Journal articles on the topic 'Romanian Folk art'

The given article presents an analytical approach to the evolution of choreographic art in Romania and the Re-public of Moldova. Emphasis is placed on analyzing the evolution of classical stage dance as well as folk dance. It should be noted that the development of choreographic art in Romania was strongly influenced by European choreography. The 19th and 20th centuries were the most significant for the development of Romanian ballet. The most famous classical ballets were staged: Zâna păpușilor, Lacul lebedelor, Priculiciul etc. The fame of Romanian ballet was brought by: Anton Romanowski, Floria Capsali, Oleg Danovski. In the Republic of Moldova, ballet - developed under the influence of European and Russian choreography, having an important base - folk dance. Namely, folk dance created premises for the establishment of popular stage dance, represented, first of all, by the academic ensemble ,,Joc” – the first professional folk dance ensemble, led for several years by people’s artist V.Curbet.

The main theme of the proposed paper concerns the professional training and artistic activity of Theodor Vasilescu, choreographer and dancer, specialized in folk dance, with a rich international activity during the communist regime. The analysis will focus on illustrating how the artist’s biography was influenced by a new trend in the satellite states of the U.R.S.S., namely that of transforming traditional dance into art with a political substratum. Also, the main thread of the article will consist in revealing the specific type of relationship between the artist and the regime, dominated by a permanent awareness of the mutual benefits of this partnership: for the dancer Theodor Vasilescu it was the chance to develop a successful career, which for the propaganda apparatus implied a strong image campaign for Romania, abroad. Regarding the temporal framework, the analyzed period will focus on the regime of Nicolae Ceaușescu, 1965-1989, relevant in Theodor Vasilescu’s career path, as well as in the dissemination of his work results. There are three important aspects that will be analyzed in this article: first, the recovery of an important cultural trend in Romanian history, when, through the influence on the Soviet chain, folklore and traditional dance became an art form strongly subsumed to an ideology. This aspect led to the foundation of many Folk Ensembles with a specific type of artistic manifestations, including folk dance. At the same time, it will be illustrated how the regime was involved in financing and promoting this type of dance, by including it in the development of the most important national performances, by encouraging research in this field and creating professional opportunities through training and also by organizing an International Folklore Festival, “Romania 69”. This approach definitively changed the professional career of Theodor Vasilescu. The last aspect consists in presenting the international career of the choreographer, as a direct result of the increased interest that the communist regime had in promoting Romania’s image abroad. This made the Romanian folk dance very popular in countries such as Netherlands, Japan, Canada, Germany. Also, the frequent tournaments con-tributed to the increase of the Securitate’s interest in his daily activity. The main categories of sources for documentation will consist of: my personal archive which contains two interviews with Theodor Vasilescu, documents in the funds and collections of the National Archives of Romania (The Central Committee of the Romanian Communist Party, Propaganda and Agitation Section, Organizational Section), also those of the National Council for Studying the Securitate Archives.

"Bartók’s string quartets play an important role in his overall output, as they represent a stylistic universe encompassing almost his entire oeuvre. In his String Quartet No. 1, Bartók aimed at reworking and expanding the folk elements as well as at developing his own personal expression. Despite being deeply rooted in folklore, this is not a folkloric work, but an expression that goes beyond folklore, which the composer placed in a new relationship to art-music. The aim of this research paper is to explore the aspects of language, the content conforming to the preoccupations of the modern era and the types of writing used, with a focus on the use of the melodic and rhythmic elements of folk music. The musical stylistics of this work is based precisely on the intertwinement and fusion of the two great creative principles: folk and art. Keywords: Béla Bartók, string quartet, folk elements. "

Abstract The “Easter Triptych” project was conducted in six annual editions (except for 2020 and 2021 – the years of the Coronavirus Pandemic). It was conceived and achieved in the name and in the spirit of the three important moments in the history of our humanity: Birth, Passion and Joy of the Resurrection of our Savior Jesus Christ. This great religious cultural project was attended by important personalities of Iaşi and not only, such as lyrical artists from the Romanian National Opera Iaşi, church persons from the Metropolitan Church of Moldavia and Bukovina, university professors, ethnographers, craftsmen and students. We were joined by Radio Romania Cultural Bucharest, Radio Iasi, TV Iasi, Radio “Trinitas” and “Moldova” National Museum Complex Iasi. With this important project, I also went to Austria, Vienna, to the Romanian Cultural Center and to the Republic of Moldova, to “Alecu Russo” State University Balti. Each edition presented under its generous scope, equally traditions, customs and beliefs firmly established in our soul and conscience as Romanians. The events included moments of musical art: classical musical works (lyrical, instrumental, choral), Christmas carols, Easter songs, religious poems, book launches, exhibitions of decorated eggs from the Bukovina area, exhibitions of icons, crosses, carpets woven in monasteries, ceramic objects from Horezu, wooden sculpture objects and traditional folk costumes. In addition to these, there was a CD: “Easter Triptych”.

Abstract The second Sonata for Piano and Violin, op. 6 by George Enescu marks the beginning of a long road of assimilation and synthesis of the Romanian folklore elements and of the way of expression“in Romanian popular character”, transposed on the characteristics of the universal language. Without knowing the authentic folk art from a scientific point of view, Enescu was deeply influenced, shaping his entire artistic personality. He consciously assimilated popular music by generalizing some essential folkloric principles, which he later organized in a personal vision. The innovative elements of the Enescian musical language are transposed in the free rhythm, the heterophonic construction, the complexity and subtleties of dynamics and agogics, the timbre color, as well as in the synthesis between freedom and rigor in the creative and interpretive act.

The authors aim to present to the interested public some moments of the valorification activity of the folk heritage by organising some exhibitions abroad in the period 1924-1956. From Brussels to Prague, from London to Vienna, Frankfurt or Geneva, from Paris to Sweden, the collections and artefacts of the Romanian folk culture have crossed and impressed the world. In addition, the article contains brief presentations of the events to which the Transylvanian Museum of Ethnography contributed with artefacts of its collections, and also part of the papers, correspondence, briefly minutes, the way of work in the mentioned period. The organisation, the way of cooperation between institutions and the responsibility of the ones involved in the transport of the artefacts are presented in this article. Not least, the paper presents information about the collections and artefacts lost, disappeared or damaged during the period they were abroad. We think that the topic can be an example of good practice nowadays through the interest, concern and seriousness with which the ethnographic collections were treated by the specialists and also the paper is a proof of the fact that the collections and artefacts of the Transylvanian Museum of Ethnography have been recognised abroad.

"Romanian ethnomusicology has a series of less discussed and, implicitly, less understood topics. One of them is the relatively vast literature that addresses the new folklore that appeared after the installation of the communist regime and the folk music of artistic ensembles performed on stage. Most of the texts written on these subjects display a strong political and ideological pressure. Consequently, they are either forgotten or superficially perceived as evidence of a repressive regime, adding to the general belief that the communist regime turned peasant art into an instrument of propaganda. Starting from a study signed by Ioan R. Nicola on music collected from Mărginimea Sibiului, we will try to understand the theoretical horizon and the ideological limitations that influenced the way researchers wrote about contemporary music phenomena in the second half of the twentieth century. Despite the constraints, we argue that ethnomusicologists had at hand a coherent system of analysis of the folk music, which they had to adapt to the official ideology. Keywords: new folklore, amateur artistic ensembles, folk performance, ethnomusicologic research, communist ideology"

Lăpuș ethnographic region is still a place where reach and fascinating traditional heritage is organically preserved. Aside throat singing, brotherhood rituals, archaic old ways. The motifs are part of a larger set of traditional decorative spectra and costumes and other ethnographical facts, Easter egg painting is conducted under also the technique and the chromatic choice are very old. Nevertheless, the most surprising aspect regarding egg painting in Lăpuș area is the way the performers understand to compose the decoration, suggesting an archaic artistic expression related to a traditional view of the world and art creation mechanisms. This paper aims to fill a lesser known chapter of Romanian folk art, the style and motifs of Easter egg from Țara Lăpușului, Transylvania. Keywords: painted eggs, Tara Lăpușului, decoration of the eggs with wax, decorative motifs, stylistics

This article examines the iconographic heritage of the Old Believer Lipovan Rogachevsky-Nikita family in the context of history of Romanian rural localities. Based on the expedition material, analysis is conducted on the peculiarities of folk icon and local traditions that established in the Old Believer center of Romania. The reviewed documentary sourced were acquired in the course of expeditions and further personal contact with the family. The collected material contains history of the family of iconographers, their lifestyle and customs, conditions for fulfilling the orders that are closely related to the history of this rural locality and way of life of the Nekrasov Cossacks. The research is of applied nature in the area of art history, as well as of interdisciplinary in nature. The article employs the methods of stylistic and historical-cultural analysis; biographical method for reconstruction of biography of the family members and their artistic heritage. New records on the dynasty of Romanian iconographers are introduced, which expands  the information on the Lipovan icon and indicate regional peculiarities of its creation. The author also introduces the new names and monuments of iconography into the scientific discourse that allows clarifying the attribution. The artistic heritage of iconographers of the late XIX – early XX centuries is also introduced into the scientific discourse: Rogachevsky-Nikita; in the XX century – Egor Nikitovich Nikita and Roman Egorovich Nikita.

Abstract The origins of the national choral art are based on Church singing, which has been widely developed since the founding of the Putnyansky and Nyametsky monasteries. In the further development of the centuries, Church singing intertwined with folk choral singing, which was reflected in the works of such conductors and composers as G. Muzichesku, M. Berezovsky, A. Kristya, M. Byrke, V. Popovich. Special attention is paid to the creative and conducting activities of Gavriil Muzichesku, all of whose initiatives were innovative and progressive, later becoming the leading ones in the national choral activities of Romania and Moldova. This article identifies and systematizes the main trends related to the process of creating vocal and choral works and their application in the system of Romanian and Moldovan musical education. Their analysis shows that the composer worked on the theoretical generalization of his own experience, turned to the best ideas of domestic and foreign pedagogy, including Russian, and thanks to this he was able to bring his knowledge and experience into a fairly coherent and integral system of musical education and education through vocal and choral culture.

The article is devoted to the creative work of the Ukrainian Diaspora scientist, teacher, historian of art, architect and graphic artist, Prince Vsevolod Karmazyn-Kakovsky (1898–1988), about whom there is very little information in Ukraine. The study emphasizes his Ukrainian roots. The publication is based on materials from the home archive of Ph.D., sculptor and artist Kristina Kishakevich-Kachaluba from Switzerland. Prince Vsevolod Karmazyn-Kakovsky studied and lived in Ukraine until 1944. In 1944 he left Ukraine for permanent residence in Romania. As a teacher he organized faculties of landscape architecture in universities in Ukraine (Odessa, Kharkiv) and Romania (Iasi). From 1978, professor lived and worked in Italy, then in France, Germany, lectured on the history of Ukrainian art, cooperated with Ukrainian research institutions in Western countries. As an artist he created and implemented the projects of health and recreational complexes on the Black Sea coast in Ukraine and Romania, which combined architecture with natural landscape, contributing to human health and longevity, and embodied the principles he established for enriching the expressiveness of landscapes. The Prince founded the Research Institute of Landscape Architecture (1921–1981), which worked in Ukraine, and then in Romania. This institution was focused on combining and harmonizing endogenous (internal) factors of human longevity with exogenous (external) factors — the synthesis of nature with art. The scientist argued that the tree crown shapes (triangular, ellipse-like, round) differently influence the mood and psychological state of a person, therefore, developed special health boxets in sanatorium complexes. This method of healing people, proposed by V. Karmazyn-Kakovsky in 1971–1981, was adopted in Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, Italy, Germany, and the United States of America. As a scientist he published more than 200 scientific works, including Monographs devoted to Ukrainian art, Lemkivska and Boykovska churches, art of Ukrainian houses, Ukrainian books. He designed his own works and covers for his books. He was skilled in the technique of pencil, sepia, watercolor, skillfully conveyed the space in the landscape, was perfect in the technique of pen and ink. The artist’s graphics is dominated by subjects closely related to his scientific works in the field of art history. Karmazyn-Kakovsky supplements almost all of his works with illustrations, headpieces, stylized folk motifs, architectural historical monuments of Romanian and Ukrainian cultures, valuable for the history of Ukrainian art, and landscape projects. V. Karmazyn-Kakovsky made more than 1200 drawings of wooden Ukrainian churches. He had personal exhibitions in Warsaw, Rome, Paris, Munich.

In this article, one of the key images of our traditional art is being proposed to analyze, the metaphor of ‘’dor’’, which determines the lyrical substance of several folk writings, generalizing the universe of popular feelings. Once ‘’dor’’ defines the “Romanian states of mind”, it deepens a complexity of feelings, inner resorts, being understood to some aesthetic generalizations of reality, these are the significance of synthesizing the ontological dimensions of human lives. The ‘’dor’’ tends to an area of absolute generality represented by proportions that it knows them sentimentally lived. Through the image of the ‘’dor’’ is considered the perpetual character of life, movement, evolution, we see a codification of the Romanian soul, the fundamental idea of a viable concept of existence. In folk’s lyric, the ‘’dor’’ becomes an aesthetic category, it defines the most genuine modern testament of the national spirit, it is one of the finest crystallizations of the popular soul, “the fundamental constant of his vision of the world and life” (M. Bucur).The poetization of the ‘’dor’’ foresees a criterion of aesthetic evaluation, of promoting the general-human values, of some attitudes taken from the experience of the people, from the treasure of its spiritual richness.

Statement of the problem. The modern instrumental and orchestral art of Bukovyna, which has deep historical roots dating back to Proto-Slavic times, stands out for its bright originality. The creation of a musical-instrumental collective involves the search for a creative personality with the appropriate professional level, musical and organizational and communication skills, and the ability to communicate tolerantly with all members of the ensemble. That is why there is a need to highlight the artistic activities of both the instrumental groups themselves and their leaders. Because it is thanks to their creative restlessness that today Bukovyna is proud of a significant number of highly professional ensembles and orchestras of instrumental music. Objectives, scientific novelty, and methods of the research. The purpose of the study is to highlight the process of developing the instrumental collectives, whose activities contributed to the shaping of the modern Bukovyna musical culture. The special task of the research and its innovative component is to consider the role of outstanding figures of the leaders of these collectives in the cultural development of Bukovina. Historical, biographical, musicological and cultural approaches were chosen to reveal the stated topic, analytical and generalizing methods were used in the processing of reference sources and scientific literature. Results of the research. Bukovyna is historically multinational region, where the Ukrainian, in particular Hutsul, Romanian, Polish, Hungarian influences is felt. So, the creative activity and repertoire of the folk groups and academic instrumental ensembles are very diverse. The music art of instrumental ensembles has been always gaining interest and respect from the listeners, due to its distinguished professionalism and ease of perception. The artistic and educational activities of such instrumental ensembles as «Triple musicians», «Plai», Chamber and Academic Symphonic orchestra of the Chernivtsi Regional Philharmonic hall, folk music ensemble «Bukovyna» and the Brass Orchestra «Dixie-Band» of the Central Palace of Culture, the orchestra group of the Honoured Academic Bukovynyan song and dance ensemble named after A. Kushnirenko was highlighted. The active educational position of the leaders of these groups as an outstanding extraordinary personalities, their importance in the formation and development of cultural and educational processes in Bukovyna, popularization of the folk music of the Bukovyna region were emphasized. Such leaders are: People’s Artists of Ukraine – Andrii Kushnirenko, Yurii Gina, Pavlo Chebotov; Honored Artists of Ukraine – Mykola Hakman, Yuriy Bleshchuk, Yevhen Tarnavskyi, Oleksandr Zhukov; Honored Art Workers of Ukraine – Viktor Kostryzh, Yosyp Sozanskyi; Honored Cultural Workers of Ukraine – Illia Miskyi, Heorhii Novakovskyi. A significant number of famous vocalists from Bukovyna have worked with the orchestras at different times, such as Honoured Artists of Ukraine Mariia Melnychuk, Nina Kapliienko, Vasyl Pyndyk, Oksana Savchuk, Iryna Styts-Kulikovska, Honoured Worker of Culture of Ukraine Vasyl Fedoriuk, a poet-songwriter Mykola Bakai and others. Instrumental ensembles are regular participants of regional art festivals “Bukovynska vesna” (“Bukovyna Spring”), “Vizerunky Bukovyny” (“Patterns of Bukovyna”), “Bukovynski zustritchi” (“Bukovyna meetings”), “Chervona Ruta” (“Red rue”), “Bukovyna Suvenir”, and others. In the best traditions of brass music, brass band marches and brass concerts are constantly held in Chernivtsi, which turn into real festivals of folk music art. Conclusion. In this context, we consider the active concerts and competition activities of these groups to be important, because the instrumental art of the Bukovyna musicians are known far beyond the borders of Ukraine. The orchestras are multiple time participants of AllUkrainian and International competitions, and showcased their art to the audience of Europe, Canada, Australia and other parts of the world contributing in the constant growth of authority and world recognition of Ukrainian music.

Rural tourism and agrotourism have an extremely important contribution in rural area’s development, not only in financial terms but also in terms of increasing and improving the quality of life of residents from these areas. So, the development of these forms of tourism is required in the rural area, both economically and socially. Known as an important ethnographic area of the country, with traditional elements specific, Almaj Valley through natural and cultural potential available, it stands more and more lately by intensifying rural tourist and ecotourist activity. However, tourist infrastructure is very underdeveloped, to rural communities returning the mission to get more involved in this purpose, having in view, the national and international recognition of the high tourism potential of this area Romanian area still retains, quite well, the traditional, cultural, ethnographic and folklore valences specific to rural areas, providing favorable conditions for development of rural tourism and agrotourism. Romanian villages have a rich tourist potential, having diversified tourist resources: traditions, customs and folk values, cultural monuments, historical and art and an unpolluted natural environment with a rich natural tourism potential. Almajului Depression known as well as the Almaj Country, Almajului Valley or Bozovici Depression is situated in the South-East side of Banat Mountains, in the south of Caras-Severin county, near the Parallel 45°, being an intramountainous depression, of ellipsoidal form of NE-SW orientation, belonging to Nera basin.

Statement of the problem. The formation of the repertoire of folk instruments is a comprehensive and long-term process that began in Ukraine only in the 20th century. A significant part of the musical repertoire for folk instruments was written by the composers of Slobozhanshchyna, because namely this region became the centre of the folk instrumental art of Ukraine at the beginning of the 20th century. Therefore, the necessary arises to recreate the holistic picture of developing the music for folk instruments in the works of the composers of Slobozhanshchyna that has not yet attracted the attention of researches, which determines the relevance of our work. Objectives, methods, and novelty of the research. The purpose of the article is to present as much as possible the entire range of music for folk instruments by the composers of Slobozhanshchyna, to reveal the dominant genre-style vectors and timbre priorities in the works of H. Khotkevych, V. Podgorny, B. Mikhieiev, V. Ivanov, M. Stetsiun, I. Haidenko and A. Haidenko. The genre-style method helps establish the hierarchy of genres and styles in music for folk instruments; historical one – to determine the stages of formation and distribution of the folk instrumental repertoire; the method of source studies – to analyze the existing sources on the works of the composers of Slobozhanshchyna; structural and functional method – to reveal the compositional features of the works. Today there are a number of works devoted to bayan /accordion, domra, balalaika, bandura, guitar and cimbalom art. A significant number of works for folk instruments by the composers of Slobozhanshchyna have already been considered, but in isolation, outside the general scheme of the development of folk instrumental music in Ukraine. The novelty of our topic lies in the fact that for the first time a panorama of music for folk instruments is presented and the ways of its development in the repertoire of the artists of Slobozhanshchyna are considered. Research results and conclusion. The panorama of music by the composers of Slobozhanshchyna for folk instruments presented in the article gives grounds for the conclusion that, starting from the 1930s, by the way of the gradual extending the genre and style guidelines, the complication of the form of works, from arrangements of folk songs to large scale concert compositions, due to discovering the original timbre solutions and bright playing techniques, deepening the artistic and conceptual content and expanding the folklore “geography” of the compositions (besides Ukrainian, appeal to Spanish, Romanian, etc. folklore), the artists from Slobozhanshchyna “guide” folk instruments to the concert stage, giving them the opportunity to establish themselves on the same level as the instruments of the academic tradition. According to chronology, since the 1930s, the original bandura works (H. Khotkevych) are first, and only since the 1960s the composers of Slobozhanshchyna write for the button accordion (V. Podgorny, A. Haidenko, M. Stetsiun), for the balalaika (P. Haidamaka, V. Ivanov, B. Mikhieiev, A. Haidenko, M. Stetsiun), and the domra (V. Podgorny, M. Stetsiun, A. Haidenko, B. Mikhieiev, V. Ivanov). Since the beginning of the 1990s, the bandura (A. Haidenko, I. Haidenko), the guitar (M. Stetsiun) and the cimbalom (A. Haidenko, I. Haidenko, M. Stetsiun) repertoire has been replenished with original compositions. The high artistic and professional status of the works of the composers of Slobozhanshchyna confirms not only their popularity among performers and listeners, but also their inclusion as mandatory in the programs of international performance competitions.

The preoccupation of many scholars to save the Romanian cultural heritage has been a constant topic. Architects, archaeologists, historians, art historians, and designers compete to preserve the image of the past and the spiritual richness of tradition with the help of various modern technological tools. Visual design is increasingly used in cultural projects. This project of visual design, of revitalizing the cultural identity of a village, wants, not only to bring unknown information about the culture of a place, but is also an invitation to preserve the fascinating value of the identity of the traditional society, represented by the crafts and folk customs that have survived until today. By synthesizing the essence of traditional patterns inherited from the past, an intuitive system of visual identity represented by signs has resulted, which introduced the interested public to the cultural and historical atmosphere of the researched region. These signs become symbolic representations of the village’s tangible and intangible heritage. A sign-symbol was created for each element of the local tradition, which will be part of the infographic that will concisely present certain cultural processes.

Subject actuality. The article highlights the evolution of the compositional style of the Hungarian composer, taking into account the performance component of Bartok as a pianist. Based on existing musicological sources (works by A. Alekseev, B. Sabolcha, S. Sigitov, J. Uyfalushi, I. Martynov, I. Nestev, A. Malinkovskaya) the historical periodization of the general interest in Bartok’s work is indicated. Despite the study of many aspects of his creative activity, the performance of B. Bartok still remains without special analysis. Therefore, the process of studying the work of B. Bartok today can not be considered completed. The issues of interaction between the compositional and performance style of B. Bartok, modern interpretations of his works remain opened. The Ukrainian listener is familiar with a limited range of B. Bartok’s works, so the emphasis on the artist’s performance serves as an additional stimulus for the actualization of his art in our time. The main presentation of the material. The evolution of B. Bartok’s piano style was identified as a problem by L. Gakkel through the constituent parameters of the piano style: 1) the “realistic-non-pedal” sound image of the piano; 2) coloristic shock-noise method of sound construction; 3) textured accentuated tone as a tonal-harmonic ground. Indeed, many works of the composer testify to this interpretation of the piano: “Two elegies op. 8 / b, Burlesque three pieces op. 8c, Suite op. 14, Etudes op. 18, Sonata; three concertos for piano and orchestra. However, there are a number of works written quite traditionally, in the classical key. In these works B. Bartok uses the coloristic possibilities of the piano quite avariciously (wide range of registers, pedal effects), a striking example is the “Romanian folk dances” op. 8-a). Milestones of the piano evolution of the artist’s style are marked: Rhapsody, cycles “Romanian folk dances”. Etudes op. 18 – a sample of expressionist aesthetics, extremely complex in pianistic terms. They use extreme technical difficulties that require maximum arm stretching and great physical strength.Most of Bartok’s piano works were written in the first two creation periods – early and experimental. The composer’s attention was focused on three genre areas: folklore, pedagogics, innovation. The communicative semantics of these spheres, of course, influenced the composer’s decisions in the formative field, texture, piano technique, the level of virtuosity. The regularities are traced: B. Bartok’s “commitment” to primary (song and dance) and romantic genres (elegy, rhapsody, rich people), program cyclicity; constant interest in creating a repertoire for children, which solves two tasks at once: the promotion of folk music and the children involvement into a new musical language. Note as a contradiction the fact that the analysis of the works of B. Bartok, created in the first and second period, does not fully confirm the version of L. Gakkel, about a radicalistic change in the sound image of the piano. Probably, in B. Bartok’s work the new did not exclude the old one. The basic quality of B. Bartok’s piano style is its national characteristic, which is shrouded in the resources of the latest technique of musical composition. Conclusions. B. Bartok-pianist by genotype belongs to the Liszt’s branch of European pianism. The Liszt’s tradition is a combination of classical-romantic performing principles, which is especially evident in the works of disciples and followers of F. Busoni, K. Martinsen, K. Arrau, and G. Gould. In general, the evolution of B. Bartok’s piano style can be seen as a movement from the romantic – through folklore – to the neoclassical tradition, which is manifested in the change of musical-linguistic resources (rhythm, harmony, features of musical form, texture, melody). As a result, also the sound image of the piano was being changed. Auditory analysis of B. Bartok’s performing style allowed us to conclude that, unlike many pianists of the romantic tradition, B. Bartok uses pedal effects very avariciously, preferring clear and precise pronunciation (utterance) of all elements of the texture. We state the «imposition» of the classical tradition, which originates from harpsichordists, and new trends associated with the percussive understanding of the piano. From the point of view of the temporal organization of the musical form, his works are distinguished by metrical variability and polyrhythm; rhythmic discrepancy of textured layers; extensive use of repetition techniques and ostinato techniques. The foundations of Bartok’s mode-harmonic mentality (reliance on ancient modes of folk music; mode variability in the conditions of chromatic tonality) determine the difficulties of mastering the «intonation dictionary» of his piano works, and in general the technical equipment of the texture. Thus, Bela Bartok’s piano writing style is an expression of the artist’s innovative thinking, in which the performing component of his own abilities played a key role.

In Europe the tradition of building in wood, which has roots reaching back into antiquity, is now mostly lost. Wooden architecture does, however, survive in parts of Eastern Europe, particularly in Romania. In addition to their architectural interest, the buildings contain a rich legacy of folk-art.

The first three papers featured in Issue 4/2021 of Balgarski ezik present results of the work on a project titled Everyday Life in the Middle Ages according to Lexical Data from Bulgarian and Romanian – a bilateral effort between the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and the Romanian Academy. Mariyana Tsibranska-Kostova’s paper Magic and its Faces (the 61st Canon of Trullo in Slavic Translations) proposes an analysis of several representatives of the lexical-semantic group of performers of magical practices according to three translations of the canon. The author discusses the word-formation structure of the lexical group as well as the semantic adaptation of Greek names for unknown realia. The text of the 61st Canon of Trullo is published as an appendix. Elka Mircheva provides a discussion on the topic of Bad Thoughts are Worse than Illness (to the Analysis of Medieval Texts) by analysing examples of illness in Pope Gregory the Great’s Dialogues which have been interpreted by earlier studies as cases of psychological conditions. The author’s analysis points to the fact that some of these occurrences are evidence of the influence of bad thoughts resulting in unacceptable reprehen-sible behaviour. Vanya Micheva’s paper Names for Living Places in the Bulgarian Language Picture of the World in the Middle Ages deals with the linguistic and semantic realisations of the concept of living places in the Old Bulgarian classical and original works from the 9th – 11th centuries and in the works of Patriarch Euthymius. The author traces the process of enrichment of the names for living places and the changes in the conceptual content of the studied lexemes. Tatyana Braga’s paper A Little-known Damaskin from the Karlovo-Adzhar School of Calligraphy and Art: Odessa Damascus № 36 (62) – Palaeography, Codicology, Dating offers a meticulous palaeographic and codicological description of a Bulgarian written monument, the Odessa Damaskin № 36 (62) from the manuscript collection of V.I. Grigorovich. Nadka Nikolova’s paper Общ язик с виражение народно. The Language Norms in the Translation of A. Granitski’s За Тръговско писмописанїе (On Commercial Letter Writing), 1858 presents the results of a study on Anastas Granitski’s contribution to the establishment of the structural basis and spelling and language norms of the Bulgarian literary language of the Revival period. On the basis of her observations on adjectives, numerals, pronouns and verbs, the author comes to the conclusion that the text reveals significant convergence of written and spoken language. Maria Mitskova addresses some Issues in the Verb Morphology of Bulgarian Dialects in the Studies of Three European Slavicists from the First Half of the 19th Century – Vuk Karadžić, Victor Grigorovich, Stefan Verković. The paper emphasises the contribution of the first Slavicists whose work marks the origination of the scientific interest in one of the most characteristic features of Bulgarian verbs. Elena Kanevska-Nikolova and Simeon Marinov present a study on the Names for Women’s Outerwear in the Rhodope Folk Clothing based on ma-terial excerpted from various ethnographic, regional historical and dialectological studies. The authors examine ambiguous and synonymous terms, main word-formation patterns, as well as the etymology of some of the names under study. They go on to analyse the terminological unity of many names for women’s outerwear characteristic of both confessional groups to which the Bulgarian population in the Rhodopes belong. Georgi Mitrinov’s paper Is there a Pomak Dialect in Bulgaria? is a critical look at a study by Emel Balakchi dealing with the Bulgarian Rhodope dialects. The author addresses Balakchi’s attempt at presenting the Rhodope dialects as Pomak dialects, while ignoring the presence of a native Bulgarian Christian population in the Rhodopes. Using numerous examples, Georgi Mitrinov reveals the study’s lack of scientific competence and objectivity in presenting the characteristic features of the Bulgarian Rhodope dialects. The issue concludes with a paper that remains outside its thematic scope. Stative Predicates in Contemporary Linguistic Theories by Svetlozara Leseva, Hristina Kukova and Ivelina Stoyanova offers a critical overview of the thematic classes of stative verbs based on a contrastive study of several thematic classifications. The authors analyse the different views of the properties of stative predicates from an aspectual and semantic perspective.

Abstract The context of public governance outsourcing social services and constantly downshifting its role creates the premises for increasing impact of crowdsourced social entrepreneurship and grassroots mobilization. The study envisions the innovative concept of social entrepreneurship by crowdfunding through a sports event, with Swimathon as study case, where most of Romanian NGOs are active to promote their calls for fundraising. Swimmer-participants are fundraisers who take on a challenge (e.g. swimming a target distance) with the aim to raise funds, in teams, for the causes they support. This fundraising event involves donors in a participative setting that combines short-term volunteering and crowdfunding. The research aims to understand practices by which crowdfunding projects grouped into categories navigate constructs on time. The ensuing research questions are as follows: What typology of time orientation do crowdfunding projects in the Romanian landscape of sports-oriented social entrepreneurship display? What do they shift, reshape, and build on in terms of time agency, time management and time empowerment? The current study seeks to uncover and chart patterns of time-bound discursive strategies that aim to attract donors for crowdfunding projects in Romania. It brings forth questions of power and influence, by explaining and synthesizing the variety of manners in which trade-offs and synergies and modelled and mapped. The thematic analysis of fundraising calls for action is structured two-fold, namely: the denotative and the connotative dimension of time. The first component reveals time agency, time use and time management as keynote discursive trends, whereas the second reveals the following categories: time and emotion, quality time and time pressure. Metaphors of time used in the discourse over sustainability appeared coupled with pressure to intervene fast. Findings gathered by connotative discourse analysis induce the idea of grassroots mobilization and individual agency to the forefront, whereas social structures of institutional support are afforded background importance. The study ends with a discussion on implications of using time cues for emerging trends in the build-up process of Romanian crowdfunding projects.

The article presents the genesis of the Mandyczewski family based on extensive source material; the factors of Eusebius Mandyczewski’s formation as a musician, conductor, and composer are characterized. Attention is focused on the significant influence on his professional development of the well-known church history teacher of Chernivtsi University Eusebius Popovych, music teacher Sydor Vorobkevych, and violin teacher Adalbert Hrimaly. The features of the talent of the future musician in his youth are revealed (he created 82 compositions between the ages of 14 and 17). Emphasis is placed on a significant event – receiving a scholarship at the competition of young talents in Leipzig, which was a significant financial support for his further studies at the University of Vienna. The “Viennese” period of E. Mandyczewski’s creativity, which lasted 54 years, is characterized. In Vienna, he studied German studies, philosophy, literature, art history, musical disciplines; his teachers were music critic Eduard Hanslick, musicologist Martin Gustav Notteb, composer Robert Fuchs. E. Mandyczewski’s professional growth was connected with activities at the Vienna Academy of Music, the Vienna Conservatory; he was the conductor of various choirs and orchestras, archivist and bibliographer of the Viennese “Society of Friends of Music” - one of the significant centers of European musical life. It was found that during many years of teaching activity, the Maestro trained a whole galaxy of composers, musicologists, teachers, most of whom became stars of the musical world of Austria, Italy, England, America... Among his students are Hans Gall, Karl Behm, Hilarion Verenko, Manolis Calomiris, George Sell, Leone Sinigaglia, Karel Prochazka (senior), Marcian Negria, Joseph Alois Krieps, Julius Patzak, Ferdinand Rebay, Rosario Scalero, Gustav Uwe Yenner, and Arthur Schnabel, Karl Garinger, Ignaz Brühl, Henry Kimball Hadlita, and others. The Austrian press deservedly called the honorary citizen of Vienna E. Mandyczewski “a living musical encyclopedia”. As a theoretician, he wrote many scientific studies on the work of W. Mozart, L. Beethoven, L. Bach, K. Czerny, A. Bruckner, Strauss, etc., compiled a complete edition of the works of J. Haydn, F. Schubert (in 42 volumes), J. Brahms (in 26 volumes). It is emphasized that E. Mandyczewski is the author of 11 Ukrainian choirs, the canon for three voices “And the day goes, and the night goes...” (to the words by T. Shevchenko), music to the lyrics by Yu. Fedkovich “Wake up, Boian!”, “Kobzar’s dawn” etc., vocal works written to the texts of Serbian, Hungarian, Ukrainian, Moldovan folk songs, author’s works written to the texts by Romanian and Moldovan poets M. Eminescu, H. Koshbuk, V. Aleksandr, O. Vlahutse, etc. Research attention is focused on the authorship of vocal works of a secular and spiritual nature, among which the most significant are: “Greek Mass” for solo, choir and orchestra, the cycle “Tuscan Songs”, church works – 12 liturgies, “Cherub” for mixed choir, “Our Father” for two children’s voices, carol “Silent night, holy night”, psalms, etc. On the basis of primary factual sources, the influence of E. Mandyczewski on the development of musical culture and education in Bukovyna is characterized.

Formulation of the problem. At the current stage, concertmaster activity as a kind of performing art requires a comprehensive study to justificatе the artistic effectiveness of the artist. Thereby, there was a need for research of the concertmaster activity of Oleksandr Nazarenko (Professor of the Department of Ukrainian Folk Instruments in I. P. Kotlyarevsky Kharkiv National University of Arts), in order to characterize his performing skills. This article is about the instrumental work of a accordionist, which is an organic component of the activities of art institutions in a variety of forms of work with the listener. The nuances of the instrumental accompaniment of a vocal composition (and not only) in conditions of genre and style diversity of the musical life of Kharkiv were the peculiarity of fruitful activity of the musician for many years. Is there a connection between this form of creative activity (at first glance, simple and not the most important) and other manifestations of the academic professional development of a musician? The answer to this question is the relevance of the topic of the article, devoted to the characteristics of O. Nazarenko’s concertmaster activity. The lack of a special study of the stylistic aspects of his concertmaster’s activity drove a necessitaty to take note to the biographical facts of the artist’s life in order to generalize the components of his performing skills. Analysis of the latest publications on the topic. O. Nazarenko’s compositional work for accordion is presented in the researches of Kharkiv accordionists and musicologists Y. Dyachenko (2012), M. Plushenko (2017), I. Snedkova (2016), A. Sagittarius (2018).However, these authors did not address the problem of concertmaster activity of O. Nazarenko, which was an important part of his professional growth as a model for the young generation of accordionists, drawing attention to this aspect of his performing arts. The object of research is the musical activity of O. Nazarenko; subject – concertmaster component of the artist’s creative universalism. The purpose of the article is to comprehensively research the process of evolution of the concertmaster’s activity of the famous Kharkiv accordionist Oleksandr Nazarenko. The research methodology is based on a complex of historical, genre-style and system approaches. Presenting of the main material. His acquaintance with concertmaster’s skill and it’s mastering O. Nazarenko began quite early – during the third year in B. Lyatoshynsky Kharkiv Music School (1955). Working with artists, he went with concerts to small factories, factory workshops (during breaks in the “red corners”), dormitories and clubs, where were held 40-minute meetings, where O. Nazarenko was accompanying dancers and vocalists. While studying at the Kharkiv Conservatory (1957–1962), he toured with a student team, where he was accompanying the instruments of the folk orchestra (domra, balalaika), symphony orchestra (violin, cello) and vocal performances. O. Nazarenko strived for performing activity, and therefore he chose the direction of creative work as a soloist-accordionist of the Kharkiv Regional Philharmonic (1962–1967), where together with solo performances he began professional concertmaster activity, working in various genres (vocal, dance and original). After graduating from the conservatory, O. Nazarenko paid much attention to the technique of reading from a sheet of works for piano, studied professional accompaniment to soloists, gained experience in concertmaster’s work to learn the new repertoire with artists. At the Department of Folk Instruments, students and teachers competed with each other in better technique of reading from a sheet, transposition into any key, play a tune by ear, improvisation, and skillfully translation the piano texture into accordion. According to the professor’s words, in order not to lose his performance skill during the tour and to maintain the technical level, he tried to practice even on a bus. He played accordion technical exercises with ready-made chords and fragments from masterpiece works (G. Diniku “Romanian round dance”, introduction to the opera “Ruslan” by M. Glinka); always worked on the plastic of his right hand. Most often, the acquaintance with the musical text took place during the move or a short time before the concert. Soloists-vocalists gave piano notes and indicated in what key they were comfortable to sing. Thus, the accordionist had to analyse the texture without an instrument, sing the melody in the required key with his inner ear, and transpose the musical material. O. Nazarenko tried to enrich the instrumental accompaniment with texture (counterpoint, melodic undertones) in order to move away from the primitive form (bass-chord support). The intention to complicate the accordion part made O. Nazarenko to improve his skills constantly in the selection of means of expression, intonation, the search for timbre diversity, all means which create true artistic values. Accompanying the soloists, the artist paid special attention to the thinning of the sound, imitating stringed instruments. While accompanying a group of brass instruments of a symphony orchestra (trumpet, trombone), he tried to convey the effect of “spaciousness”, equalling the techniques of sound production of brass instruments. Thus, performing a popular song of the Great Patriotic War “At Nameless Height”, O. Nazarenko imitated the replicas of the trumpet signal, and in the song “Buchenwald’s alarm” his performance gained maximum tension, sharpening and concentration in the transmission of bells. The world-famous song for the musical of the same name “Hello, Dolly” accompanied by O. Nazarenko gained a swing accent due to the alternation of the first and fourth parts of the bar and bright intonation. The material for accompaniment in the original genres (acrobats, jugglers, tightrope walkers, illusionists) was Latin American tunes (“Malagenya”, rumba “Valencia”), music for movies (“Serenade of the Sunny Valley”), personal improvisations. Between 1967 and 1987, the Union of Composers of Ukraine had author’s concerts-meetings, where among soloists were present the artists from the Philharmonic, the Opera House and teachers from the Institute of Arts. Well-known composers of Kharkiv such as G. Finarovsky, O. Zhuk, T. Kravtsov, F. Bogdanov, I. Kovach, N. Yukhnovska, O. Litvinov, G. Faintukh, V. Zolotukhin selected the soloists and completed the concert program. In general, during the whole period devoted to concertmaster’s activity, O. Nazarenko performed with more than a hundred soloists-vocalists of academic (bass, baritone, soprano, mezzo-soprano) and folk singing, as well as with numerous instrumentalists. Conclusions. Fruitful work on improving his own professionalism made the master a famous concertmaster-accordionist of Kharkiv. Collaboration with talented artists filled the emotional and intellectual state of the young musician, a rich palette of genres allowed the musician to think more widely and go beyond academism. The variety in the choice of means of expression enriched the technique of reading from a sheet, transposing and transition a piano works into an accordion. The expansion of the dramatic functions of the accordion accompaniment, the arsenal of means of expression contributed to the formation of a new type of ensemble based on the cocreation (equality / subordination) of its participants. This determined the active role of the accordionist concertmaster at all stages of the development of the interpretation plan: from the search for a key idea to its implementation on the concert stage. Working as an accompanist influenced not only his performing skills, but also Nazarenko’s work as a composer. Thanks to the personality of O. Nazarenko, the concertmaster activity of a whole generation of accordionists reached a qualitatively new professional level, and the profession of accompanist became popular among the younger generations working in this complex performance format.

The last decades are time of dynamic changes in folk music, which is a part of contemporary Bulgarian musical culture. Singer's performing art related to Bulgarian musical folklore is the part of Bulgarian culture that makes it recognizable and valued in the world. Thus, the Bulgarian folk song presented by its contemporary performers is perceived simultaneously as one of the oldest and most local manifestations of art in the cultural world, and as well as an artefact and a value, one of the most modern and global manifestations of the shared cultural heritage of humanity. The Bulgarian folklore, with its specificity and characteristics, develops on the land of the Bulgarian ethnos and it was formed on a space in Southeastern Europe, which far exceeds the state borders of present-day Bulgaria. Bearers of this culture are as numerous diasporas in southern Russia, in Ukraine and Moldavia, as well as Bulgarian settlers in the Banat region of present-day Romania, population in Bosilegrad, Dimitrovgrad and the surrounding villages in present-day Serbia. Why is it so important to preserve and rediscover our folk song, to develop it as art, concert policy, media content, educational practices, market mechanisms? Bulgarian folk song contains every single human experience, every emotion, the history of past and present generations, wisdom, folly, heroism, cunning, love, hate, faith, hope, kindness ... It is a mystical memory, a philosophy of life, a way to understand the spiritual and the eternal. The folklore song is both old and modern; simultaneously our, local and common, global; because it reflects our cultural identity and makes us unique and recognizable in the world; because it is one of the strongest manifestations of the human, the aesthetic, the moral. Imagine that you are listening to a favorite folk song: the power of words pierces the brain, the melody caresses and warms the heart, the magic of the song carries you like a time machine backwards, in the memory of the Golden Ages of harmonious worlds and forward, in the dreamed better worlds... Without the folk song, our Bulgarian world will not be the same because our Bulgarian folk song is bread, life, history, past, present and future.

There are rarely highlighted works and stages of composition, part of the evolution of any composer, both in exegesis and in the auditory memory of the public. In consequence, a presentation and analysis by several perspectives (stylistic-musical, historical, social, monographic) is always a welcome restoration act. The creation of the Romanian composer Filip Lazăr is one of international interest, with diverse stylistic spacing, part of it, developed on the line of the European interwar Avant-garde or following an edification of the National Spirit in musical writing, not by cited fragments but by subtly integrating both the genre and the internal archaic structures of the folk song. In this study, I propose a brief look at Trois Pastorales for voice and piano, a cycle of songs coming out from a young master of music’s pen,composed a year before the separation of both the natal space and of the idyllic sound representations, in a modal-tonal space, enlarged with Romanian sound iridescences.

This article investigates the literary institutions that facilitate the dissemination of the Romanian novel in (the former) Yugoslavia between 1918 and 2020. My approach consists of a two-fold analysis: quantitative and sociological. While a quantitative

One of the most enjoyable characteristics of London musical life is that it is peopled by a generous number of foreigners who, every so often, take it upon themselves to enlighten the rest of us as to the music we are missing from back home. These can, of course, be hit-and-miss occasions, but it's in the nature of exploring unknown music of any age that you will happily put up with a handful of duds if you come away with a real discovery ringing in your ears. The Second London Festival of Bulgarian Culture (I seem to have missed the First) ran in various venues over the course of November 2012 and also accommodated art, film, literature, theatre and other forms of music (folk, pop and jazz). It opened its classical batting with a concert of ‘Bulgarian and British Symphonic Folk Songs’ in Cadogan Hall on 3 November, with the Varna Symphony Orchestra, Paulina Voices (the choir of St Paul's Girls' School) and the Holst Choir (from James Allen's Girls' School) conducted by Martin Georgiev. Pancho Vladigerov (1899–1978) being the only Bulgarian composer generally known to the outside world, it made sense to begin with him. His Shumen Miniatures, six attractive piano pieces based on folk-tunes from the town, Shumen, where Vladigerov grew up, were written in 1934 and orchestrated at some later date vouchsafed neither by the concert-programme nor the worklist at www.vladigerov.org. They embrace a variety of lighter moods: the first and fourth pieces offer lazy and lyrical summer-evening hazes and the second and third vigorous dances; the proximity of the fifth to the style of Enescu brought a reminder of the long common border Bulgaria shares with Romania (Shumen is around 100 km away from it).

Most of the homes in the Budzhak region are interesting historical and architectural sites and deserve attention. Considering their current state, one can see the manifestation of a number of architectural features: well-established national traditions, authorship of folk craftsmen, the influence of academic art, historical architectural styles (Romanesque, Gothic, Renaissance, Baroque, Classicism, Modernist), as well as the features of serial time. The unifying factor is, on the one hand, the similarity of ideological and creative thoughts and the desire of folk craftsmen to give a compositional and stylistic integrity to the whole object-space environment of the manor (in particular, in the exterior and interior of a dwelling house), on the other-ethnic identity manifests itself perfectly recognizable through ornamental motifs and forms by elements of certain national symbols. The article deals with the national features of the traditional residential architecture of Budzhak Ukrainians, Russians, Bulgarians, Romanians, Moldavians, Gagauzians, Germans, selected for research as the most numerous in the national composition of Budzhak (southern Bessarabia) according to the population censuses from 1822 to 2001. Budzhak's national composition is presented in pie charts. The national identity of the compositional features and decorative and artistic means of expressing the dwellings of Budzhak, in particular its central regions (Saratov and Tatarbunar regions of Odessa region) of the given ethnic groups of the population is revealed. In general, the main large volumes and forms of traditional residential buildings are the construction of walls and roofs. Picturesque volumetric compositions acquire buildings with a combined type of roof that is used to cover the intersecting several volumes of the building, the kind with roofs with artistically decorated attic windows, located both in the plane of the roof slope and on the pediment of the main front. The subjects of detailed consideration and research are: ornamental-plastic decor made of cement, brick, lime, metal. Artistic carving -on wood and metal. Artistic forging, as a rule, has common compositional features with the architecture of the home and the estate as a whole. The entrance to the apartment house is decidedly representative and colorful enough. Borrowing and imitating natural counterparts (prototypes), folk craftsmen have created unique works that clearly reflect interethnic and religious-everyday contacts, professional borrowings, family traditions and the achievements of modern times.Photographic examples of dwellings typical of nationality (the second half of the XIX –the second half of the twentieth century) are given. The collected photos are dated 2015, 2017, 2018. Numerous photo materials of the respective states were considered by the author for the identification of houses by nationality: Ukraine, Russia, Moldavia, ATO Gagauzia, Romania, Germany, Bulgaria. The resulting comparative tables and schemes of ethnic influences are quite large in volume and can therefore be illustrated and analyzed in the next article by the author. However, the features noted briefly atthis stage made it possible to draw some conclusions, which made it possible to distinguish the typical residential homes of the studied national groups from the vast number of mixed types characteristic of the South of Ukraine as a historical and ethnographic region as a whole. The distinctive features of the dwellings of Budzhak Ukrainians, Russians, Bulgarians, Romanians, Moldavians, Gagauzians, Germans are considered and detailed, places of decorative and color accents in the general composition of estates are revealed. Tradition is a form of translation of social experience in the philosophical sense. This or that type of stage borrowing of any object that evolves, including culture, is possible provided that the old goes into the new and works in it productively. Tradition acquires the features of stability when it becomes flexible, dynamic, able to absorb the best qualities of artistic cultures of other nations and groups, and also as a result of self-development. A comprehensive study of the featuresof traditional residential architecture provides the basis for the scientific substantiation of restoration works and the unveiling of the tourist potential of Budzhak. Taking into account the multifaceted architectural forms of residential objects, both geographical and sociocultural, it is possible to identify not only the visual and morphological features of traditional residential buildings of different ethnic groups, but also the semantic structure of the image of traditional architecture, which meansto develop certain techniques for the use of ethnic styles. houses for the future. The obtained factual material of this scientific article can be implemented in a wide range of architectural and design activities, as well as cultural, ethno-cultural and art-science practices.

The Omicron variant of SARS-CoV-2 has caused a large number of cases and hospitalizations in the pediatric population. Infants due to their age are susceptible to viral infections that may have a worse prognosis. Therefore, the aim of the current study has been to characterize the clinical features and the outcome of infants hospitalized with confirmed SARS-CoV-2 infection during the Omicron wave. We conducted a retrospective study of all consecutive infants hospitalized with symptomatic COVID-19 and no other co-infections, from January to September 2022 in one of the largest infectious diseases hospitals from Bucharest, Romania. A total of 613 infants were included in the analysis. The median age was 5 months (IQR: 3, 8 months). The clinical features were dominated by fever (96.4%), cough (64.8%) and loss of appetite (63.3%), and overall, respiratory symptoms were the most numerous (76.0%). Infants between 1-3 months old had a 1.5-fold increased risk of elevated alanine aminotransferase (ALT) values, and a longer length of hospitalization as compared to older infants. Infants between 7-9 months of age had 1.5-fold higher odds of loss of appetite, 1.7-fold more frequent cough and 1.6-fold more frequent digestive symptoms compared to infants in other age groups. The presence of digestive symptoms increased the probability of hepatic cytolysis (increased ALT) by 1.9-fold. Continued monitoring of COVID-19 among infants is very necessary, given the progressive character of SARS-CoV-2, in order to take correct and rapid therapeutic measures and to adapt to clinical changes driven by viral variant change.

Th e article presents the concept of the study of Ukrainian-foreign musical relations in the “Ukrainian Music Encyclopedia”, which is published by the Musicology and Ethnomusicology Department of the M. Rylsky Instiitute, on the example of Moldovan-Ukrainian musical connections. The directions, on which facts were systematized, are investigated. One of the components of the rich and long-lasting Moldovan-Ukrainian musical relationship is composer creativity, aimed at enriching both our cultures. It should be emphasized that the creative relations of figures of both cultures at all times were exclusively friendly and based on partnership. Of course, the creative dialogue of artists — both direct and indirect — began long before its formalizing in 1937 by launching the branch of the Union of Moldovan Composers within the Odessa organization of the Union of Composers of Ukraine. In the last century, the relations were concentrated mainly on the educational and pedagogical sphere and connected with the names of S. Vorobkevych, G. Muzychenko (Muzychescu), and M. Kazanli. One of the aspects of mediated creative dialogue is the appeal to Ukrainian composers concerning the Moldovan theme. In the XIX century, it was manifested in Th e Memoirs of the land of Moldova, op. 85, J. Rukgaber, 48 folk Romanian songs by K. Mikuli. The same aspect is deepened by an appeal to national poetry, for instance, in the romances by S. Vorobkevych, E. Mandychevsky, based on the poems of V. Alecsandri, A. Vlahutse, M. Eminescu, G. Cosbuc, etc

Th e image of the forest or of the woods is deeply implanted in the spiritual life, becoming for centuries a maternal symbol of our people. We fi nd it in popular creation (doinas, ballads, tales). In most folk tales, the main characters, on their way to becoming, wander through a thick and dark forest, as the forest itself is the destination point, where the dramatic denouement, an unpredictable meeting or a love idyll will take place. We also fi nd this space of transformations in the creation of our poets and writers (Mihai Eminescu, Vasile Alecsandri, Grigore Vieru, Ion Druță, etc.), in some tales, cult fairy tales, including those of the classic Ion Creangă. We will elucidate this space, represented in various interpretations of the Crengian tales: „Capra cu trei iezi”(Goat with three kids) in the fi lm Mama (1976, directed by Elisabeta Bostan); „Povestea lui Harap Alb”(Th e Story of Harap Alb) in De-ași fi Harap Alb (If I were Harap Alb) (1965), „Povestea porcului” (Th e story of the pig) in “Povestea dragostei”(Love story) (1977), “Fata babei și fata moșneagului” (Th e grandmother’s girl and the old man’s girl) in Maria-Mirabela (1981) — all directed by the Romanian Ion Popescu- Gopo, Dănilă Prepeleac (1996, directed by Tudor Tătaru) etc., fi lms where the forest is the main space for the unfolding of actions/events in the evolution of the dramaturgy, but also the spiritual modifi cation of the character.

In this article I will analyse the contribution of Nicolae I. Apostolescu, one of B.P. Hasdeu’s disciples, who (in his study, Language and its Social Manifestations) resumes his magister’s discussion about noematology and enlarges its sphere, directing it to a kind of “hermeneutics of sense”, appliable to both revealing the (hidden) meaning in art in general, and to etymological explanations (in order to clarify, for instance, the way in which folk etymologies appear, when the speaker makes certain connections, understands the situations which motivate certain significations in a specific way etc.). On this occasion, I will try to demonstrate that N.I. Apostolescu deserves to be considered an important forerunner of the Romanian hermeneutical research.

Abstract External political circumstances as well as Bartók’s personal activities in the early 1920s were decisive in contributing to the expansion of the basic principles of his musical language. Bartók’s Second Sonata for Violin and Piano (1922) may be considered a focal point in his evolution toward ultramodernism. Concomitant with this tendency, both Sonatas for Violin and Piano of this period have become paradigmatic of the controversial notion set forth by certain scholars regarding the existence of an atonal Bartók idiom. Within the ultramodernist style of the Second Sonata, the essence of Eastern-European folk music is still very much in evidence. The intention of this article is to show how Bartók’s move toward synthesis of varied folk and art-music elements in this work produces a sense of an organic connection between atonality and tonality. The close connection between these two principles was suggested by Bartók in an essay of 1920. I intend to show how both contradictory principles are conjoined within a highly complex polymodal idiom based on the tendency toward equalization of the twelve tones. Within the stanzaic structure of the Romanian “long song,” stylistic elements of recitation, improvisation, and declamation are essential in the gradual unfolding between these two contrasting concepts of pitch organization. Despite tonal ambiguity on both local and large-scale levels, the sense of polymodal tonality is ultimately established as primary.

The present paper analyses the emergence of a novel field of interest in the philosophical aesthetics of the 1960s in Romania: the aesthetics of everyday life. As such, it first starts by drawing out an overview of the aesthetic discussions in 1950s Romania by closely reading several articles from the main philosophical journal of the period: Cercetări filozofice. In this regard, I focus on two main aspects, namely the theory of reflection, which was the guiding principle of Marxist-Leninist aesthetics, and the theory of the social function of art. Further on I will sketch out how these two aspects defined the main traits of the local aesthetics of everyday life, a topic which took the center fold of aesthetic interest for almost a decade, and which has ever since the early 2000s found renewed interest.

Pediatric obesity presents a multifactorial etiology, which involves genetic traits as well, including single nucleotide polymorphisms. The aim of the study is to investigate the contribution of PPARG gene polymorphisms (namely Pro12Ala rs1801282, His447His rs3856806, and Pro115Gln rs1800571) and PPARGC1A rs8192678 SNP on the anthropometric and metabolic parameters in a population of Romanian children. We conducted a cross-sectional study of 295 Caucasian children, divided according to the body mass index (BMI) z-score into the study (obese and overweight) group of 130 children and the control (normoponderal) group of 165 children. Anthropometric parameters were greater in the obese and overweight population as opposed to controls, with significant differences (p < 0.01) found for the weight (2.77 ± 1.54 SD vs. −0.04 ± 1.15 SD), body mass index (BMI) (2.28 ± 0.97 SD vs. −0.18 ± 1.19 SD), mid-upper arm circumference (MUAC) (4.59 ± 2.28 SD vs. 0.28 ± 3.45 SD), tricipital skin-fold (TSF) (3.31 ± 3.09 SD vs. 0.62 ± 7.28 SD) and waist-to-height ratio (WHtR) (0.61 ± 1.51 SD vs. −0.35 ± 1.35 SD) z-scores. Moreover, triglyceride values were higher in the study group (118.70 ± 71.99 SD vs. 77.09 ± 37.39 SD). No significant difference in the allele and genotype distribution of investigates gene polymorphisms was observed between the studied groups (p > 0.05). PPARG (rs1801282, rs3856806, and rs1800571) were not associated with demographic, anthropometric, and laboratory parameters. However, PPARGC1A rs8192678 CC genotype was associated with TSF z-score (p = 0.03), whereas total and LDL cholesterol levels were significantly higher among TT homozygotes (p < 0.01). Our data suggest that PPARG (rs1801282, rs3856806, and rs1800571) and PPARGC1A (rs8192678) gene polymorphisms were not associated with childhood and adolescence overweight and obesity. The present study identified a significant increase in fasting glucose levels, triglyceride, albumin, and ALT levels in children with excess weight, as well as expected important upward variation of anthropometric parameters (BMI, MUAC, TSF z-scores).

Various theories have emerged as a result of evaluations and studies on nationalism. Among these theories, "primordial theory", "modernist theory" and "ethno-symbolist theory" came to the fore. Primordial theory argues that nations come from the same lineage and share a common religion, language, culture and history. In this theory, there are “naturalistic”, “biological” and “cultural” perspectives. According to modernist theory, nationalism is a social necessity of that period. In this theory, nationalism is evaluated together with the modernization process, which affects social, political and economic developments and changes. In the ethno-symbolist theory, nationalism, ethnic origin and cultural characteristics of nations are emphasized. National symbols are frequently encountered in Turkish oral and written cultural products. Symbols reflecting Turkish nationalism are widely used, especially in Minstrel Literature, a product of Turkish Folk Literature. These symbols appeal to the subconscious of the Turks with their deep meanings. Each symbol has its own semantic national value. The "Turnalar" epic of Ozantürk emphasizes the shared cultural heritage of the Turkish people. In the epic of Turnalar, which consists of three separate works connected to each other, the Turkish communities that make up the Turkish World are described. In the first of these texts, the Turks of Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus, Uzbekistan, Turkey and of Turkmenistan are mentioned. In the second text, Turkish tribes living in a wide geography including countries such as Iraq, Iran, East Turkestan, Crimea, Tatarstan, Bashkortostan, Yakutia / Sakha, Chuvashia, Altai Republic, Tuva Republic, Khakas Republic are presented. In the third text, the Turks living in countries such as Greece / Western Thrace, Bulgaria, Romania, Moldova / Gagauzeli, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Kosovo, Albania, Croatia, Macedonia, Hungary, and Turks who struggle for existence" along with the Turkish presence in Europe are spoken of. The epic of "Turnalar" is a work of Bayram Durbilmez, who also wrote poems in minstrel manner under the pseudonym Ozantürk. Durbilmez is a scholar known for his works in the fields of minstrel literature, tekke-sufi literature and folklore of the Turkish World. This scholar is also known as a Turkist, nationalist intellectual who has served as a member of the board of directors, chairman of the board of directors and a delegate to the headquarters in various non-governmental organizations, foundations and associations that defend Turkish nationalism. The fact that he usually uses the pseudonym Ozantürk in his poems shows that Durbilmez has a nationalist attitude also in the world of art. In this article numerous national symbols that occurs in Ozantürk / Bayram Durbilmez's epic "Turnalar" about the Turkish World and that are shared by Turkish states and communities that exist across many geographical areas will be analysed. The national symbols in question are evaluated within the framework of nationalist theories, some of which through the primordial theory which states there are natural nations, some of which through modernist theory that emerged with the effect of modernization, and some of which through the ethno-symbolist theory that adopts ethnic cultural values. There are also symbols that are evaluated within these three theories. While determining the nationalist attitude in the epic, the scientific foundations of nationalism will also be tried to be shown through the mentions of the poet's academic studies on the Turkish World.

The traditional German tale of the Pied Piper of Hamelin inhabits an ambiguous narrative borderland, a liminal space between fact and fiction, fantasy and horror, concrete details and elusive mystery. In his study of the Pied Piper in Tradition and Innovation in Folk Literature, Wolfgang Mieder describes how manuscripts and other evidence appear to confirm the historical base of the story. Precise details from a fifteenth-century manuscript, based on earlier sources, specify that in 1284 on the 26th of June, the feast-day of Saints John and Paul, 130 children from Hamelin were led away by a piper clothed in many colours to the Koppen Hill, and there vanished (Mieder 48). Later manuscripts add details familiar today, such as a plague of rats and a broken bargain with burghers as a motive for the Piper’s actions, while in the seventeenth century the first English-language version advances what might also be the first attempt at a “rational” explanation for the children’s disappearance, claiming that they were taken to Transylvania. The uncommon pairing of such precise factual detail with enigmatic mystery has encouraged many theories. These have ranged from references to the Children’s Crusade, or other religious fervours, to the devastation caused by the Black Death, from the colonisation of Romania by young German migrants to a murderous rampage by a paedophile. Fictional interpretations of the story have multiplied, with the classic versions of the Brothers Grimm and Robert Browning being most widely known, but with contemporary creators exploring the theme too. This includes interpretations in Hamelin itself. On 26 June 2015, in Hamelin Museum, I watched a wordless five-minute play, entirely performed not by humans but by animatronic stylised figures built out of scrap iron, against a montage of multilingual, confused voices and eerie music, with the vanished children represented by a long line of small empty shirts floating by. The uncanny, liminal nature of the story was perfectly captured. Australia is a world away from German fairy tale mysteries, historically, geographically, and culturally. Yet, as Lisa M. Fiander has persuasively argued, contemporary Australian fiction has been more influenced by fairy tales than might be assumed, and in this essay it is proposed that major motifs from the Pied Piper appear in several Australian novels, transformed not only by distance of setting and time from that of the original narrative, but also by elements specific to the Australian imaginative space. These motifs are lost children, the enigmatic figure of the Piper himself, and the power of a very particular place (as Hamelin and its Koppen Hill are particularised in the original tale). Three major Australian novels will be examined in this essay: Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock (1967), Christopher Koch’s The Doubleman (1985), and Ursula Dubosarsky’s The Golden Day (2011). Dubosarsky’s novel was written for children; both Koch’s and Lindsay’s novels were published as adult fiction. In each of these works of fiction, the original tale’s motifs have been developed and transformed to express unique evocations of the Pied Piper theme. As noted by Fiander, fiction writers are “most likely to draw upon fairy tales when they are framing, in writing, a subject that generates anxiety in their culture” (158). Her analysis is about anxieties of place within Australian fiction, but this insight could be usefully extended to the motifs which I have identified as inherent in the Pied Piper story. Prominent among these is the lost children motif, whose importance in the Australian imagination has been well-established by scholars such as Peter Pierce. Pierce’s The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety explores this preoccupation from the earliest beginnings of European settlement, through analysis of fiction, newspaper reports, paintings, and films. As Pierce observed in a later interview in the Sydney Morning Herald (Knox), over time the focus changed from rural children and the nineteenth-century fear of the vast impersonal nature of the bush, where children of colonists could easily get lost, to urban children and the contemporary fear of human predators.In each of the three novels under examination in this essay, lost children—whether literal or metaphorical—feature prominently. Writer Carmel Bird, whose fiction has also frequently centred on the theme of the lost child, observes in “Dreaming the Place” that the lost child, the stolen child – this must be a narrative that is lodged in the heart and imagination, nightmare and dream, of all human beings. In Australia the nightmare became reality. The child is the future, and if the child goes, there can be no future. The true stories and the folk tales on this theme are mirror images of each other. (7) The motif of lost children—and of children in danger—is not unique to the Pied Piper. Other fairy tales, such as Hansel and Gretel and Little Red Riding Hood, contain it, and it is those antecedents which Bird cites in her essay. But within the Pied Piper story it has three features which distinguish it from other traditional tales. First, unlike in the classic versions of Hansel and Gretel or Red Riding Hood, the children do not return. Neither are there bodies to find. The children have vanished into thin air, never to be seen again. Second, it is not only parents who have lost them, but an entire community whose future has been snatched away: a community once safe, ordered, even complacent, traumatised by loss. The lack of hope, of a happy ending for anyone, is striking. And thirdly, the children are not lost or abandoned or even, strictly speaking, stolen: they are lured away, semi-willingly, by the central yet curiously marginal figure of the Piper himself. In the original story there is no mention of motive and no indication of malice on the part of the Piper. There is only his inexplicable presence, a figure out of fairy folklore appearing in the midst of concrete historical dates and numbers. Clearly, he links to the liminal, complex world of the fairies, found in folklore around the world—beings from a world close to the human one, yet alien. Whimsical and unpredictable by human standards, such beings are nevertheless bound by mysteriously arbitrary rules and taboos, and haunt the borders of the human world, disturbing its rational edges and transforming lives forever. It is this sense of disturbance, that enchanting yet frightening sudden shifting of the border of reality and of the comforting order of things, the essence of transformation itself, which can also be seen at the core of the three novels under examination in this essay, with the Piper represented in each of them but in different ways. The third motif within the Pied Piper is a focus on place as a source of uncanny power, a theme which particularly resonates within an Australian context. Fiander argues that if contemporary British fiction writers use fairy tale to explore questions of community and alienation, and Canadian fiction writers use it to explore questions of identity, then Australian writers use it to explore the unease of place. She writes of the enduring legacy of Australia’s history “as a settler colony which invests the landscape with strangeness for many protagonists” (157). Furthermore, she suggests that “when Australian fiction writers, using fairy tales, describe the landscape as divorced from reality, they might be signalling anxiety about their own connection with the land which had already seen tens of thousands of years of occupation when Captain James Cook ‘found’ it in 1770” (160). I would argue, however, that in the case of the Pied Piper motifs, it is less clear that it is solely settler anxieties which are driving the depiction of the power of place in these three novels. There is no divorce from reality here, but rather an eruption of the metaphysical potency of place within the usual, “normal” order of reality. This follows the pattern of the original tale, where the Piper and all the children, except for one or two stragglers, disappear at Koppen Hill, vanishing literally into the hill itself. In traditional European folklore, hollow hills are associated with fairies and their uncanny power, but other places, especially those of water—springs, streams, even the sea—may also be associated with their liminal world (in the original tale, the River Weser is another important locus for power). In Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock, it is another outcrop in the landscape which holds that power and claims the “lost children.” Inspired partly by a painting by nineteenth-century Australian artist William Ford, titled At the Hanging Rock (1875), depicting a group of elegant people picnicking in the bush, this influential novel, which inspired an equally successful film adaptation, revolves around an incident in 1900 when four girls from Appleyard College, an exclusive school in Victoria, disappear with one of their teachers whilst climbing Hanging Rock, where they have gone for a picnic. Only one of their number, a girl called Irma, is ever found, and she has no memory of how and why she found herself on the Rock, and what has happened to the others. This inexplicable event is the precursor to a string of tragedies which leads to the violent deaths of several people, and which transforms the sleepy and apparently content little community around Appleyard College into a centre of loss, horror, and scandal.Told in a way which makes it appear that the novelist is merely recounting a true story—Lindsay even tells readers in an author’s note that they must decide for themselves if it is fact or fiction—Picnic at Hanging Rock shares the disturbingly liminal fact-fiction territory of the Piper tale. Many readers did in fact believe that the novel was based on historical events and combed newspaper files, attempting to propound ingenious “rational” explanations for what happened on the Rock. Picnic at Hanging Rock has been the subject of many studies, with the novel being analysed through various prisms, including the Gothic, the pastoral, historiography, and philosophy. In “Fear and Loathing in the Australian Bush,” Kathleen Steele has depicted Picnic at Hanging Rock as embodying the idea that “Ordered ‘civilisation’ cannot overcome the gothic landscapes of settler imaginations: landscapes where time and people disappear” (44). She proposes that Lindsay intimates that the landscape swallows the “lost children” of the novel because there is a great absence in that place: that of Aboriginal people. In this reading of the novel, it is that absence which becomes, in a sense, a malevolent presence that will reach out beyond the initial disappearance of the three people on the Rock to destroy the bonds that held the settler community together. It is a powerfully-made argument, which has been taken up by other scholars and writers, including studies which link the theme of the novel with real-life lost-children cases such as that of Azaria Chamberlain, who disappeared near another “Rock” of great Indigenous metaphysical potency—Uluru, or Ayers Rock. However, to date there has been little exploration of the fairy tale quality of the novel, and none at all of the striking ways in which it evokes Pied Piper motifs, whilst transforming them to suit the exigencies of its particular narrative world. The motif of lost children disappearing from an ordered, safe, even complacent community into a place of mysterious power is extended into an exploration of the continued effects of those disappearances, depicting the disastrous impact on those left behind and the wider community in a way that the original tale does not. There is no literal Pied Piper figure in this novel, though various theories are evoked by characters as to who might have lured the girls and their teacher, and who might be responsible for the disappearances. Instead, there is a powerful atmosphere of inevitability and enchantment within the landscape itself which both illustrates the potency of place, and exemplifies the Piper’s hold on his followers. In Picnic at Hanging Rock, place and Piper are synonymous: the Piper has been transformed into the land itself. Yet this is not the “vast impersonal bush,” nor is it malevolent or vengeful. It is a living, seductive metaphysical presence: “Everything, if only you could see it clearly enough, is beautiful and complete . . .” (Lindsay 35). Just as in the original tale, the lost children follow the “Piper” willingly, without regret. Their disappearance is a happiness to them, in that moment, as it is for the lost children of Hamelin, and quite unlike how it must be for those torn apart by that loss—the community around Appleyard, the townspeople of Hamelin. Music, long associated with fairy “takings,” is also a subtle feature of the story. In the novel, just before the luring, Irma hears a sound like the beating of far-off drums. In the film, which more overtly evokes fairy tale elements than does the novel, it is noteworthy that the music at that point is based on traditional tunes for Pan-pipes, played by the great Romanian piper Gheorge Zamfir. The ending of the novel, with questions left unanswered, and lives blighted by the forever-inexplicable, may be seen as also following the trajectory of the original tale. Readers as much as the fictional characters are left with an enigma that continues to perplex and inspire. Picnic at Hanging Rock was one of the inspirations for another significant Australian fiction, this time a contemporary novel for children. Ursula Dubosarsky’s The Golden Day (2011) is an elegant and subtle short novel, set in Sydney at an exclusive girls’ school, in 1967. Like the earlier novel, The Golden Day is also partly inspired by visual art, in this case the Schoolgirl series of paintings by Charles Blackman. Combining a fairy tale atmosphere with historical details—the Vietnam War, the hanging of Ronald Ryan, the drowning of Harold Holt—the story is told through the eyes of several girls, especially one, known as Cubby. The Golden Day echoes the core narrative patterns of the earlier novel, but intriguingly transformed: a group of young girls goes with their teacher on an outing to a mysterious place (in this case, a cave on the beach—note the potent elements of rock and water, combined), and something inexplicable happens which results in a disappearance. Only this time, the girls are much younger than the characters of Lindsay’s novel, pre-pubertal in fact at eleven years old, and it is their teacher, a young, idealistic woman known only as Miss Renshaw, who disappears, apparently into thin air, with only an amber bead from her necklace ever found. But it is not only Miss Renshaw who vanishes: the other is a poet and gardener named Morgan who is also Miss Renshaw’s secret lover. Later, with the revelation of a dark past, he is suspected in absentia of being responsible for Miss Renshaw’s vanishment, with implications of rape and murder, though her body is never found. Morgan, who could partly figure as the Piper, is described early on in the novel as having “beautiful eyes, soft, brown, wet with tears, like a stuffed toy” (Dubosarsky 11). This disarming image may seem a world away from the ambiguously disturbing figure of the legendary Piper, yet not only does it fit with the children’s naïve perception of the world, it also echoes the fact that the children in the original story were not afraid of the Piper, but followed him willingly. However, that is complicated by the fact that Morgan does not lure the children; it is Miss Renshaw who follows him—and the children follow her, who could be seen as the other half of the Piper. The Golden Day similarly transforms the other Piper motifs in its own original way. The children are only literally lost for a short time, when their teacher vanishes and they are left to make their own way back from the cave; yet it could be argued that metaphorically, the girls are “lost” to childhood from that moment, in terms of never being able to go back to the state of innocence in which they were before that day. Their safe, ordered school community will never be the same again, haunted by the inexplicability of the events of that day. Meanwhile, the exploration of Australian place—the depiction of the Memorial Gardens where Miss Renshaw enjoins them to write poetry, the uncomfortable descent over rocks to the beach, and the fateful cave—is made through the eyes of children, not the adolescents and adults of Picnic at Hanging Rock. The girls are not yet in that liminal space which is adolescence and so their impressions of what the places represent are immediate, instinctive, yet confused. They don’t like the cave and can’t wait to get out of it, whereas the beach inspires them with a sense of freedom and the gardens with a sense of enchantment. But in each place, those feelings are mixed both with ordinary concerns and with seemingly random associations that are nevertheless potently evocative. For example, in the cave, Cubby senses a threateningly weightless atmosphere, a feeling of reality shifting, which she associates, apparently confusedly, with the hanging of Ronald Ryan, reported that very day. In this way, Dubosarsky subtly gestures towards the sinister inevitability of the following events, and creates a growing tension that will eventually fade but never fully dissipate. At the end, the novel takes an unexpected turn which is as destabilising as the ending of the Pied Piper story, and as open-ended in its transformative effects as the original tale: “And at that moment Cubby realised she was not going to turn into the person she had thought she would become. There was something inside her head now that would make her a different person, though she scarcely understood what it was” (Dubosarsky 148). The eruption of the uncanny into ordinary life will never leave her now, as it will never leave the other girls who followed Miss Renshaw and Morgan into the literally hollow hill of the cave and emerged alone into a transformed world. It isn’t just childhood that Cubby has lost but also any possibility of a comforting sense of the firm borders of reality. As in the Pied Piper, ambiguity and loss combine to create questions which cannot be logically answered, only dimly apprehended.Christopher Koch’s 1985 novel The Doubleman, winner of the Miles Franklin Award, also explores the power of place and the motif of lost children, but unlike the other two novels examined in this essay depicts an actual “incarnated” Piper motif in the mysteriously powerful figure of Clive Broderick, brilliant guitarist and charismatic teacher/guru, whose office, significantly, is situated in a subterranean space of knowledge—a basement room beneath a bookshop. Both central yet peripheral to the main action of the novel, touched with hints of the supernatural which never veer into overt fantasy, Broderick remains an enigma to the end. Set, like The Golden Day, in the 1960s, The Doubleman is narrated in the first person by Richard Miller, in adulthood a producer of a successful folk-rock group, the Rymers, but in childhood an imaginative, troubled polio survivor, with a crutch and a limp. It is noteworthy here that in the Grimms’ version of the Pied Piper, two children are left behind, despite following the Piper: one is blind, one is lame. And it is the lame boy who tells the townspeople what he glimpsed at Koppen Hill. In creating the character of Broderick, the author blends the traditional tropes of the Piper figure with Mephistophelian overtones and a strong influence from fairy lore, specifically the idea of the “doubleman,” here drawn from the writings of seventeenth-century Scottish pastor, the Reverend Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle. Kirk’s 1691 book The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies is the earliest known serious attempt at objective description of the fairy beliefs of Gaelic-speaking Highlanders. His own precisely dated life-story and ambiguous end—it is said he did not die but is forever a prisoner of the fairies—has eerie parallels to the Piper story. “And there is the uncanny, powerful and ambiguous fact of the matter. Here is a man, named, born, lived, who lived a fairy story, really lived it: and in the popular imagination, he lives still” (Masson).Both in his creative and his non-fiction work Koch frequently evoked what he called “the Otherland,” which he depicted as a liminal, ambiguous, destabilising but nevertheless very real and potent presence only thinly veiled by the everyday world. This Otherland is not the same in all his fictions, but is always part of an actual place, whether that be Java in The Year of Living Dangerously, Hobart and Sydney in The Doubleman, Tasmania, Vietnam and Cambodia in Highways to a War, and Ireland and Tasmania in Out of Ireland. It is this sense of the “Otherland” below the surface, a fairy tale, mythical realm beyond logic or explanation, which gives his work its distinctive and particular power. And in The Doubleman, this motif, set within a vividly evoked real world, complete with precise period detail, transforms the Piper figure into one which could easily appear in a Hobart lane, yet which loses none of its uncanny potency. As Noel Henricksen writes in his study of Koch’s work, Island and Otherland, “Behind the membrane of Hobart is Otherland, its manifestations a spectrum stretched between the mystical and the spiritually perverted” (213).This is Broderick’s first appearance, described through twelve-year-old Richard Miller’s eyes: Tall and thin in his long dark overcoat, he studied me for the whole way as he approached, his face absolutely serious . . . The man made me uneasy to a degree for which there seemed to be no explanation . . . I was troubled by the notion that he was no ordinary man going to work at all: that he was not like other people, and that his interest couldn’t be explained so simply. (Koch, Doubleman 3)That first encounter is followed by another, more disturbing still, when Broderick speaks to the boy, eyes fixed on him: “. . . hooded by drooping lids, they were entirely without sympathy, yet nevertheless interested, and formidably intelligent” (5).The sense of danger that Broderick evokes in the boy could be explained by a sinister hint of paedophilia. But though Broderick is a predator of sorts on young people, nothing is what it seems; no rational explanation encompasses the strange effect of his presence. It is not until Richard is a young man, in the company of his musical friend Brian Brady, that he comes across Broderick again. The two young men are looking in the window of a music shop, when Broderick appears beside them, and as Richard observes, just as in a fairy tale, “He didn’t seem to have changed or aged . . .” (44). But the shock of his sudden re-appearance is mixed with something else now, as Broderick engages Brady in conversation, ignoring Richard, “. . . as though I had failed some test, all that time ago, and the man had no further use for me” (45).What happens next, as Broderick demonstrates his musical prowess, becomes Brady’s teacher, and introduces them to his disciple, young bass player Darcy Burr, will change the young men’s lives forever and set them on a path that leads both to great success and to living nightmare, even after Broderick’s apparent disappearance, for Burr will take on the Piper’s mantle. Koch’s depiction of the lost children motif is distinctively different to the other two novels examined in this essay. Their fate is not so much a mystery as a tragedy and a warning. The lost children of The Doubleman are also lost children of the sixties, bright, talented young people drawn through drugs, immersive music, and half-baked mysticism into darkness and horrifying violence. In his essay “California Dreaming,” published in the collection Crossing the Gap, Koch wrote about this subterranean aspect of the sixties, drawing a connection between it and such real-life sinister “Pipers” as Charles Manson (60). Broderick and Burr are not the same as the serial killer Manson, of course; but the spell they cast over the “lost children” who follow them is only different in degree, not in kind. In the end of the novel, the spell is broken and the world is again transformed. Yet fittingly it is a melancholy transformation: an end of childhood dreams of imaginative potential, as well as dangerous illusions: “And I knew now that it was all gone—like Harrigan Street, and Broderick, and the district of Second-Hand” (Koch, Doubleman 357). The power of place, the last of the Piper motifs, is also deeply embedded in The Doubleman. In fact, as with the idea of Otherland, place—or Island, as Henricksen evocatively puts it—is a recurring theme in Koch’s work. He identified primarily and specifically as a Tasmanian writer rather than as simply Australian, pointing out in an essay, “The Lost Hemisphere,” that because of its landscape and latitude, different to the mainland of Australia, Tasmania “genuinely belongs to a different region from the continent” (Crossing the Gap 92). In The Doubleman, Richard Miller imbues his familiar and deeply loved home landscape with great mystical power, a power which is both inherent within it as it is, but also expressive of the Otherland. In “A Tasmanian Tone,” another essay from Crossing the Gap, Koch describes that tone as springing “from a sense of waiting in the landscape: the tense yet serene expectancy of some nameless revelation” (118). But Koch could also write evocatively of landscapes other than Tasmanian ones. The unnerving climax of The Doubleman takes place in Sydney—significantly, as in The Golden Day, in a liminal, metaphysically charged place of rocks and water. That place, which is real, is called Point Piper. In conclusion, the original tale’s three main motifs—lost children, the enigma of the Piper, and the power of place—have been explored in distinctive ways in each of the three novels examined in this article. Contemporary Australia may be a world away from medieval Germany, but the uncanny liminality and capacious ambiguity of the Pied Piper tale has made it resonate potently within these major Australian fictions. Transformed and transformative within the Australian imagination, the theme of the Pied Piper threads like a faintly-heard snatch of unearthly music through the apparently mimetic realism of the novels, destabilising readers’ expectations and leaving them with subversively unanswered questions. ReferencesBird, Carmel. “Dreaming the Place: An Exploration of Antipodean Narratives.” Griffith Review 42 (2013). 1 May 2016 <https://griffithreview.com/articles/dreaming-the-place/>.Dubosarsky, Ursula. The Golden Day. Sydney: Allen and Unwin, 2011.Fiander, Lisa M. “Writing in A Fairy Story Landscape: Fairy Tales and Contemporary Australian Fiction.” Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature 2 (2003). 30 April 2016 <http://openjournals.library.usyd.edu.au/index.php/JASAL/index>.Henricksen, Noel. Island and Otherland: Christopher Koch and His Books. Melbourne: Educare, 2003.Knox, Malcolm. “A Country of Lost Children.” Sydney Morning Herald 15 Aug. 2009. 1 May 2016 <http://www.smh.com.au/national/a-country-of-lost-children-20090814-el8d.html>.Koch, Christopher. The Doubleman. 1985. Sydney: Minerva, 1996.Koch, Christopher. Crossing the Gap: Memories and Reflections. 1987. Sydney: Vintage, 2000. Lindsay, Joan. Picnic at Hanging Rock. 1967. Melbourne: Penguin, 1977.Masson, Sophie. “Captive in Fairyland: The Strange Case of Robert Kirk of Aberfoyle.” Nation and Federation in the Celtic World: Papers from the Fourth Australian Conference of Celtic Studies, University of Sydney, June–July 2001. Ed. Pamela O’Neil. Sydney: University of Sydney Celtic Studies Foundation, 2003. Mieder, Wolfgang. “The Pied Piper: Origin, History, and Survival of a Legend.” Tradition and Innovation in Folk Literature. 1987. London: Routledge Revivals, 2015.Pierce, Peter. The Country of Lost Children: An Australian Anxiety. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.Steele, Kathleen. “Fear and Loathing in the Australian Bush: Gothic Landscapes in Bush Studies and Picnic at Hanging Rock.” Colloquy 20 (2010): 33–56. 27 July 2016 <http://artsonline.monash.edu.au/wp-content/arts/files/colloquy/colloquy_issue_20_december_2010/steele.pdf>.

The article presents the preliminary results of the interdisciplinary research (geological and geospatial studies, archaeological excavations, salt production experiments, and ethnographic survey) carried out during 2016-2019, in the site and hybrid saltscape of Băile Figa, well known for its remarkable environmental, ancient and current salt exploitation evidence. Besides, the article aims to evaluate the contribution of the recent research to a better understanding of the environmental context of the site and ancient salt production technology in the Inner Carpathian region. Also, it focuses on the hybrid character of the site and its potential to the transdisciplinary and holistic study. Environmental context. The site is rich in environmental, archaeological and ethnographic evidence. It is positioned in the salt-rich area of the Someșul Mare Basin at the northern edge of the Transylvanian Plain (Fig. 1/2; 2/1). The site is part of the landscape that was and is strongly affected by the dynamics of a salt diapir (Fig. 2/2) and deposits of salt mud, brine and halo-biotic factors, as well as by the intense human activity. Excavation. The excavation was carried out in Trench S.XV (16 m x 14 m), located in the central-southern sector of the site. The trench cut through the stream-bed and steep and high banks of the salt stream that crosses the site from south to north (Fig. 4; 5, 10). Its profile sections show four major stratigraphic units: a blackish topsoil, yellow clay mixed with gravel, salty mud, and the rock salt massif. The excavation was conducted in the mud layer, in the central sector of the trench, and in the clay-and-gravel layer found in its lateral sectors. In the area of ca. 60 square meters of the central sector, the excavation has reached the rock salt massif (Fig. 7-11). The excavation in the trench has uncovered rich evidence for Late Bronze Age salt production: seven interconnected features and around one hundred artifacts. The vast majority of the finds have been uncovered in the mud layer. The uncovered features included five timber structures surviving in the salt mud layer, as well as a ditch and a pit dug in the rock salt massif. Feature 1-XV-2013 (Fig. 12; 14/1) is a structure that includes a cone-shaped wattle-lined pit surrounded by a roundish wattle-made fence. The pit cuts through the mud up to the rock salt massif. Its rock salt bottom was sectioned by a ditch, 0.4-0.5 m wide and over 0.9 m deep. It seems that first, by rather extensive digging, the soil and mud were removed down to the salt massif. Then, a ditch, about 5 m long, 0.4 m wide and over 0.9 m deep (see below), was dug in the rock, from east to west. After that, a cone-shaped outer framework made of wattle (D maximal: 1.2 m, D minimal: 0.4 m, H: 1.8 m) was placed over the ditch, narrow end down. After that, the empty space around the framework was filled with mud. Then the pit was surrounded by a roundish wattle fence. A 1.6 m long massive rope made of three twisted threads (Clematis vitalba) has been found in the ditch (Fig. 41). Four samples taken from the wattle framework have produced five dates which fall between 2821±24 and 2778±26 BP. Feature 2-XV-2013 (Fig. 13) was uncovered in the northern part of the trench, on the right side of the stream, between feature 1-XV-2013 (see above) and the north edge of the trench. It was a rectilinear fence, 3.6 m long, built of vertical planks, split troughs, and channelled pieces, pushed into the mud down to the rock salt massif. Three fragments of the troughs from the fence were dendrochronologically dated to the period between 996 and 980 BC. Feature 1-XV-2015 (Fig. 14) was uncovered in the central-southern part of the trench. It was a corridor, 2.5 m long and 1 m wide, oriented E – W, made of two parallel rectilinear alignments of massive upright poles driven into the mud. One of its poles was at the same time part of the fence of the Feature 1-XV-2013. The corridor, on the base of three samples, has been radiocarbon-dated between 2870±32 and 2718±30 BP. Feature 1-XV-2018 (Fig. 15-17) was partially uncovered in the north-west part of the trench, about 3.5 m west of the stream. It is a 5 m long fence, oriented S – N, made of vertical planks, stakes (Fig. 17/2), and a split trough (Fig. 17/1), stuck into the mud, and four horizontal planks linking them to each other (Fig.17/2). Not dated. Feature 2-XV-2018 (Fig. 18; 19/1) was partially uncovered in the western part of the trench, in the rock salt massif. It is a roundish pit (over 2.5 x 1.8 m) with irregular edges, ca. 1.7 m deep below the salt massif surface. Not dated. Feature 3-XV-2018 (Fig. 19; 20) was uncovered in the central part of the trench. It was a ditch dug in the salt massif, 0.4 to 0.8 m wide, over 0.9 m deep, and about 4 m long. It cuts through the bottom of feature 1-XV-2013 (Fig. 12/2) and links it to the feature 2-XV-2018. Not dated. Feature 4-XV-2018 (Fig. 19/1; 20-22) was uncovered in the south-east corner of the trench, covering about 4 x 4 m, and consisted of a cluster of parallel beams laying on the salt massif, and a few vertical poles. The feature continues eastwards and southwards beyond the sides of the trench. On the base of three samples, it was radiocarbon-dated between 2856±31 and 2817±30 BP. Artifacts. We found some 100 artifacts in Trench S.XV during the excavation seasons, between 2016 and 2019. Most of them were made of wood, 1 of hemp (?), and 3 of stone (basalt). The wooden artifacts include 31 component pieces and fragments of trough bodies (Fig. 24-27), 17 channelled pieces (Fig. 28-30), 2 shovels (Fig. 33), 12 paddles (Fig. 31; 32), 4 mallets (Fig. 34/2,3), an L-shaped haft for a socketedaxe (Fig. 34/1), 2 pans (Fig. 35), a bowl (Fig. 36), fragments of 2 ladders (Fig. 37), 3 knife-shaped tools (Fig. 38/2,3), 11 rods with pointed end (Fig. 38/4), 4 loops made of twisted twigs (Fig. 40), a massive rope made of three twisted threads (Clematis vitalba) (Fig. 41), and 5 wedges. One of the artifacts found was made of plant material, possibly hemp: a small twisted cord (it may come from a peg inserted in the trough hole). Stone (basalt) artifacts include 2 mining hammers (mining tools) with engraved grooves aimed to fix the bindings (Fig. 44/1,3), an ovoid-shaped object with many percussion marks at its thicker end (Fig. 44/2). The chronology of the finds. In 2018 4 samples (wattle) from the Feature 1-XV-2013 were dated at Oxford University Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art / Radiocarbon Accelerator Unit. In 2019 some of the timber features (1-XV-2015 and 4-XV-2018) and wooden artifacts (the ladder, the troughs nos. 4 and 5 and some others) were radiocarbon dated by “Horia Hulubei” National Institute for Research and Development in Physics and Nuclear Engineering. Most of the dates fall between 1000 – 900 cal BC. Just one date (a wooden bowl) falls between ca. 1419-1262 cal BC (Tabels 1, 2, 3). The structures and most of the artifacts uncovered in S.XV date to ca. XI-IX centuries cal BC and seem to have been part of a complex production system aimed at brine and rock salt processing. Differential distribution of finds across the site. The research has revealed differential distribution of finds across the site. Thus, the evidence dating to ca. 2300 – 2000 cal BC (a pit dug in the rock massif and pottery), 1600 – 1400 cal BC (a wattle-built structure and wooden troughs), and 400 – 180 cal BC (timber-lined shaft, a wooden ladder and pottery) is mainly concentrated in the southern sector of the site. In exchange, the finds dating to ca. 1400 – 1100 cal BC have mainly been uncovered in the south-central part of the site (timber structures) and northern part of the site (pottery). The evidence dating to about 1050 – 850 cal BC covers two distinct areas: the south-central and northern sectors of the site. While about thirty fragmented troughs have been found in the south-central sector, no one object of this kind has been found in the northern sector. There are also differences concerning the timber structures between these sectors of the site. These strongly suggest that in XI – IX centuries cal BC, at least two different and complementary production areas were active in the site. Salt production experiments. The experiments on salt production, using faithful replicas of Late Bronze Age artifacts uncovered in trenches S.I and S.XV – troughs, channelled pieces, mallets, wedges, stone mining hammers, etc. – aimed to obtain from the different source material – rock salt massif, brine, and mud – various forms of salt: lumps of rock salt, fine salt, and highly concentrated and pure brine. The experiments showed the technical validity of several techniques. The most effective were as follows: 1. Detaching lumps of rock salt from the massif. By means of jets of fresh water directed with the troughs (along the twisted cords fitted in the perforations of the sticks that went through the pegs which were fixed in the holes at the base of the trough) depressions were simultaneously created in the rock salt at ten to twenty spots, 10 to 15 cm apart and 7 to 12 cm deep. This process took few hours (Fig. 45/1). It was noticed that each hole generated one to three cracks in the salt massif, around 1 m long and 5 to 10 cm deep. The holes and cracks allowed the insertion of wooden wedges. By hitting them with heavy wooden mallets, the wedges were pushed down to ca. 20 cm deep. Finally, using hooked sticks, many blocks of rock salt could be detached from the massif. The larger blocks were easily broken by stone hammers (mining tools). 2. Producing small pieces of salt and fine salt from the rock salt massif. The first stages of the process were identical to the previously described. After the holes and cracks were created, the rock salt mass was beaten with stone hammers (mining tools) along the cracks and holes, so that small pieces of salt, as well as wet and soft fine salt, were easily separated from the mass. Thus, about 50 kilograms of fine salt were collected in 30 minutes during the experiment (Fig. 45/2). 3. Boiling brine in the troughs with hot stones and drawing off the brine. Stones heated as much as possible in a fire were immersed in the brine with which the trough was filled, thus bringing it to the boil (Fig. 46). The boiling continued until the salt begun to crystallize. After that, the trough, full of highly concentrated brine, was left motionless for several hours. The insoluble impurities of the brine sedimented according to their specific weight: the lightest of them floated to the top, while the heaviest (metals and minerals) settled on the bottom. Above the sediment lying on the bottom of the trough and under that at the top remained a rather thick layer of fairly clean brine. During the experiments, the lower sediment has never reached 3 cm in thickness. The wider tops of the plugs that were inserted into the holes found at the bottom of the trough, were at least 3 cm high. Because of this, the upper edges of the plugs remained above the sediment on the bottom of the trough. We then slightly raised the long sticks that were tightly inserted into the axial holes of the plugs, which in turn tightly closed the holes in the trough’s bottom. The sticks were fixed and maintained in a slightly raised position by a kind of pliers – half split twigs – set transversely over the trough opening. In this way, the brine was allowed to drain easily into channelled pieces set under the trough. The brine then flowed through the channelled pieces to the next trough(s). The process could be repeated in the next trough(s) until the salt makers would get a fairly clean and highly concentrated brine. Ethnographic survey. Băile Figa and its surroundings are places where the evidence for ethnographic research, of what is commonly called ‘the traditional salt civilization’, can still be found. In every ancient salt production archaeological site known in Romania, without any exception, the current folk salt exploitation is still in progress. The latter offers to these sites a valuable research potential, almost unique in Europe, for the ethnoarchaeological research. The ethnographic survey has attested a number of aspects of the present-day folk ways of exploiting brine, rock salt, salt mud, and halophytic vegetation, as well as other traditional practices and customs related to these resources. Brine folk exploitation. The most exploited saline occurrence at Băile Figa is currently brine. Brine is taken directly from the numerous springs filling the central salty stream valley (Fig. 48/1). Then, it is loaded into plastic drums of 50 to 200 litres and transported by carts to the neighbouring villages (Fig. 48/2). The locals told us that, in the past, the brine was transported in large, cone-shaped barrels, called “bote mari”, of 60 litres, made of softwood boards connected to each other with circles of hazel twigs (Fig. 49/5), in smaller containers, of approx. 20 litres, called “barbânțe” (Fig. 49/3), as well as in smaller containers hollowed out of tree trunks and called “bote” (Fig. 49/2). The most remote localities, to which the brine from Băile Figa is transported, are situated at a distance of 11 km. But most people that currently get brine from Băile Figa live within a maximum perimeter of 6 km. Brine is mainly used for preserving meat, bacon (especially around the winter holidays), and vegetables. Sometimes the brine is used for health care purposes, mainly against colds, rheumatic pains, skin diseases or circulatory deficiencies, either on the spot or at home. In the 1960s and 1970s, the locals built two brine ponds and used them for health cure baths. Rock salt folk exploitation. According to some elderly locals, until 1989, the rock salt was periodically extracted at Băile Figa, by manual or mechanized digging of vertical pits. It was mainly used to supplement the feed of domestic animals in the individual households, sheepfolds (Fig. 50) and collective farms or state agricultural enterprises. Sometimes, the locals crushed and grinded salt lumps. In some households in the village of Figa, we have identified and documented some primitive millstones used in salt grinding (Fig. 49/1). Ground salt is added to animal feed and very rarely in human food, people being sure that this kind of salt can harm their health. Sapropelic mud folk exploitation. The ethnographic surveys have documented the traditional exploitation of sapropelic mud at Băile Figa. It is found only in some limited spots of the salt stream valley. The spots with small deposits of sapropelic mud are known only by “connoisseurs” who, among the clues, are guided by a specific smell. The sapropelic mud is used for health care purposes, especially for the treatment of rheumatic diseases. The mud is applied, either on most of the body or only on the parts affected by pain. Sometimes, the mud is applied to animal wounds, for disinfection and drying. Mud-based treatments are done both on-site and at home. Shepherding. Until the building, during 2007 – 2011, of the leisure resort, Băile Figa was the favourite place for grazing for the local domestic animals (sheep, cows, buffaloes, and horses). The animals, according to the information delivered by the shepherds, loved salt grass and brine (Fig. 49/2). Shepherds tried to prevent the animals from drinking brine from the springs because their fondness of the salty taste made them to drink it in unhealthy quantities, so that they could “swell” and die. Beekeeping. In the northern sector of the salt stream valley, at the surface of the soil, in the summer of 2018, a primitive beehive made of a hollowed-out oak trunk was discovered (Fig. 48/4). So far, as we can know, it is a unique find of this sort in a saline context.

[Editors’ note: this lyric essay was presented as the keynote address at Edith Cowan University’s CREATEC symposium on the theme Catastrophe and Creativity in November 2012, and represents excerpts from the author’s publication Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry. Regina, SK: Hagios Press, 2011. Reproduced with the author’s permission].Essay and verse and anecdote are the ways I have chosen to apprentice myself to loss, grief, faith, memory, and the stories we use to tie and untie them. Cat’s cradle, Celtic lines, bends and hitches are familiar: however, when I write about loss, I find there are knots I cannot tie or release, challenging both my imagination and my craft. Over the last decade, I have been learning that writing poetry is also the art of tying together light and dark, grief and joy, of grasping and releasing. Language is a hinge that connects us with the flesh of our experience; it is also residue, the ash of memory and imagination. (Threading Light 7) ———Greek katastrophé overturning, sudden turn, from kata down + strophe ‘turning” from strephein to turn.Loss and catastrophe catapult us into the liminal, into a threshold space. We walk between land we have known and the open sea. ———Mnemosyne, the mother of the nine Muses, the personification of memory, makes anthropologists of us all. When Hermes picked up the lyre, it was to her—to Remembrance —that he sang the first song. Without remembrance, oral or written, we have no place to begin. Stone, amulet, photograph, charm bracelet, cufflink, fish story, house, facial expression, tape recorder, verse, or the same old traveling salesman joke—we have places and means to try to store memories. Memories ground us, even as we know they are fleeting and flawed constructions that slip through our consciousness; ghosts of ghosts. One cold winter, I stayed in a guest room in my mother’s apartment complex for three days. Because she had lost her sight, I sat at the table in her overheated and stuffy kitchen with the frozen slider window and tried to describe photographs as she tried to recall names and events. I emptied out the dusty closet she’d ignored since my father left, and we talked about knitting patterns, the cost of her mother’s milk glass bowl, the old clothes she could only know by rubbing the fabric through her fingers. I climbed on a chair to reach a serving dish she wanted me to have, and we laughed hysterically when I read aloud the handwritten note inside: save for Annette, in a script not hers. It’s okay, she said; I want all this gone. To all you kids. Take everything you can. When I pop off, I don’t want any belongings. Our family had moved frequently, and my belongings always fit in a single box; as a student, in the back of a car or inside a backpack. Now, in her ninth decade, my mother wanted to return to the simplicity she, too, recalled from her days on a small farm outside a small town. On her deathbed, she insisted on having her head shaved, and frequently the nursing staff came into the room to find she had stripped off her johnny shirt and her covers. The philosopher Simone Weil said that all we possess in the world is the power to say “I” (Gravity 119).Memory is a cracked bowl, and it fills endlessly as it empties. Memory is what we create out of what we have at hand—other people’s accounts, objects, flawed stories of our own creation, second-hand tales handed down like an old watch. Annie Dillard says as a life’s work, she’d remember everything–everything against loss, and go through life like a plankton net. I prefer the image of the bowl—its capacity to feed us, the humility it suggests, its enduring shape, its rich symbolism. Its hope. To write is to fashion a bowl, perhaps, but we know, finally, the bowl cannot hold everything. (Threading Light 78–80) ———Man is the sire of sorrow, sang Joni Mitchell. Like joy, sorrow begins at birth: we are born into both. The desert fathers believed—in fact, many of certain faiths continue to believe—that penthos is mourning for lost salvation. Penthus was the last god to be given his assignment from Zeus: he was to be responsible for grieving and loss. Eros, the son of Aphrodite, was the god of love and desire. The two can be seen in concert with one another, each mirroring the other’s extreme, each demanding of us the farthest reach of our being. Nietzsche, through Zarathustra, phrased it another way: “Did you ever say Yes to one joy? O my friends, then you have also said Yes to all Woe as well. All things are chained, entwined together, all things are in love.” (Threading Light 92) ———We are that brief crack of light, that cradle rocking. We can aspire to a heaven, or a state of forgiveness; we can ask for redemption and hope for freedom from suffering for ourselves and our loved ones; we may create children or works of art in the vague hope that we will leave something behind when we go. But regardless, we know that there is a wall or a dark curtain or a void against which we direct or redirect our lives. We hide from it, we embrace it; we taunt it; we flout it. We write macabre jokes, we play hide and seek, we walk with bated breath, scream in movies, or howl in the wilderness. We despair when we learn of premature or sudden death; we are reminded daily—an avalanche, an aneurysm, a shocking diagnosis, a child’s bicycle in the intersection—that our illusions of control, that youthful sense of invincibility we have clung to, our last-ditch religious conversions, our versions of Pascal’s bargain, nothing stops the carriage from stopping for us.We are fortunate if our awareness calls forth our humanity. We learn, as Aristotle reminded us, about our capacity for fear and pity. Seeing others as vulnerable in their pain or weakness, we see our own frailties. As I read the poetry of Donne or Rumi, or verse created by the translator of Holocaust stories, Lois Olena, or the work of poet Sharon Olds as she recounts the daily horror of her youth, I can become open to pity, or—to use the more contemporary word—compassion. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum argues that works of art are not only a primary means for an individual to express her humanity through catharsis, as Aristotle claimed, but, because of the attunement to others and to the world that creation invites, the process can sow the seeds of social justice. Art grounds our grief in form; it connects us to one another and to the world. And the more we acquaint ourselves with works of art—in music, painting, theatre, literature—the more we open ourselves to complex and nuanced understandings of our human capacities for grief. Why else do we turn to a stirring poem when we are mourning? Why else do we sing? When my parents died, I came home from the library with stacks of poetry and memoirs about loss. How does your story dovetail with mine? I wanted to know. How large is this room—this country—of grief and how might I see it, feel the texture on its walls, the ice of its waters? I was in a foreign land, knew so little of its language, and wanted to be present and raw and vulnerable in its climate and geography. Writing and reading were my way not to squander my hours of pain. While it was difficult to live inside that country, it was more difficult not to. In learning to know graveyards as places of comfort and perspective, Mnemosyne’s territory with her markers of memory guarded by crow, leaf, and human footfall, with storehouses of vast and deep tapestries of stories whispered, sung, or silent, I am cultivating the practice of walking on common ground. Our losses are really our winter-enduring foliage, Rilke writes. They are place and settlement, foundation and soil, and home. (Threading Light 86–88) ———The loseability of our small and larger worlds allows us to see their gifts, their preciousness.Loseability allows us to pay attention. ———“A faith-based life, a Trappistine nun said to me, aims for transformation of the soul through compunction—not only a state of regret and remorse for our inadequacies before God, but also living inside a deeper sorrow, a yearning for a union with the divine. Compunction, according to a Christian encyclopaedia, is constructive only if it leads to repentance, reconciliation, and sanctification. Would you consider this work you are doing, the Trappistine wrote, to be a spiritual journey?Initially, I ducked her question; it was a good one. Like Neruda, I don’t know where the poetry comes from, a winter or a river. But like many poets, I feel the inadequacy of language to translate pain and beauty, the yearning for an embodied understanding of phenomena that is assensitive and soul-jolting as the contacts of eye-to-eye and skin-to-skin. While I do not worship a god, I do long for an impossible union with the world—a way to acknowledge the gift that is my life. Resonance: a search for the divine in the everyday. And more so. Writing is a full-bodied, sensory, immersive activity that asks me to give myself over to phenomena, that calls forth deep joy and deep sorrow sometimes so profound that I am gutted by my inadequacy. I am pierced, dumbstruck. Lyric language is the crayon I use, and poetry is my secular compunction...Poets—indeed, all writers—are often humbled by what we cannot do, pierced as we are by—what? I suggest mystery, impossibility, wonder, reverence, grief, desire, joy, our simple gratitude and despair. I speak of the soul and seven people rise from their chairs and leave the room, writes Mary Oliver (4). Eros and penthos working in concert. We have to sign on for the whole package, and that’s what both empties us out, and fills us up. The practice of poetry is our inadequate means of seeking the gift of tears. We cultivate awe, wonder, the exquisite pain of seeing and knowing deeply the abundant and the fleeting in our lives. Yes, it is a spiritual path. It has to do with the soul, and the sacred—our venerating the world given to us. Whether we are inside a belief system that has or does not have a god makes no difference. Seven others lean forward to listen. (Threading Light 98–100)———The capacity to give one’s attention to a sufferer is a rare thing; it is almost a miracle; it is a miracle. – Simone Weil (169)I can look at the lines and shades on the page clipped to the easel, deer tracks in the snow, or flecks of light on a summer sidewalk. Or at the moon as it moves from new to full. Or I can read the poetry of Paul Celan.Celan’s poem “Tenebrae” takes its title from high Christian services in which lighting, usually from candles, is gradually extinguished so that by the end of the service, the church is in total darkness. Considering Celan’s—Antschel’s—history as a Romanian Jew whose parents were killed in the Nazi death camps, and his subsequent years tortured by the agony of his grief, we are not surprised to learn he chose German, his mother’s language, to create his poetry: it might have been his act of defiance, his way of using shadow and light against the other. The poet’s deep grief, his profound awareness of loss, looks unflinchingly at the past, at the piles of bodies. The language has become a prism, reflecting penetrating shafts of shadow: in the shine of blood, the darkest of the dark. Enlinked, enlaced, and enamoured. We don’t always have names for the shades of sorrows and joys we live inside, but we know that each defines and depends upon the other. Inside the core shadow of grief we recognise our shared mortality, and only in that recognition—we are not alone—can hope be engendered. In the exquisite pure spot of light we associate with love and joy, we may be temporarily blinded, but if we look beyond, and we draw on what we know, we feel the presence of the shadows that have intensified what appears to us as light. Light and dark—even in what we may think are their purest state—are transitory pauses in the shape of being. Decades ago my well-meaning mother, a nurse, gave me pills to dull the pain of losing my fiancé who had shot himself; now, years later, knowing so many deaths, and more imminent, I would choose the bittersweet tenderness of being fully inside grief—awake, raw, open—feeling its walls, its every rough surface, its every degree of light and dark. It is love/loss, light/dark, a fusion that brings me home to the world. (Threading Light 100–101) ———Loss can trigger and inspire creativity, not only at the individual level but at the public level, whether we are marching in Idle No More demonstrations, re-building a shelter, or re-building a life. We use art to weep, to howl, to reach for something that matters, something that means. And sometimes it may mean that all we learn from it is that nothing lasts. And then, what? What do we do then? ———The wisdom of Epictetus, the Stoic, can offer solace, but I know it will take time to catch up with him. Nothing can be taken from us, he claims, because there is nothing to lose: what we lose—lover, friend, hope, father, dream, keys, faith, mother—has merely been returned to where it (or they) came from. We live in samsara, Zen masters remind us, inside a cycle of suffering that results from a belief in the permanence of self and of others. Our perception of reality is narrow; we must broaden it to include all phenomena, to recognise the interdependence of lives, the planet, and beyond, into galaxies. A lot for a mortal to get her head around. And yet, as so many poets have wondered, is that not where imagination is born—in the struggle and practice of listening, attending, and putting ourselves inside the now that all phenomena share? Can I imagine the rush of air under the loon that passes over my house toward the ocean every morning at dawn? The hot dust under the cracked feet of that child on the outskirts of Darwin? The gut-hauling terror of an Afghan woman whose family’s blood is being spilled? Thich Nhat Hanh says that we are only alive when we live the sufferings and the joys of others. He writes: Having seen the reality of interdependence and entered deeply into its reality, nothing can oppress you any longer. You are liberated. Sit in the lotus position, observe your breath, and ask one who has died for others. (66)Our breath is a delicate thread, and it contains multitudes. I hear an echo, yes. The practice of poetry—my own spiritual and philosophical practice, my own sackcloth and candle—has allowed me a glimpse not only into the lives of others, sentient or not, here, afar, or long dead, but it has deepened and broadened my capacity for breath. Attention to breath grounds me and forces me to attend, pulls me into my body as flesh. When I see my flesh as part of the earth, as part of all flesh, as Morris Berman claims, I come to see myself as part of something larger. (Threading Light 134–135) ———We think of loss as a dark time, and yet it opens us, deepens us.Close attention to loss—our own and others’—cultivates compassion.As artists we’re already predisposed to look and listen closely. We taste things, we touch things, we smell them. We lie on the ground like Mary Oliver looking at that grasshopper. We fill our ears with music that not everyone slows down to hear. We fall in love with ideas, with people, with places, with beauty, with tragedy, and I think we desire some kind of fusion, a deeper connection than everyday allows us. We want to BE that grasshopper, enter that devastation, to honour it. We long, I think, to be present.When we are present, even in catastrophe, we are fully alive. It seems counter-intuitive, but the more fully we engage with our losses—the harder we look, the more we soften into compassion—the more we cultivate resilience. ———Resilience consists of three features—persistence, adaptability transformability—each interacting from local to global scales. – Carl FolkeResilent people and resilient systems find meaning and purpose in loss. We set aside our own egos and we try to learn to listen and to see, to open up. Resilience is fundamentally an act of optimism. This is not the same, however, as being naïve. Optimism is the difference between “why me?” and “why not me?” Optimism is present when we are learning to think larger than ourselves. Resilience asks us to keep moving. Sometimes with loss there is a moment or two—or a month, a year, who knows?—where we, as humans, believe that we are standing still, we’re stuck, we’re in stasis. But we aren’t. Everything is always moving and everything is always in relation. What we mistake for stasis in a system is the system taking stock, transforming, doing things underneath the surface, preparing to rebuild, create, recreate. Leonard Cohen reminded us there’s a crack in everything, and that’s how the light gets in. But what we often don’t realize is that it’s we—the human race, our own possibilities, our own creativity—who are that light. We are resilient when we have agency, support, community we can draw on. When we have hope. ———FortuneFeet to carry you past acres of grapevines, awnings that opento a hall of paperbarks. A dog to circle you, look behind, point ahead. A hip that bends, allows you to slidebetween wire and wooden bars of the fence. A twinge rides with that hip, and sometimes the remnant of a fall bloomsin your right foot. Hands to grip a stick for climbing, to rest your weight when you turn to look below. On your left hand,a story: others see it as a scar. On the other, a newer tale; a bone-white lump. Below, mist disappears; a nichein the world opens to its long green history. Hills furrow into their dark harbours. Horses, snatches of inhale and whiffle.Mutterings of men, a cow’s long bellow, soft thud of feet along the hill. You turn at the sound.The dog swallows a cry. Stays; shakes until the noise recedes. After a time, she walks on three legs,tests the paw of the fourth in the dust. You may never know how she was wounded. She remembers your bodyby scent, voice, perhaps the taste of contraband food at the door of the house. Story of human and dog, you begin—but the wordyour fingers make is god. What last year was her silken newborn fur is now sunbleached, basket dry. Feet, hips, hands, paws, lapwings,mockingbirds, quickening, longing: how eucalypts reach to give shade, and tiny tight grapes cling to vines that align on a slope as smoothlyas the moon follows you, as intention always leans toward good. To know bones of the earth are as true as a point of light: tendernesswhere you bend and press can whisper grace, sorrow’s last line, into all that might have been,so much that is. (Threading Light 115–116) Acknowledgments The author would like to thank Dr. Lekkie Hopkins and Dr. John Ryan for the opportunity to speak (via video) to the 2012 CREATEC Symposium Catastrophe and Creativity, to Dr. Hopkins for her eloquent and memorable paper in response to my work on creativity and research, and to Dr. Ryan for his support. The presentation was recorded and edited by Paul Poirier at Mount Saint Vincent University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. My thanks go to Edith Cowan and Mount Saint Vincent Universities. ReferencesBerman, Morris. Coming to Our Senses. New York: Bantam, 1990.Dillard, Annie. For the Time Being. New York: Vintage Books, 2000.Felstiner, John. Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001.Folke, Carl. "On Resilience." Seed Magazine. 13 Dec. 2010. 22 Mar. 2013 ‹http://seedmagazine.com/content/article/on_resilience›.Franck, Frederick. Zen Seeing, Zen Drawing. New York: Bantam Books, 1993.Hanh, Thich Nhat. The Miracle of Mindfulness. Boston: Beacon Press, 1976.Hausherr, Irenee. Penthos: The Doctrine of Compunction in the Christian East. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications, 1982.Neilsen Glenn, Lorri. Threading Light: Explorations in Loss and Poetry. Regina, SK: Hagios Press, 2011. Nietzsche, Frederick. Thus Spake Zarathustra. New York: Penguin, 1978. Nussbaum, Martha. Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Oliver, Mary. “The Word.” What Do We Know. Boston: DaCapo Press, 2002.Rilke, Rainer Maria. Duino Elegies and the Sonnets to Orpheus. (Tenth Elegy). Ed. Stephen Mitchell. New York: Random House/Vintage Editions, 2009.Weil, Simone. The Need for Roots. London: Taylor & Francis, 2005 (1952).Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. London: Routledge, 2004.Further ReadingChodron, Pema. Practicing Peace in Times of War. Boston: Shambhala, 2006.Cleary, Thomas (trans.) The Essential Tao: An Initiation into the Heart of Taoism through Tao de Ching and the Teachings of Chuang Tzu. Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1993.Dalai Lama (H H the 14th) and Venerable Chan Master Sheng-yen. Meeting of Minds: A Dialogue on Tibetan and Chinese Buddhism. New York: Dharma Drum Publications, 1999. Hirshfield, Jane. "Language Wakes Up in the Morning: A Meander toward Writing." Alaska Quarterly Review. 21.1 (2003).Hirshfield, Jane. Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. New York: HarperCollins, 1997. Lao Tzu. Tao Te Ching. Trans. Arthur Waley. Chatham: Wordsworth Editions, 1997. Neilsen, Lorri. "Lyric Inquiry." Handbook of the Arts in Qualitative Research. Eds. J. Gary Knowles and Ardra Cole. Thousand Oaks: Sage, 2008. 88–98. Ross, Maggie. The Fire and the Furnace: The Way of Tears and Fire. York: Paulist Press, 1987.

I called your producer on the way here in the car because I was very excited. I found out … I did one of those genetic testing things and I found out that I'm 63 percent Irish … I had no idea. I had no idea! I thought I was Scottish and Welsh. It turns out my parents are just full of shit, I guess. But now I’m Irish and it just makes so much sense! I'm a really good drinker. I love St. Patrick's Day. Potatoes are delicious. I'm looking forward to meeting all my cousins … [to Conan O’Brien] You and I are probably related! … Now I get to say things like, “It’s in me genes! I love that Conan O’Brien; he’s such a nice fella.” You’re kinda like a giant leprechaun. (Reese Witherspoon, Tuesday 21 March 2017)IntroductionAs an Irishman and a football fan, I watched the unfolding 2016 UEFA European Championship in France (hereafter ‘Euro 2016’) with a mixture of trepidation and delight. Although the Republic of Ireland team was eventually knocked out of the competition in defeat to the host nation, the players performed extremely well – most notably in defeating Italy 1:0. It is not the on-field performance of the Irish team that interests me in this short article, however, but rather how Irish fans travelling to the competition were depicted in the surrounding international news coverage. In particular, I focus on the centrality of fan footage – shot on smart phones and uploaded to YouTube (in most cases by fans themselves) – in this news coverage. In doing so, I reflect on how sports fans contribute to wider understandings of nationness in the global imagination and how their behaviour is often interpreted (as in the case here) through long-established tropes about people and places. The Media ManifoldTo “depict” something is to represent it in words and pictures. As the contemporary world is largely shaped by and dependent on mass media – and different forms of media have merged (or “converged”) through digital media platforms – mediated forms of depiction have become increasingly important in our lives. On one hand, the constant connectivity made possible in the digital age has made the representation of people and places less controllable, insofar as the information and knowledge about our world circulating through media devices are partly created by ordinary people. On the other hand, traditional broadcast media arguably remain the dominant narrators of people and places worldwide, and their stories, Gerbner reminds us, are largely formula-driven and dramatically charged, and work to “retribalize” modern society. However, a more important point, I suggest, is that so-called new and old media can no longer be thought of as separate and discrete; rather, our attention should focus on the complex interrelations made possible by deep mediatisation (Couldry and Hepp).As an example, consider that the Youtube video of Reese Witherspoon’s recent appearance on the Conan O’Brien chat show – from which the passage at the start of this article is taken – had already been viewed 54,669 times when I first viewed it, a mere 16 hours after it was originally posted. At that point, the televised interview had already been reported on in a variety of international digital news outlets, including rte.ie, independent.ie., nydailynews.com, msn.com, huffingtonpost.com, cote-ivoire.com – and myriad entertainment news sites. In other words, this short interview was consumed synchronously and asynchronously, over a number of different media platforms; it was viewed and reviewed, and critiqued and commented upon, and in turn found itself the subject of news commentary, which fed the ongoing cycle. And yet, it is important to also note that a multiplicity of media interactions does not automatically give rise to oppositional discourse and ideological contestation, as is sometimes assumed. In fact, how ostensibly ‘different’ kinds of media can work to produce a broadly shared construction of a people and place is particularly relevant here. Just as Reese Witherspoon’s interview on the Conan O’Brien show perpetuates a highly stereotypical version of Irishness across a number of platforms, news coverage of Irish fans at Euro 2016 largely conformed to established tropes about Irish people, but this was also fed – to some extent – by Irish fans themselves.Irish Identity, Sport, and the Global ImaginationThere is insufficient space here to describe in any detail the evolving representation of Irish identity, about which a vast literature has developed (nationally and internationally) over the past several decades. As with other varieties of nationness, Irishness has been constructed across a variety of cultural forms, including advertising, art, film, novels, travel brochures, plays and documentaries. Importantly, Irishness has also to a great extent been constructed outside of Ireland (Arrowsmith; Negra).As is well known, the Irish were historically constructed by their colonial masters as a small uncivilised race – as primitive wayward children, prone to “sentimentality, ineffectuality, nervous excitability and unworldliness” (Fanning 33). When pondering the “Celtic nature,” the renowned English poet and cultural critic Mathew Arnold concluded that “sentimental” was the best single term to use (100). This perception pervaded internationally, with early depictions of Irish-Americans in US cinema centring on varieties of negative excess, such as lawlessness, drunkenness and violence (Rains). Against this prevailing image of negative excess, the intellectuals and artists associated with what became known as the Celtic Revival began a conscious effort to “rebrand” Ireland from the nineteenth century onwards, reversing the negatives of the colonial project and celebrating Irish tradition, language and culture (Fanning).At first, only distinctly Irish sports associated with the amateur Gaelic Athletic Association (GAA) were co-opted in this very particular nation-building project. Since then, however, sport more generally has acted as a site for the negotiation of a variety of overlapping Irish identities. Cronin, for example, describes how the GAA successfully repackaged itself in the 1990s to reflect the confidence of Celtic Tiger Irishness while also remaining rooted in the counties and parishes across Ireland. Studies of Irish football and rugby have similarly examined how these sports have functioned as representatives of changed or evolving Irish identities (Arrowsmith; Free). And yet, throughout Ireland’s changing economic fortunes – from boom to bust, to the gradual renewal of late – a touristic image of Irishness has remained hegemonic in the global imagination. In popular culture, and especially American popular culture, Ireland is often depicted as a kind of pre-industrial theme park – a place where the effects of modernity are felt less, or are erased altogether (Negra). The Irish are known for their charm and sociability; in Clancy’s words, they are seen internationally as “simple, clever and friendly folk” (98). We can identify a number of representational tropes within this dominant image, but two in particular are apposite here: ‘smallness’ and ‘happy-go-luckiness’.Sporting NewsBefore we consider Euro 2016, it is worth briefly considering how the news industry approaches such events. “News”, Dahlgren reminds us, is not so much “information” as it is a specific kind of cultural discourse. News, in other words, is a particular kind of discursive composition that constructs and narrates stories in particular ways. Approaching sports coverage from this vantage point, Poulton and Roderick (xviii) suggest that “sport offers everything a good story should have: heroes and villains, triumph and disaster, achievement and despair, tension and drama.” Similarly, Jason Tuck observes that the media have long had a tendency to employ the “vocabulary of war” to “hype up sporting events,” a discursive tactic which, he argues, links “the two areas of life where the nation is a primary signifier” (190-191).In short, sport is abundant in news values, and media professionals strive to produce coverage that is attractive, interesting and exciting for audiences. Stead (340) suggests that there are three key characteristics governing the production of “media sports packages”: spectacularisation, dramatisation, and personalisation. These production characteristics ensure that sports coverage is exciting and interesting for viewers, but that it also in some respects conforms to their expectations. “This ‘emergent’ quality of sport in the media helps meet the perpetual audience need for something new and different alongside what is familiar and known” (Rowe 32). The disproportionate attention to Irish fans at Euro 2016 was perhaps new, but the overall depiction of the Irish was rather old, I would argue. The news discourse surrounding Euro 2016 worked to suggest, in the Irish case at least, that the nation was embodied not only in its on-field athletic representatives but more so, perhaps, in its travelling fans.Euro 2016In June 2016 the Euros kicked off in France, with the home team beating Romania 2-1. Despite widespread fears of potential terrorist attacks and disruption, the event passed successfully, with Portugal eventually lifting the Henri Delaunay Trophy. As the competition progressed, the behaviour of Irish fans quickly became a central news story, fuelled in large part by smart phone footage uploaded to the internet by Irish fans themselves. Amongst the many videos uploaded to the internet, several became the focus of news reports, especially those in which the goodwill and childlike playfulness of the Irish were on show. In one such video, Irish fans are seen singing lullabies to a baby on a Bordeaux train. In another video, Irish fans appear to help a French couple change a flat tire. In yet another video, Irish fans sing cheerfully as they clean up beer cans and bottles. (It is noteworthy that as of July 2017, some of these videos have been viewed several million times.)News providers quickly turned their attention to Irish fans, sometimes using these to draw stark contrasts with the behaviour of other fans, notably English and Russian fans. Buzzfeed, followed by ESPN, followed by Sky News, Le Monde, Fox News, the Washington Post and numerous other providers celebrated the exploits of Irish fans, with some such as Sky News and Aljazeera going so far as to produce video montages of the most “memorable moments” involving “the boys in green.” In an article titled ‘Irish fans win admirers at Euro 2016,’ Fox News reported that “social media is full of examples of Irish kindness” and that “that Irish wit has been a fixture at the tournament.” Aljazeera’s AJ+ news channel produced a video montage titled ‘Are Irish fans the champions of Euro 2016?’ which included spliced footage from some of the aforementioned videos. The Daily Mirror (UK edition) praised their “fun loving approach to watching football.” Similarly, a headline for NPR declared, “And as if they could not be adorable enough, in a quiet moment, Irish fans sang on a French train to help lull a baby to sleep.” It is important to note that viewer comments under many of these articles and videos were also generally effusive in their praise. For example, under the video ‘Irish Fans help French couple change flat tire,’ one viewer (Amsterdam 410) commented, ‘Irish people nicest people in world by far. they always happy just amazing people.’ Another (Juan Ardilla) commented, ‘Irish fans restored my faith in humanity.’As the final stages of the tournament approached, the Mayor of Paris announced that she was awarding the Medal of the City of Paris to Irish fans for their sporting goodwill. Back home in Ireland, the behaviour of Irish fans in France was also celebrated, with President Michael D. Higgins commenting that “Ireland could not wish for better ambassadors abroad.” In all of this news coverage, the humble kindness, helpfulness and friendliness of the Irish are depicted as native qualities and crystallise as a kind of ideal national character. Though laudatory, the tropes of smallness and happy-go-luckiness are again evident here, as is the recurrent depiction of Irishness as an ‘innocent identity’ (Negra). The “boys” in green are spirited in a non-threatening way, as children generally are. Notably, Stephan Reich, journalist with German sports magazine 11Freunde wrote: “the qualification of the Irish is a godsend. The Boys in Green can celebrate like no other nation, always peaceful, always sympathetic and emphatic, with an infectious, childlike joy.” Irishness as Antidote? The centrality of the Irish fan footage in the international news coverage of Euro 2016 is significant, I suggest, but interpreting its meaning is not a simple or straightforward task. Fans (like everyone) make choices about how to present themselves, and these choices are partly conscious and partly unconscious, partly spontaneous and partly conditioned. Pope (2008), for example, draws on Emile Durkheim to explain the behaviour of sports fans sociologically. “Sporting events,” Pope tells us, “exemplify the conditions of religious ritual: high rates of group interaction, focus on sacred symbols, and collective ritual behaviour symbolising group membership and strengthening shared beliefs, values, aspirations and emotions” (Pope 85). Pope reminds us, in other words, that what fans do and say, and wear and sing – in short, how they perform – is partly spontaneous and situated, and partly governed by a long-established fandom pedagogy that implies familiarity with a whole range of international football fan styles and embodied performances (Rowe). To this, we must add that fans of a national sports team generally uphold shared understandings of what constitutes desirable and appropriate patriotic behaviour. Finally, in the case reported here, we must also consider that the behaviour of Irish fans was also partly shaped by their awareness of participating in the developing media sport spectacle and, indeed, of their own position as ‘suppliers’ of news content. In effect, Irish fans at Euro 2016 occupied an interesting hybrid position between passive consumption and active production – ‘produser’ fans, as it were.On one hand, therefore, we can consider fan footage as evidence of spontaneous displays of affective unity, captured by fellow participants. The realism or ‘authenticity’ of these supposedly natural and unscripted performances is conveyed by the grainy images, and amateur, shaky camerawork, which ironically work to create an impression of unmediated reality (see Goldman and Papson). On the other hand, Mike Cronin considers them contrived, staged, and knowingly performative, and suggestive of “hyper-aware” Irish fans playing up to the camera.However, regardless of how we might explain or interpret these fan performances, it is the fact that they play a role in making Irishness public that most interests me here. For my purposes, the most important consideration is how the patriotic performances of Irish fans both fed and harmonized with the developing news coverage; the resulting depiction of the Irish was partly an outcome of journalistic conventions and partly a consequence of the self-essentialising performances of Irish fans. In a sense, these fan-centred videos were ready-made or ‘packaged’ for an international news audience: they are short, dramatic and entertaining, and their ideological content is in keeping with established tropes about Irishness. As a consequence, the media-sport discourse surrounding Euro 2016 – itself a mixture of international news values and home-grown essentialism – valorised a largely touristic understanding of Irishness, albeit one that many Irish people wilfully celebrate.Why such a construction of Irishness is internationally appealing is unclear, but it is certainly not new. John Fanning (26) cites a number of writers in highlighting that Ireland has long nurtured a romantic self-image that presents the country as a kind of balm for the complexities of the modern world. For example, he cites New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who observed in 2001 that “people all over the world are looking to Ireland for its reservoir of spirituality hoping to siphon off what they can feed to their souls which have become hungry for something other than consumption and computers.” Similarly, Diane Negra writes that “virtually every form of popular culture has in one way or another, presented Irishness as a moral antidote to contemporary ills ranging from globalisation to post-modern alienation, from crises over the meaning and practice of family values to environmental destruction” (3). Earlier, I described the Arnoldian image of the Irish as a race governed by ‘negative excess’. Arguably, in a time of profound ideological division and resurgent cultural nationalism – a time of polarisation and populism, of Trumpism and Euroscepticism – this ‘excess’ has once again been positively recoded, and now it is the ‘sentimental excess’ of the Irish that is imagined as a salve for the cultural schisms of our time.ConclusionMuch has been made of new media powers to contest official discourses. Sports fans, too, are now considered much less ‘controllable’ on account of their ability to disrupt official messages online (as well as offline). The case of Irish fans at Euro 2016, however, offers a reminder that we must avoid routine assumptions that the “uses” made of “new” and “old” media are necessarily divergent (Rowe, Ruddock and Hutchins). My interest here was less in what any single news item or fan-produced video tells us, but rather in the aggregate construction of Irishness that emerges in the media-sport discourse surrounding this event. Relatedly, in writing about the London Olympics, Wardle observed that most of what appeared on social media concerning the Games did not depart significantly from the celebratory tone of mainstream news media organisations. “In fact the absence of any story that threatened the hegemonic vision of the Games as nation-builder, shows that while social media provided an additional and new form of newsgathering, it had to fit within the traditional news structures, routines and agenda” (Wardle 12).Obviously, it is important to acknowledge the contestability of all media texts, including the news items and fan footage mentioned here, and to recognise that such texts are open to multiple interpretations based on diverse reading positions. And yet, here I have suggested that there is something of a ‘preferred’ reading in the depiction of Irish fans at Euro 2016. The news coverage, and the footage on which it draws, are important because of what they collectively suggest about Irish national identity: here we witness a shift from identity performance to identity writ large, and one means of analysing their international (and intertextual significance), I have suggested, is to view them through the prism of established tropes about Irishness.Travelling sports fans – for better or worse – are ‘carriers’ of places and cultures, and they remind us that “there is also a cultural economy of sport, where information, images, ideas and rhetorics are exchanged, where symbolic value is added, where metaphorical (and sometimes literal, in the case of publicly listed sports clubs) stocks rise and fall” (Rowe 24). There is no question, to borrow Rowe’s term, that Ireland’s ‘stocks’ rose considerably on account of Euro 2016. In news terms, Irish fans provided entertainment value; they were the ‘human interest’ story of the tournament; they were the ‘feel-good’ factor of the event – and importantly, they were the suppliers of much of this content (albeit unofficially). Ultimately, I suggest that we think of the overall depiction of the Irish at Euro 2016 as a co-construction of international news media practices and the self-presentational practices of Irish fans themselves. The result was not simply a depiction of idealised fandom, but more importantly, an idealisation of a people and a place, in which the plucky little people on tour became the global standard bearers of Irish identity.ReferencesArnold, Mathew. Celtic Literature. 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