Future events

 

Call for Papers: 'Balkan and Baltic States in United Europe: History, Religion, and Culture VI'.

Sofia, Bulgaria - October 3–5, 2025

Deadline for proposals: March 30, 2025

We cordially invite you to participate in the 6th edition of the international conference, with the intriguing topic Magic, Holiness and Mountains.

This time we will explore the intersection of the sacred, magical and mountains, which have always been intertwined in various cultures around the world. The mountains have been places of natural and “unnatural” power, associated with various beliefs and practices of worship, with the noted examples of Mt. Olympus to Mt. Kailash, but also places of the magical and mystical where hermits, mystical creatures and powers reside.

In modern and post-modern societies, with the disenchantment of the world (Weber, 1920) the meaning of these phenomena has not entirely disappeared; on the contrary, their significance is now growing with more people turning towards the unconventional, particularly in the postsocialist space (Anastasova, 2011, Valtchinova, 2019; Toncheva, 2015). The magical practices in Europe (traditional, neo-pagan, shamanic, voodoo, etc.), along with mystical spiritual teachings and others, whose geography is further expanding around the world, are merely an example of these phenomena. Furthermore, we pay attention not only to the human, but also to nonhuman world such as mountains, animals, plants, and ecosystems, which as entities participate in practices of veneration, magical spells, and are also protected or valued for their spiritual/ritual significance.

The conference is targeted at scholars and researchers from diverse disciplines and backgrounds interested in presenting their research related to the general topic of the conference. Recent PhDs and other young researchers are also encouraged to participate. The themes of the presentations may vary, without being limited to:

- the Balkan-Baltic region in comparative context in relation to holiness, magic and mountains;

- the processes of the “invention” of the sacred space related to mountains, hills, and forests;

- traditional magical beliefs and practices in modern/postmodern society;

- the magical and holy and everyday life;

- nonhuman world and the sacred – the role of nonhumans in various magical practices, as well as the protection of mountains, animals, plants and ecosystems in the context of multispecies ethnography;

- COVID 19 – the role of magic, holiness and mountains in dealing with COVID and its consequences.

Meanwhile, our 6th conference marks 17 years of the meetings and discussions of the International Society of Balkan and Baltic Studies. We, therefore, continue to observe the current situation in these regions in terms of transformations in the Balkan-Baltic area, reinterpretation of their history, situation of their diverse ethnic and religious communities, current topics that have emerged in the novel political, social and other contexts

Languages:

English and Russian. We intend to publish the conference papers (after transparent process of peer review) in a special publication of our journal ‘The Yearbook of Balkan and Baltic Studies’, indexed by SCOPUS.

Conference venue:

The conference will be held in a hybrid format – in presence, at the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with Ethnographic Museum in Sofia, Bulgaria, as well as online.

Organizing Committee:

Ekaterina Anastasova and Svetoslava Toncheva (heads), IEFSEM, BAS

Mare Kõiva, Estonian Academy of Sciences

Žilvytis Šaknys, Lithuanian Institute of History

Inese Runce, Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, University of Latvia

Evgenia Troeva-Grigorova, IEFSEM, BAS

Milena Lubenova, IEFSEM, BAS

Mariyanka Borisova, Irina Kolarska-Mladenova (secretaries), IEFSEM, BAS

Scientific committee:

Dejan Ajdachich, University of Gdansk, Poland; Robert Fletcher, Wageningen University, Netherlands; Sabina Ispas, Academia Romana, Romania; Thede Kahl, Friedrich-Schiller University, Jena, Germany; Solveiga Krūmiņa-Koņkova, University of Latvia, Latvia; Dr. Rasa Račiūnaitė-Paužuolienė, Vytautas Magnus University, Lithuania; Nemanja Radulović, University of Belgrade, Serbia.

Conference fee:

There is a € 60 conference fee. It will cover conference materials, cocktails and a 1-day excursion to one of the most sacred region of Bulgaria – Rupite (Vanga’s church), Heraclea Sintica, Rozhen Monastery and Melnik. The fee must be paid upon acceptance and no later than August 30 2025. Travel and accommodation costs must be covered by the participants.

The deadline for proposals is March 30, 2025.

Please send the title of your paper, an abstract (no more than 300 words), your first and last names, academic degree, academic affiliation, address and e-mail to: svetahet@yahoo.com and ekaterina_anastasova@yahoo.com.

Response with acceptance of papers: April 30, 2025

Further information concerning registration, the conference activities and schedule will be provided in a Second Circular in May, 2025.

We look forward to seeing you in Sofia!

---

Call for Papers: The Yearbook of Balkan and Baltic Studies (YBBS) 2025.

Community, art, religion, and feasts.

Deadline for proposals: April 1, 2025

Deadline for the submission of completed articles: August 1, 2025

The arts, religion and feasts and their communal expression have repeatedly come up in previous discussions and analyses, offering diverse interpretation possibilities. We invite you to provide an examination of art, religion, and feasts. How are these topics represented as distinct entities within various forms during modern times and in history? Materiality, visuality, mental values, and everyday principles influence religion and art; the cultural turn also influences relations between human and non-human persons. How do ‘private’ information and feasts become ‘public’? What kind of role do recognition and continuous changes play in these processes?

We hope that the 2025 issue will continue the journal's line of research on mythologies and their further developments in contemporary art. Also, we hope that the contributions will lead us to a new level, permitting the re-examination and analyses of flows in folk art or ethno art, their philosophical, religious and sociopolitical background and approaches.

We welcome new views on past and recent forms of communication and narratives, represented by urban legends, rumours, conspiracies, those legends which had an important place in the past, and in today’s society.

We welcome articles on traditional and new religious groups and their practices. In this regard, we will return to the ways of celebrating the ritual year and the anniversaries of human life. We invite you to open and describe the patterns, individual and collective features that appear in them. We draw attention to what is happening on social media platforms, which as practices are as valuable as face-to-face celebrations in everyday life and in the cycle of celebrations. The practices of the ritual year secure prestige and recognition in the community, but is this still true today?

Articles are submitted online at www.folklore.ee/balkan_baltic_yearbook/YBBS/about/submissions, which also contains all the submission guidelines.

The articles will be published at the end of November, or the very beginning of December.

Hoping for a nice cooperation,

Editors:

Ekaterina Anastasova

Mare Kõiva

Žilvytis Šaknys

Skaidrė Urbonienė

 

Past events

The Ritual Year WG Seasonal Webinars, see here for the past webinars.

Working Group conferences:

11-13 December 2024 | Fifteenth Conferece of the Ritual Year SIEF Working Group "Food, Feasts, Festivities, & Folklore". University of the Philippines Diliman, Philippines.

1-4 June 2022 | Fourteenth Conference of the Ritual Year SIEF Working Group "Commerce and Traditions". National Library of Latvia, Riga.

7-9 November 2018 | Thirteenth Conference of the Ritual Year SIEF Working Group “City Rituals”. Institute of Sociology, Romanian Academy. Bucharest, Romania.

8-12 January 2016 | Twelfth annual conference of the SIEF working group on the ritual year“Regulating customs”. Elphinstone Institute, University of Aberdeen. Findhorn, Scotland, UK

4–7 June 2015 | Eleventh Annual Conference of the SIEF Working Group on the Ritual Year“Traditions and Transformation”. Kazan (Volga Region) Federal University. Kazan, Russia.

25-28 September 2014 | Tenth Annual Conference of the SIEF Working Group on the Ritual Year“Magic in Rituals and Rituals in Magic”. Institute for History and European Ethnology of the University of Innsbruck. Innsbruck, Austria.

14-16 March 2013 | Ninth International Conference of the SIEF Working Group on the Ritual Year “Politics, Feasts, Festivals”. Department of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology of the University of Szeged, the Bálint Sándor Institute for the Study of Religion. Szeged, Hungary. Programme

26–29 June 2012 | Eighth International Conference of the SIEF Working Group on the Ritual Year “Migrations”. The Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with Ethnographic Museum (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) & Paisii Hilendarski University of Plovdiv. Plovdiv, Bulgaria.

10–13 November 2011 | Seventh International Conference of the SIEF Working Group on the Ritual Year “Researchers, Performance, Researcher. Co-Designing Heritage, Co-Designing Performance”. Institute of Slovenian Ethnology SRC SASA Ljubljana, Slovenia. Programme

4–7 June 2010 | Sixth International Conference of the SIEF Working Group on the Ritual Year “The Inner and the Outer”, Estonian Literary Museum, Folklore Archive, Tallinn, Estonia.

2–6 July 2009 | Fifth International Conference of the SIEF Working Group on the Ritual Year “The Power of the Mask”, Vytautas Magnus University, Kaunas, Lithuania.

22–26 June 2008 | Fourth International Conference of the SIEF Working Group on the Ritual Year “Ritual Year and Gender”. Folklore and Ethnology Department, University College Cork, Cork, Ireland.

25–29 May 2007 | Third International Conference of the SIEF Working Group on the Ritual Year “Ritual Year and History”. Narodni ustav lidove kultury, Strážnice, Czech Republic.

7–11 June 2006 | Second Conference of the SIEF Working Group on The Ritual Year “The Ritual Year and Ritual Diversity”. Institute for Dialectology, Onomastics and Folklore Research. Gothenburg, Sweden.

20–24 March 2005 | First International Conference of the SIEF Working Group on the Ritual Year in Association with the Department of Maltese University of Malta, Junior College Msida, Malta.

The inaugural meeting, Edinburgh 2004.

---

Panels at SIEF congresses:

Panel at SIEF2019 14th Congress, Santiago de Compostela, Spain, 14-17 April 2019
Tracking the ritual year on the move in different cultural settings and systems of values; convenors Irina Sedakova and Laurent Fournier

The Ritual Year Working Group panels “Statics vs. Dynamics, Nature vs. Culture in the Dwelling-Connected Practices of the Ritual Year” and “Dwelling in the festive city” at the 13th Congress of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) “Ways of Dwelling: Crisis – Craft – Creativity”. 26–30 March 2017. Göttingen, Germany.

The Ritual Year Working Group panels “The transformation of traditional rituals: imposed change or natural evolution?” and “Folk costume in the ritual year and beyond: heritage, identity marker & symbolic object” at the 12th Congress of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) “Utopias, Realities, Heritages. Ethnographies for the 21st century”.  21-25 June 2015. Zagreb, Croatia.

The Ritual Year Working Group panel “Differentiation of the ritual year(s) through time and space: selectivity and its reasons” at the 11th Congress of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) “Circulation”. 30 June - 4 July 2013. Tartu, Estonia.

The Ritual Year Working Group panels “Ritual places through the ritual year (1)” and “Ritual places through the ritual year (2)” at the 10the Congress of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) “People Make Places – ways of feeling the world". 17-21 April 2011. Lisbon, Portugal.

The Ritual Year Working Group panel “The Ritual Year and Folk Religion” (1) and “The Ritual Year and Folk Religion” (2) and “Masks and Mumming in the Nordic Area” at the 9th Congress of the International Society for Ethnology and Folklore (SIEF) “Liberating the Ethnological Imagination”. 16-20 June 2008. Derry / Londonderry. UK.