the United Kingdom, Italy, and Switzerland differ from other countries in a positive sense and with a significant difference. Eastern European and Balkan nations are often at the bottom of the table. As a consequence of this study, it is expected that the results of future studies using other methodologies or methods will be compared with this study. At the same time, it is aimed to explain the relevant indicators and their dimensions.

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Vilnius University This article discusses the contribution to the studies of the ‘Eastern’ and ‘Southern’ lands in the 18th century by naturalist, travel writer, and ethnologist George Forster, who had accompanied his father, Johann Reinhold Forster, on Captain James Cook’s expedition of 1772–5 to circumnavigate the globe and who was a professor of natural history at Vilnius University from 1784 to 1787. The paper presents the background of European long-distance navigation, examines Forster’s contribution to Cook’s second voyage, and reconsiders his work completed at the Vilnian Academy against the broader perspective of the European notions of travel literature and ethnography of the Pacific region, as well as the prospect of Oriental studies, gradually emerging as an academic field in Western Europe and, later on, in Vilnius.

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This article analyses five fourteenth-century Old Norse travel narratives in light of the learned geographical tradition of medieval Iceland. Three of the narratives, Þorvalds þáttr víðfǫrla, Eiríks saga víðfǫrla, and Yngvars saga víðfǫrla, focus on the travels of Nordic people to eastern Europe and Asia; while the latter two, Eiríks saga rauða and Grœnlendinga saga, tell of travels to the continent later named North America. While the travels to the East deal with pilgrimage and the search for the terrestrial Paradise in the service of individual salvation and missionary activities in Scandinavia and Iceland more specifically, the travels to the West are focused on the violent conquest and Christianization of newfound peripheral areas and their peoples. What these narratives have in common, and owe to the learned (Plinian) tradition, is their dehumanized view of foreign and strange people: the giants and monsters of the East, and the skrælingar (indigenous peoples) and einfœtingar (sciopods) of the West. In these sagas travels to the East, while dangerous, introduce heroes to courtly manners, encyclopedic knowledge, and salvation; whereas travels to the West lead to mayhem and death and all attempts at settlement there fail miserably, making Greenland the westernmost outpost of Christianity in the world. This article aims to show how this learned tradition was adapted for use in saga literature to contrast the monstrous and heathen periphery with the more central and piously Christian Iceland.

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We describe the first case of chancroid seen in the Czech Republic, diagnosed in a 40-year-old heterosexual HIV-positive man. Despite genital localization of the ulcer, the transmission of Haemophilus ducreyi infection in our patient remains unclear, as he denied having sexual intercourse and he did not travel outside the Czech Republic for several months before the ulcer appeared. The correct diagnosis has been revealed by a multiplex nucleic acid amplification test. Physicians in countries in the eastern and central Europe region should be aware that chancroid can occur in their patients.

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The volume offers a representative collection of Shakespeare festivals from the European continent in the form of individual case studies. The book makes the case for a “pan-European and post-English” Shakespeare by providing evaluative and interpretative accounts of both well-known and less-focused festivals in Eastern and Western Europe. The essays combine an external, objective eye with an internal perspective, in just the right balance. Shakespeare on European Festival Stages is a high-quality travel companion, providing a brand-new Shakespearean Grand Tour for all interested theatre scholars and theatre-goers.

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Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever virus (CCHFV) is an arthropod-borne virus (arbovirus), mainly transmitted by ticks, belonging to the genus Orthonairovirus (family Nairoviridae, order Bunyavirales). CCHFV causes a potentially severe, or even fatal, human disease, and it is widely distributed in Africa, Asia, eastern Europe and, more recently, in South-western Europe. Until a few years ago, no cases of Crimean-Congo hemorrhagic fever (CCHF) had been reported in western Europe, with the exception of several travel-associated cases. In 2010, the CCHFV was reported for the first time in South-western Europe when viral RNA was obtained from Hyalomma lusitanicum ticks collected from deer in Cáceres (Spain). Migratory birds from Africa harboring CCHFV-infected ticks and flying to Spain appear to have contributed to the establishment of the virus (genotype III, Africa-3) in this country. In addition, the recent findings in a patient and in ticks from deer and wild boar of viral sequences similar to those from eastern Europe (genotype V, Europe-1), raise the possibility of the introduction of CCHFV into Spain through the animal trade, although the arrival by bird routes cannot be ruled out (Africa-4 has been also recently detected). The seropositive rates of animals detected in regions of South-western Spain suggest an established cycle of tick-host-tick in certain areas, and the segment reassortment detected in the sequenced virus from one patient evidences a high ability to adaptation of the virus. Different ixodid tick genera can be vectors and reservoirs of the virus, although Hyalomma spp. are particularly relevant for its maintenance. This tick genus is common in Mediterranean region but it is currently spreading to new areas, partly due to the climate change and movement of livestock or wild animals. Although to a lesser extent, travels with our pets (and their ticks) may be also a factor to be considered. As a consequence, the virus is expanding from the Balkan region to Central Europe and, more recently, to Western Europe where different genotypes are circulating. Thus, seven human cases confirmed by molecular methods have been reported in Spain from 2016 to August 2020, three of them with a fatal outcome. A One Health approach is essential for the surveillance of fauna and vector populations to assess the risk for humans and animals. We discuss the risk of CCHFV causing epidemic outbreaks in Western Europe.

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AbstractIn recent years, cultural historians interested in the Grand Tour have written divided histories focusing on travelers from one particular nation or region. Drawing from what these researchers report on educational traveling as well as from primary sources, it is now possible to put the Grand Tour into a European perspective. As to travelers from Germany, there is a wide scope of source material at hand, comprising funeral sermons, university rolls, travelogues, travel accounts, and correspondence. As a comparative perspective clearly reveals, educational travelling was vital in shaping the identity of gentlemanly travelers. Though starting out as a transnational social practice common to most aristocrats from northern and eastern Europe and to a lesser degree also to the nobilities from Romance countries, it contributed to sharpen notions of “the own” and “the other” towards the end of the Early Modern Period.

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The fundamental question is whether the non-Western world is capable of developing our form of liberal democratic self-government, despite our differences in tradition and culture. The author taps on several critical differences of interpretation of what we consider to be integral to our form of government, such as John Locke's concept of “civil society”; the idea of “pluralism”; and the concept of “inherent human rights” counsel, which have distinctly different meanings in the West compared to those of Central and Eastern Europe. Interestingly, the differences are indicative of the profound cultural and historic differences of the societies engaged in the interpretation and adaption of these ideas. The author is optimistic in the regard of democracy “traveling,” provided that individuals recognize their own identity within the democratic society and acquire practice in exercising their freedoms. In this way, not only will democracy flourish under previously dictatorial regimes, but will continue to persist where it is already established.

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The present article is concerned with the role of metonymy in gastrolinguistic landscape, specifically with its role in creating a message for guests in the names of restaurants. Linguistic landscape is a relatively novel concept in contemporary linguistics, its methodology still in the flux, while its topics and approaches keep diversifying. The purpose of this article is to show that there is also a very important cognitive linguistic aspect to it. Specifically, the article points out the role of metonymy in creative examples of restaurant names that contain one or more elements from a language different from the rest of the restaurant name, focusing on the gastrolinguistic landscape of Central and Eastern Europe, primarily Croatia and Hungary. It is demonstrated that that in addition to some more general cultural models of language, speakers also have a multitude of specific folk models of particular languages, mostly based on stereotypes, which in turn are also metonymic. These activate a series of metonymic inferencing steps most of the time resulting in complex cumulative metonymies such that one is superimposed on the other, the target of one simultaneously functioning as the source for the next one, and so forth.

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Abstract François Maspero is best known as the owner of the radical Latin Quarter bookstore La joie de lire and the founder and editor of Éditions Maspero, but he was also a writer, a translator, and a journalist. Maspero published several novels and wrote for media outlets like Le Monde and France Culture. He wrote about his travels throughout Eastern Europe, Israel-Palestine, Algeria, and the Caribbean, and published literature reviews, obituaries, and even his testimony of the events of 17 October 1961. This article is the first comprehensive analysis of his work as a print journalist for Le Monde, notably as a travel writer. While Maspero critiqued journalism in both of his novel-travelogues, Les passagers du Roissy-Express (1990) and Balkans-Transit (1997), this article argues that his journalism was a breeding ground for his novel-writing and vice versa. The intersection between journalism, novel writing, and militancy also allowed him to create a multidirectional activism, which reanimated past militancy to understand contemporary political crises.

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European countries that are normally associated with freedom of movement have temporarily closed their internal (within the European Union) and external borders in response to the outbreak of COVID-19 starting spring 2020. Border closures have heavily impacted the whole European region, including its Eastern European neighbours. As of March, Ukraine stopped all regular passenger services, so that people were not able to leave the country by plane, train or bus. It seriously complicated routine activities of those Ukrainians who were planning to travel out of their country through Europe (and Russia) for various purposes, including work, study, and family visits.

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Abstract This article is focused on the visions of pilgrimages to Rabbi Nachman’s site located in Uman, Ukraine. Research results are based on the analysis of in-depth interviews with eighteen Americans who have made the pilgrimage, supplemented by reading in secondary sources about pilgrimage and travel, especially American Jewish travel to Eastern Europe. Emphasis is made on the perception of both place and locals, as well as upon the leading motives and characteristics of pilgrimage. This research sheds light upon the role of existing stereotypes and personal encounters in cross-cultural issues. Dominant attitudes of pilgrims to locals in Uman may be characterized in the frame of the conceptual trio of “background fear,” “historical aftertaste,” and “learned neutrality.” Huge differences between the understanding of Uman as a place for pilgrimage and a space with inhabitants raise the questions of parallel historical heritages bound within the same territory and time.

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Abstract In 1630, Guillaume Le Vasseur, sieur de Beauplan, travelled to the lands of Poland-Lithuania to begin a seventeen-year military career in the Crown army. The purpose of the Beauplan’s Ukraine (BU) project is to provide a set of open access, georeferenced databases for the populated places, rivers, river fords, river rapids, islands, forests, mountains, valleys, and travel paths that are shown on a selection of maps created by Beauplan. The purpose of this document is to describe how these databases and related materials can be accessed and applied by scholars, with the ultimate goal of this work being to convert the rich source of information provided by Beauplan’s maps into a viable instrument for the laboratory of the historian of south-eastern Europe in Early Modern times.

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New global developments point towards a more demanding tourist and a preference for tailor-made travel arrangements. The competition is fierce and quality improvement a general trend. The most countries in south-eastern Europe have started tourism quality enhancement projects. The key element of these processes will be an internationally compatible system of professional education. In order to develop educational norms which will meet the needs of European tourism and hospitality industry, Faculty of Hotel Management Opatija has within the frame of the joint project with Manchester Metropolitan University Hotel & Tourism Management Education Development taken the first steps towards international accreditation of its curricula.

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Abstract This paper provides an examination of tourism in the New Member States of the European Union from the date of accession until the last year for which data is available (2014), assessing not only the importance of tourism for the New Member States economy, but also the factors and trends that might affect this industry. Predictions for tourism after joining the EU had been confident and the statistical findings confirmed that the outcomes had been to a great extent encouraging and favourable. Considerable research has been devoted to tourism in the developed countries from Europe, the so-called Old Member States, but rather less attention has been paid to tourism in the Central Eastern Europe, the New Member States region. In this regard, the paper will start with an overview of the current state of the literature on this topic, section that precedes a presentation of European bodies and policies in the travel and tourism field. According to The World Bank Database (World Tourism Organization, 2016), the number of international inbound tourists in the countries Newest Members of EU increased on average three times and in many cases this is partly a consequence of the Community’s accession policy and the market oriented policies in the new Member States (Enterprise and Industry Directorate-General of the European Commission, 2007). Time series will be analysed in order to identify specific trends in the tourism industry, but also in an attempt to characterize the European integration impact on the New Member States’ tourism. Main future challenges and opportunities in the travel and tourism industry will also be sketched, so the paper to better serve not only participants in the academic community and practitioners in the tourism business, but also financial market parties or consultants.

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Mosquito-borne viruses are the cause of some of the greatest burdens to human health worldwide, particularly in tropical regions where both human populations and mosquito numbers are abundant. Due to a combination of anthropogenic change, including the effects on global climate and wildlife migration there is strong evidence that temperate regions are undergoing repeated introduction of mosquito-borne viruses and the re-emergence of viruses that previously were not detected by surveillance. In Europe, the repeated introductions of West Nile and Usutu viruses have been associated with bird migration from Africa, whereas the autochthonous transmission of chikungunya and dengue viruses has been driven by a combination of invasive mosquitoes and rapid transcontinental travel by infected humans. In addition to an increasing number of humans at risk, livestock and wildlife, are also at risk of infection and disease. This in turn can affect international trade and species diversity, respectively. Addressing these challenges requires a range of responses both at national and international level. Increasing the understanding of mosquito-borne transmission of viruses and the development of rapid detection methods and appropriate therapeutics (vaccines / antivirals) all form part of this response. The aim of this review is to consider the range of mosquito-borne viruses that threaten public health in Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, and the national response of a number of countries facing different levels of threat.

Abstract:

International traveller and acclaimed Swedish-language author Göran Schildt sailed in the Black Sea in the summer of 1963. He was a well-read scholar with a deep interest in the Antiquity and a seasoned traveller with a vast experience of multilingual and multicultural situations. This was the first and last visit of his yacht Daphne to the Black Sea and the Eastern Bloc. Through the eyes of this keen observer, a small aperture can be detected among the bricks in the walls dividing Europe. A window had been opened by world politicians in the Iron Curtain at the end of the 1950s. Although there were periods of high global tension, new possibilities for travel and tourism were created in some Eastern Bloc countries, among them Bulgaria and Romania. Visits by dozens of journalists, writers and artists and thousands of charter tourists from the Western Bloc over the next few decades opened up new windows to the world beyond the Iron Curtain. Göran Schildt stands out among the Nordic cultural visitors to Bulgaria and Romania in the post-war period. His desire to get acquainted with everyday life and ordinary people, capability to see behind facades and analysing experiences could be defined as journalistic, but his travel writing went deeper. In comparison with some other writers from Finland, who visited Bulgaria or Romania during the Cold War, such as the poet Lassi Nummi or comic fiction writer Arto Paasilinna, and the Bulgarian author Yordan Radichkov who visited Sweden, Schildt’s background, interests and multilingual and multicultural strategies supported the discovery and collection of extensive information and the processing of it into a multidimensional travel book. This article discusses the journey and travel narrative of Göran Schildt from the perspective of multilingual and multicultural strategies for encountering other languages, societies and cultures, and the processing of experiences as recorded in his diary and his popular travel narrative.

Abstract:

Sir Patrick Leigh Fermor (1915-2011) is the writer who managed to turn travelogues into a genre deserving to be called an art form. The contrast between Fermor's travelogue and the new configurations and shapes undertaken by travel writing nowadays becomes comforting through the intrinsic qualities of his écriture: the transformative encounters with known and unknown people, the preference for the adventurous less travelled paths (even on foot) of Central and Eastern Europe before WWII (1933-1939), the assessment of historical events through his own feelings and personal history. Fermor raised the stakes by making his real and reflective voyages grow into the very matter of literature (rather than be a mere setting or an annex of it) because of his erudition and because of his genuine capacity to create authentic connections between himself and the people he met, between past and present, between inter-war years and the post-WWII world, between Western and Eastern cultures in the cold-war era.

Abstract:

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to investigate the extent to which the largest Romanian travel agencies communicate their CSR practices and policies in the online environment, as reflected by the contents of their websites and social media pages, outlining the manner of this online disclosure within specific CSR domains. Design & methodology – The websites and social media pages of the largest Romanian travel agencies, in terms of net turnover, were analyzed considering several variables related to CSR communication/disclosure: having a CSR dedicated section, including CSR reports, emphasizing legal and economic responsibilities, and disclosing workforce, society, market, and environment oriented CSR actions or policies. Findings – The research reveals significant deficiencies and superficiality in communicating CSR in the online environment by the investigated organizations. Only 10% dedicate a section on their website to CSR, none of them include any form of CSR reports, while the most frequent CSR aspects comprised in their online domains can be categorized as market-oriented, service quality being the most emphasized facet, fair pricing and honest/transparent communication being also consistently outlined. Originality of the research – Research on how the members of the tourism distribution sector communicate CSR in the online environment with focus on Central and Eastern Europe has been extremely scarce. This paper’s contribution consists in reducing this literature gap, bringing insights into CSR communication practices from the Central and Eastern European tourism distribution sector. Moreover, the proposed methodology for analyzing travel agencies’ websites and social media pages can be further used in order to research the issue of online CSR communication in other regions or tourism sectors.

Abstract:

The aim of the paper is to assess the level of Millennial travellers’ from Central and Eastern Europe safety estimated by the importance of the security measures implemented in tourism infrastructure (accommodation facilities and tourist attractions) as a way to provide a safer leisure environment. In addition, the paper examines whether tourists’ gender and economic stimulus in the form of reduced travel costs are among the factors which influence the evaluation of the significance of safety measures and the perception of risk. The objective is accomplished through a critical analysis of literature and the survey conducted by the authors among Millennials from Poland, Lithuania and Slovakia. The findings indicate that security measures improve the safety and quality of the tourist experience in respondents from the countries focused on in the survey; however, there are differences in the type of security measures accepted by tourists from individual countries. To have lower travel expenses, they are more willing to accept a lower level of safety during an outbound trip. The research has also revealed that the assessment of security measures varies depending on tourists’ gender.

Abstract:

In the article expression of space imagination with toponyms based on Ukrainian Hetman Danylo Apostol travel journal (1728 year) is considered. The travel journal of the 1728 year belongs to dairy or travelogue which was very popular in European culture in the XVIII century. In the research short characteristics of this type of Cossack chronicle are explained. Toponymic deixis (a part of space) is always used with temporal and personal deixis in the narration. This article shows an attempt to make a complex typology of toponyms and similar topography objects in Ukrainian lands and Eastern and South-Eastern Europe. In the paper «geographical centre» i.e. where hold the biggest number of events of narration were analyzed. An analysis shows that the toponymic deixis centre of narration was in Hetman capital Hlukhiv city. Also, it was given a short explanation of a term horod (город) in this dairy. This research finds grammar categories and lexical tools expressing events and a person’s movement in, between or near towns, villages and other geographical objects. It investigates a category of a forest when it becomes a toponym with own location and characteristics. In this article considered how the author of travel journal marks familiar and far people settlement and in what way writer points well-determined and symbolic spaces. It concluded a strong correlation in detailed description (with name of type and for unknown (for the author or his potential readers) towns. A content analysis demonstrates aspects of using the most common words «Malaya Roseya» and «Ukraina» marking Ukrainian Hatmanate territory. Comparing using names of Cossack state and Ukrainians lands («Malaya Roseya» and «Ukraina») with other dairies of the same epoch and the same social group testify political and ideological views of travelogue‘s author.

Abstract:

Chinese government has developed transport infrastructure rapidly under Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) strategy. The BRI strategy is China's economic development strategies for expanding trade and cultural influence towards countries in western and eastern regions, including ASEAN. The development of BRI strategy is consists of two main components i.e., (i) the Silk Road Economic Belt, follows the historical overland Silk Road through Central Asia, Iran, Turkey and eventually to Europe, and (ii) the Maritime Silk Road, originates in the South China Sea, passing through the Malacca Strait, the Indian Ocean, and the Red Sea and extending into the Mediterranean Sea (Chris & Elizabeth, 2015). Due to the BRI strategy, more than 6000 trains made the journey from China to Europe in 2018, which is an increase of 72% compared to 2017. China has sent more than 11,000 freight trains to Europe and back since the BRI strategy was announced in 2013. Railway networks have been constructed under the BRI strategy for connecting 48 Chinese cities with 42 cities in Europe through Asia. There are many railway infrastructures under the BRI strategy. The China – Laos railway (Vientiane–Boten railway) is one of project under the Silk Road Economic Belt that has been developed for serving as a key infrastructure for the economic corridor between the two countries. In nearly future, this railway will be helped to boost trade, investment and tourism for Lao PDR. and south China's Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region. The Vientiane–Boten railway, especially transportation time will attract both travelers and Logistics Service Providers (LSP), which can be reduced time of journey compared with road mode. In this paper, modal shift potential of travelers and freight on Kunming-Bangkok Highway (R3A), AH2, AH8, AH9, AH10, AH12, AH13, and AH18 have been investigated by considering behavioral aspects of long distance travel. Keywords: Mode Split Model, Modal Shift, Vientiane–Boten railway, Travel Behaviour

Abstract:

This issue opens the twenty-fifth volume of Contemporary European History. In the journal's inaugural editorial in 1992, Kathleen Burk and Dick Geary noted that they were standing ‘on the brink of a new Europe’ – and what exciting times those were. Just two and a half years after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, and barely months after the formal dissolution of the Soviet Union, CEH came into existence at a time of radical change in Europe and beyond. With the treaties signed at Maastricht in 1992 and in Amsterdam in 1997 European integration accelerated apace. The European Community became a Union. The twelve became fifteen. From March 1995 the Schengen Agreement let people of any nationality travel freely between the seven participating countries without any passport controls at the borders. By the end of the decade, the Single Market was a reality, the Euro was about to be introduced and negotiations for EU membership of ten central and eastern European countries were well underway. The themes of the decade were (re)integration, federation, ever greater union. As Burk and Geary wrote in their 1992 editorial, ‘year by year, the concept of Europe as both a geographical and an historical entity becomes more credible’.

Abstract:

Transport infrastructure investment is a catalyst for enhanced competitiveness and economic growth through an overall reduction in travel times and costs. These efficiency gains are among the goals of the Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) program, one of the major European Union infrastructure policy packages. This study evaluated the benefits of TEN-T with respect to increased accessibility for the population that it encompassed and by using a detailed and up-to-date representation of the entire European road network. A routing algorithm that could efficiently exploit the high detail of the road network was used. By considering various impedance functions in outreach opportunities, the proposed methodology compared, for all major European urban agglomerations considered (695 in total), two measures of accessibility: one baseline measure that considered the TEN-T network as implemented in 2014 and one scenario measure that considered that the whole TEN-T network was completed. The proposed methodology addressed self-accessibility by considering a weighted travel time of the entire road network within each urban agglomeration under study. The results show where the major benefits (accessibility gains) are expected to occur following the completion of the TEN-T policy. In general, the main positive effects are to appear in European areas that are lagging behind in infrastructure investment (Eastern Europe) and in their neighboring counterparts (Central Europe). The presented quantitative estimates may be useful for an eventual review of the focus of and priority for the not-yet-implemented part of TEN-T policy.