vilnius group

Constituted in May 2000, member countries Slovenia, Slovakia (having already undergone its Velvet Divorce in 1993, the date falls on the anniversary of the 1990 compromise that ended the so called Hyphen War, Pomlčková vojna, started in 1989 after the dissolution of the Soviet Union on what to call themselves and how to share a territory with two identities) Romania, North Macedonia, Lithuania (its capital the namesake), Latvia, Estonia, Croatia, Bulgaria and Albania to lobby as a group for NATO inclusion, all aspirants acceded to the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation on this day in 2004 with the exception of Albania, Croatia and North Macedonia (under the Adriatic Charter) joining in 2009 and 2020. The former association closely maps with the composition of the Visegrád Group, another former pooled campaign for European Union membership and presently a regional economic cooperative.

postmaster or fancy-cancels

Via the always stunning Present /&/ Correct, we appreciated making the acquaintance with a wonderful resource for vintage ephemera in the Bulgarian Virtual Museum for Socialism through the lens of this cheerful collection of postal seals and cancellation (oblitération, измиране) stamps, especially this one commemorating sixty years of radio broadcasting in the country. With an abundance of travel, film and political posters, company and trade logos and extra philately, there’s much more to explore at the links above.

calling on, in transit

Having closed down operations once the countries were admitted into the European Union, Radio Free Europe is restarting programming in Romania and Bulgaria due to a sharp increase in the incidence of false reporting in efforts to combat the spread of disinformation.
During the Hungarian Revolt of 1956, Radio Free Europe was accused of stoking revolution by promising that American help was imminent, which was counter to US foreign policy at the time and no intervention was forthcoming—resulting in a major overhaul on how the organisation was administered, geared to protect journalists’ independence and not to promote an agenda. When the country was a Soviet satellite, Romanian leader Nicolae Ceaușescu regarded the station a serious threat and provocateur and waged a campaign of counter-programming with Operation Ether, which included discrediting and assassinating reporters. Though activities have been significantly curtailed since the end of the Cold War, the Prague-based broadcaster maintains some seventeen local bureaus and is present in over twenty-five countries, including Russia (Radio Liberty was the name of the station dedicated to broadcasting to the USSR until the stations merged in 1976), in jurisdictions which the organisation assesses are not fully matured in regards to the unfettered flow of information.

stoop and kneel

Amusing Planet introduces us to the remaining basement-level kiosks of Sophia, Bulgaria, whose retail space represents some of the first entrepreneurial efforts after the fall of Communism and the dissolution of the Soviet Union. Known as klek (коляно, knee) shops, these colourful storefronts operate like convenience stores and corner shops elsewhere but an early lack of commercial space pushed them to down to the sidewalk level. Learn more and view quite an extensive gallery of klek shops at the link up top.

cornucopia or fertile crescent

Although I’d like to believe that I would personally be able to recognise the courage and the dedication of the staff at the headquarters of the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas completely on its own merit, I think a measure of thanks for the capacity for appreciation and foresight—both in besieged Tal Hadya in Syria and Saint Petersburg—is due to the parallel history and challenge of botanists that remained to protect the Vavilov Institute of All-Russian Plant Industry that I learnt about recently.
The act of determination and defiance, also adapted into podcast form, saved the vast seed banks of Leningrad whilst under Nazi assault and had the staff themselves dying of hunger to stave off mass-starvation that would result if there were no repository of food-crops for planting after the war. The Syrian institute itself is host to refugee cultivars saved from the Iraqi seed vault in Abu Gharaib and other regional combat-zones, however, while these and other reserves are of vital importance in re-establishing a healthy and prosperous populace after fighting has ceased, seeds are not just artefacts—like so much cultural heritage that could not be salvaged and works of art in the former case that were evacuated from the Hermitage, but rather need the farmers (with their institutional knowledge that may or may not already be on the run) to till fields free of fighting. The legacy is for future generations as well but dividends are yielded in one season.

balkanization

 A US politician, not a contending mouth-piece fortunately but despicable all the same, made the hateful comment some months ago that the Palestinians were a made-up people and proposed to exclude them with prejudice from all future negotiations. While this was not the words of a gadfly and hopefully the statement’s reverberations went no further than a few pandering sound-bites, the conferring of the Nobel Peace Prize on the European Union, and a lunch-time quiz to name the twenty-seven member states of the EU, a tricky task sometimes with some distinctions lying in semantics and treaties and not just geography, made me wonder if the same arrogance and dismissiveness are not also at work in the halls of this organization. I want to say this carefully, and I hope that I am not so naïve as to gloss over real—though cryptic—bigotries or the rules and reforms contingent on ascension, but I was not fit for the challenge and could not name two members on the periphery of the glaring hole at the nexus of the Balkans.  The region that gives its name to allegorical device was created by the successive collapse of empires, first the Ottoman, then Austro-Hungarian and the Russian Imperia and the finally the Soviet Union, and the fast breaks with feudalism revived sectarian fighting, parallel to the wars and de-colonization of the European powers in Africa and Asia that redrew the lines in the sand, creating new national entities with borders that did not necessarily match historical and culture contexts.

The region has made a lot of progress since being defeoffed and may not be looking to reinstate being lorded over in any measure nor want to join, necessarily, at this juncture—quite a few of the current members I think are grumbling over their association and it is not as if all the current upstanding, founding membership was completely forthcoming and honest about their own conditions and by-laws in the first place. While I am sure there are good reasons for doing so, there is even one country there named, in English, anyway with the unspeakably sad moniker of the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia (FYROM), and I could not guess what the endonym might be and it seems to make it seem more like a place where Europeans do not live.  The EU is not Europe and forced, coerced inclusion is never a good thing, but it is a distressing thought that accomplishment and self-determination would be belittled for the sake of making the disparager’s case look more secure.