Balkan Perspectives of Europe

Eleonora Naxidou is Professor of Modern and Contemporary History of Southeastern Europe in the Department of History and Ethnology at Democritus University of Thrace, Greece. She is the author of the book Europeanness in the Context of Bulgarian ‘Balkanness’: Lyuben Karavelov, Federalism, and the Greeks (2021; in Greek), and co-editor of several scholarly volumes.Yura Konstantinova is Professor at the Institute of Balkan Studies & Center of Thracology, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. She has published extensively and been involved in numerous academic research projects on subjects including the history of modern Greece, Greek–Bulgarian relations, and international relations in Southeastern Europe in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

• Introduction: Balkan Occidental Discourse or Balkan Counter-Orientalism Part 1: What Is Europe? 1. Diverse Perceptions of Europe in the Newly Founded Greek State 2. Meeting Europe During a War: Perceptions of the French by Varna Residents During the Crimean War (1853–6) 3. ‘Mixed Feelings’: Nineteenth-Century Balkan Intellectuals and the Tanzimat 4. The West, the East and the Balkans: Bulgarian Intellectuals of the Revival and the Image of Europe 5. Between Imperial Legacy and European Identity: The Alchemy of Greek Perceptions of Europe Part 2: East vs West: The Two Sides of the Same Coin? 6. Images of Russia in the Greek World and Their European Horizon (Eighteenth Century) 7. Traces of American Protestant Missions in the Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Balkans: Local Perceptions of the USA 8. Modelling Emotions: Bulgarian Perceptions of Russia 9. Postwar Realignment: Yugoslavia Seeks to Join Europe 10. (Step-)Mother Russia – Projections and Mental Maps of Russia in Serbia Part 3: Visual Encounters 11. Heritage and Civilizational Discourse: ‘Civilized Europe’ and ‘Antiquities’ in Mid-Nineteenth Century Romania 12. ‘Granma Europe’: Political Imaginary and Representations of Europe in Bulgarian Caricature at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century 13. The Bulgarian Perception About Russia and the Fate of Russian Monuments in Bulgaria 14. Americans Appeared in the Balkans: How They Were Imagined in the Movies from the Region?