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Pål Kolstø, Professor in the Department of East European Studies at the University of Oslo, edited a new book on Myths and Boundaries in South-Eastern Europe (357pp., June 2005).
Myths and Boundaries in South Eastern Europe examines how historical myths have contributed to the crystallisation of national boundaries in the Balkans, primarily among the South Slavs. Myths and the relevance of myth-making in politics are
well-established fields of social inquiry, as are boundaries and the mechanisms that define them, but they have largely developed in isolation from each other. Only rarely have studies of historical myths taken into account their boundary-creating effects. Conversely, the study of identity boundaries has mostly focused on mechanisms other than myth-making. One of the
achievements of this book is to bring these two traditions of inquiry into dialogue with each other.

Contents:

• Introduction: Assessing the Role of Historical Myths in Modern Society (Pål Kolstø)
• The Symbolic Identity of Croatia in the Triangle Crossroads-Bulwark-Bridge (Ivo Zanic)
• The Boundary on the Drina: the meaning and development of the mythologem (Ivo Goldstein)
• Bosnian Historical Reality and its Reflection in Myth (Sreccko M. Dzaja)
• The Sanctification of Enmity: Churches and the construction of founding myths of Serbia and Croatia (Vjekoslav Perica)
• Adamant and Treacherous: Serbian historians on religious conversions (Bojan Aleksov)
• The Evolution of Boundary: Defining historical myths in Serbian academic and public opinion in the 1990s (Ana Antic)
• Between Destiny and Contingency: Variations on historical narratives in the arts during the break-up of Yugoslavia (Zoran Terzic)
• Ancient Nationhood and the Struggle for Statehood: Historiographic myths in the Republic of Macedonia (Ulf Brunnbauer)
• Historical Myths: the Bulgarian case of pride and prejudice (Albena Hranova)