Europe and the Orient: Past Encounters, Heritage, Present-Day Interactions

From the period of Antiquity, through the Arabic conquests in Southern Europe, the Ottoman rule in the Balkans, and the complicated relations between the West and its colonies, the Mediterraneum has been a realm of constant mobility and exchange. In this space, societies traded, clashed, and interacted, shaping visions of each other, transferring technological and aesthetic discoveries, sharing stories, symbols, and interpretations. With multiple representations in philosophy, literature, architecture, music, and visual arts, the relationships between Europe and the Orient have formed a longue durée in the history of this region and remain a steady undercurrent in European culture until today.

The current volume revisits the centuries of contacts between Europe, Northern Africa, and the Middle East, and highlights the importance that the tour of images, artefacts, and ideas have held in both the past and the present. The volume is prepared within the project "Europe and the Orient: Historical Interactions and Cultural Heritage" that involves researchers from the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with Ethnographic Museum - Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Consisting of eighteen studies, the book outlines the processes of shaping the Orient in notions and imagination, the verbal forms traversing the cultural space within three continents, the role of East-West relations in constructing national ideologies, and the projections of the Orient in different social contexts and networks of everyday life.