I don’t think a lot of people (especially those not living in the balkans and Eastern Europe) understand the meaning of Rim Tim Tagi Dim. It’s a song about saying goodbye to your family, your birthplace, everyone you know and everything you have ever known. It’s about your parents sacrificing what little they have to give you a better life (the “I’m going away and I sold my cow” line), bc let’s be real a lot of you don’t understand how much livestock meant to people here even as little as 20-30 years ago (there is a saying “it’s better for the wife to die than the cow”). Rim Tim Tagi Dim is about going away and not being sure if you will be able to see your family even twice a year. And people still have to move away from the villages but not just that. It’s about the diaspora that had to move away to be able to get fair pay for their work, to be able to have a life. It’s a beautiful song that deserved to win for its meaning (and the cats!)

bratstvo i jedinstvo

Mother Teresa’s statue at Tirana International Airport, Albania 🇦🇱🙏✝️

In Albania for a few days, managed to get a cheap flight, £46 return from Edinburgh. Arrived last night so not seen much as yet, jumping on a bus to go to the World Unesco Heritage site of Berat, then back to Tirana on Thursday till Saturday.

eastern european parents don't apologize. they start to act all nice and sweet all of a suden

interact with this post in some way for me to randomly* assign you a country, territory, autonomous zone, or other region to research and follow current events for in 2024

Some clarifications before we get started

I'm using a random list generator to come up with these assignments so micronations won't be included

Everyone SHOULD be learning what they can about the genocide being inflicted against Palestinians and the Israel vs Palestine conflict more broadly, so for that reason I want everyone to treat Palestine as another country to learn more about in addition to the one I assign

interacting with this post in any way will be treated as an invitation to given you an assignment, this includes interacting exclusively to tell me NOT to do so

There's no set deadlines for turning anything in; if you wanna send new findings each week you're welcome to do that but you can also submit them monthly or even compile them to release at the end of 2024

Multiple interactions via the same blog won't lead to multiple assignments unless you explicitly ask for more

While I'm not going to explicitly require or forbid you to use specific sources I'd encourage you to look at sources both from within your assigned nation as well as from those outside of it, and in general be aware of fact checking and whatnot

*and some clarification: this won't be entirely at random because I'm going to generally try to avoid assigning anybody their own country...but like if you don't have it in your bio I'm not gonna ask what it is I'll just not worry about it when giving you your assignment

"You're so romantic"

Thanks, I grew up watching Telenovelas with my grandma!

"The so-called "Venus of Kostenki" was recovered from one of the Paleolithic sites on the Don River in Russia. Several figurines from this area share the same traits and indicate a single goddess who is encountered not just in Russia but throughout prehistoric Europe and the Near East. Her commonalities in so many figurines include the largeness of breasts, belly, thighs, and buttocks; a globe of a head with closely plated hair or more likely a knitted cap; and arms folded under breasts. Of subtler recurrence, least often remarked upon but of signal importance, is how often her head is tipped downward, not skyward, for the afterlife is not in the sky but in her own womb, the womb of the fatted earth. She is additionally faceless, as the Goddess in her wholeness is unknowable. This is the standard appearance of the Kostenki goddess figurines; but how nearly identical she is to prehistoric figurines from France to Israel is what startles. It is now known that a series of prehistoric societies were extremely far-ranging in their influences, amounting to a vast society of roaming hunter-gatherers. The last of these cultures has been named the Gravettian, the mammoth hunters who built sturdy shelters of mammoth bones to stand against even Ice Age storms, or dwelt in caves or semi-underground habitations. They were not a settled culture but did have centers revisited seasonally or periodically, ritual sites or encampments along the trails of migratory animals. Gravettian art dates from 25,000 to 20,000 BCE or older in Europe (and the Kostenki sites in use from about 37,000 BCE). This surprisingly was a unified culture that lasted a minimum of 5,000 years, with lingering elements until 17,500 BCE, and influences on the following Epigravettian era in Spain, Italy, France, the Balkans and Ukraine. Their goddess figurines were small because a nomadic existence required portability. When the Ice Age ended, Gravettian culture begins its slow fade into settled agricultural societies, the first cities, the earliest of which still created heavy-set faceless goddess figurines."

~ Jessica Amanda Salmonson

" Europe will pay for what they did to Moldova in ESC 2022. Croatia coming second will bring peace to the Balkans."

A You Tube Video and some comments.

So the comments on this dub of a 4chan shit post are fucking gold. Have a look.

raiven looking like *that* ❤️ supporting my thesis that slavics are real life targaryens iktr

A child of a vampire and a human. Without the weaknesses of vampires, but still decidedly unnatural. Some regions say they are short-lived and soft-bodied with fragile bones.

normal ppl rushing to the hospital: feel sick very badly -> goes to the doctor

eastern europeans rushing to the hospital: feel sick very badly -> tries remedies paased down from our ancestors -> call left and right until someone is or knows a doctor/pharmacist to tell us what pills/medicine to take -> tries curing it with alcohol -> tries the cleansing against the evil eye -> goes to a small doctor's office that won't sent us to the hospital right away -> we end up not going to the hospital after all "our ppl survived worse in the past, i shall see this trhough" placebo shit that works 🤷‍♀️

Inside the replica of the Thracian tomb of Kazanlak, Bulgaria.

Skradinski Buk waterfall, Krka National Park, Croatia

“   Salonica ceased to be an Ottoman city in November 1912. The capital city of Macedonia had been annexed by the Kingdom of Greece at a time when most of its population was non-Greek. Here, then, the main assignment was to obliterate the Ottoman heritage and to reinvent the Greek antecedents of the city.

   In Salonica, various events facilitated the task of the Greek administration. One major factor of urban reorganization was the big fire of August 1917 which destroyed 9,500 buildings, or approximately two thirds of the city. When the reconstruction process came to an end in the 1930s, nothing much remained of the urban pattern as it had been shaped during the last decades of Ottoman presence. Many Jews had lost their property in downtown Salonica and had been forced to move to suburban quarters. When one looks at photos of the 1930s, one easily remarks that the city had lost, by then, its Oriental character. No minarets in view. No intricate streets. A rigid grid of avenues and lanes arranged following a chequered pattern had replaced the playful Ottoman city.

   While the reconstruction process was going on, efforts were also made to resuscitate the Greek and Christian heritage of Salonica. The Hébrard plan foresaw highlighting of the main monuments of the city through a strategy of destruction of environing constructions and isolation of edifices of historical interest. Thus, small Byzantine churches, which had survived thanks to their invisibility, were transformed into major landmarks. In parallel, public squares were populated with  statues of Greek national heroes and the façades of the buildings all around were covered with typically 'Greek' ornamental motifs, although remaining faithful to Hamidian neoclassicism.

    After the departure of the Turks, the new image of Salonica drew mainly on the Christian and neo-Hellenic past of the city. But, like in other places in Greece, antiquity was also considered a major component of the city's memory. Although not much was done to revive ancient Salonica, subsequent to pioneering archaeological research by the French 'Armée d'Orient' between 1916 and 1919,24 some attention was nevertheless given to prominent late-Roman monuments such as the Rotunda, the Palace and Arch of Galerius, and the Agora.”

Source: Durmont, Paul. Salonica and Beirut: The Reshaping of Two Ottoman Cities of the Eastern Mediterranean, p. 195, 196, 197