Armenian Studies

Throughout the centuries there have been ties between Europe and the region of Greater Armenia. In this article I give a brief survey about the assumptions of Josef Strzygowski, a prominent and quite controversial figure in this field and discuss the affiliation of Armenia with Europe. Moreover, German artists who have depicted Armenian themes in their work are introduced.

Die Arbeit versammelt und untersucht alle wichtigen westlichen Reiseberichte über die Kunstschätze Armeniens bis hin zu Strzygowski. Für die Erforschung der Denkmäler ist ihre Kenntnisse unerlässlich. Zugleich zeigt der Überblick, wie aus Wissen Wissenschaft wird. Das Buch ist für jeden unverzichtbar, der sich mit der Kunst und Kultur Armeniens befassen will.

This article discusses symbolic forms and the association of folklore and politics in the Riga Brethren Cemetery (Brāļu Kapi). The iconographic and formal analysis of this memorial sheds light on its function as a place of worship for those who fell in action while fighting for the sovereignty of the Latvian people. Considering that Latvia suffered severely from different foreign rules over the past centuries, the memorial has contributed to strengthen nationalistic movements in Latvian society and has played an important role in nation-building. The cemetery’s landscape design as well as its large-scale monuments by the Latvian sculptor Kārlis Zāle (1888-1942) borrowed themes from Latvian mythology. After investigating another major work of Zāle, the Freedom Monument in Riga, I analyse the main elements of the sculptural ensemble of the Brethren Cemetery. Eventually, I outline how the political circumstances have influenced the burial practices over the decades. With Latvia celebrating the centennial of its first proclamation of independence in 2018, the restoration of this memorial has been undertaken in recent years.

Based on the accounts of selected Western European travelers, the knowledge about Armenia and its art has risen gradually throughout the past centuries until it has reached its peak when Josef Strzygowski published his "Baukunst der Armenier und Europa" in 1918. While gradually shifting from a transit country to the final destination of explorers, art lovers and natural scientists, these important documents reveal, piece by piece, the extent of Armenian cultural heritage, even leading to discussions about the origin of Gothic style, thus also shaping the cultural history of Europe. Due to the fact that many of the edifices described or depicted in the traveler's illustrations do not exist anymore, the significant value of these records has to be appreciated even more.

This article discusses symbolic forms and the association of folklore and politics in the Riga Brethren Cemetery (Brāļu Kapi). The iconographic and formal analysis of this memorial sheds light on its function as a place of worship for those who fell in action while fighting for the sovereignty of the Latvian people. Considering that Latvia suffered severely from different foreign rules over the past centuries, the memorial has contributed to strengthen nationalistic movements in Latvian society and has played an important role in nation-building. The cemetery's landscape design as well as its large-scale monuments by the Latvian sculptor Kārlis Zāle (1888-1942) borrowed their themes from Latvian mythology. After investigating another major work of Zāle, the Freedom Monument in Riga, I analyse the main elements of the sculptural ensemble of the Brethren Cemetery. Eventually, I outline how the political circumstances have influenced the burial practices over the decades. With Latv...

This article discusses symbolic forms and the association of folklore and politics in the Riga Brethren Cemetery (Brāļu Kapi). The iconographic and formal analysis of this memorial sheds light on its function as a place of worship for those who fell in action while fighting for the sovereignty of the Latvian people. Considering that Latvia suffered severely from different foreign rules over the past centuries, the memorial has contributed to strengthen nationalistic movements in Latvian society and has played an important role in nation-building. The cemetery's landscape design as well as its large-scale monuments by the Latvian sculptor Kārlis Zāle (1888-1942) borrowed themes from Latvian mythology. After investigating another major work of Zāle, the Freedom Monument in Riga, I analyse the main elements of the sculptural ensemble of the Brethren Cemetery. Eventually, I outline how the political circumstances have influenced the burial practices over the decades. With Latvia cel...

On the basis of three award winning books written recently by a successful author from Upper Austria, the present study makes use of linguistic methods in order to approach a corpus of literary texts. Since some of the terms therein utilized by the author can, ac-cording to the Variantenwörterbuch and other relevant reference works, clearly be at-tributed to both standard varieties of German spoken and written either in Austria or in Germany, the question is raised as to which conditions could justify such a coexistence. Functional manifestations might be one reason. The possible circumstances of a linguistic "censorship" of manuscripts of Austrian authors by German lecturers – as well as those of a commercially motivated choice of a standard – is also given due consideration. The fact that the examination of the "idiolectal" level of an author must not be forgotten becomes particularly evident in the present analysis.

In 1453, the Ottoman Sultan Mehmet II captured the city of Constantinople and ended the Byzantine tenure of the city. As part of his imperial bragging rights, he claimed dominion over two continents-Europe and Asia-and two seas: the Mediterranean or White Sea (Ak Deniz) and the Black Sea (Kara Deniz). Since antiquity, the Straits of the Bosphorus and the Dardanelles not only linked these two seas but created an imagined geographical division between Europe and Asia. The start of a universal Islamic rule centered at Constantinople precipitated a cultural and ideological backlash that resonated through the Mediterranean world. Responses to this sudden transition from Byzantine to Ottoman and from Orthodox Christianity to Sunni Islam varied from the reluctant cooperation of Genoese Pera to the polemics of Pope Pius II. While one end of the spectrum represented the semi-cooperative response of Genoese Pera, the other encapsulated the visceral response of the papacy-best expressed in the so-called Renaissance Crusader literature. 1 Scholars tend to divide the Mediterranean region along an East-West axis and so misread the 1453-capture of Constantinople and its fifteenth century context. This impoverished view obscures the reality that Constantinople and the cluster of cities, suburbs and settlements surrounding it acted as a cultural and economic nexus for a broader unified Mediterranean world. Equally important, Ottoman historiography has diminished the Mediterranean role of the Ottoman Empire in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in favor of the sixteenth century. The Venetian Republic took part in Eastern Mediterranean commerce and exchange. Constantinople engaged with the Papacy and the Western Mediterranean. Constantinople played a crucial role in the political and economic dynamics of the entire Mediterranean, a role that continued to evolve with the Ottoman dynasty and state in the fifteenth century. In contrast to traditional, narrow, narratives of the city's urban history, this paper contextualizes the role of Constantinople into a larger Mediterranean world. It uses a political and cultural-historical reading of its urban history during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This Mediterraneanizing approach removes the baggage of Greek and Turkish imperial readings of the Eastern Mediterranean. It highlights the intricate dynamics of the evolving Mediterranean economic and geopolitical spheres in the fifteenth century. The