Search Results (50)

The identification of the “Mediterranean Diet” (MD) by Prof. Ancel Keys is described here, alongside its confirmation through the epidemiological study known as “The Seven Countries Study of Cardiovascular Diseases” (SCS). Prof. Keys’ intuition on the possible dietary determinants of coronary heart disease (CHD) was derived from several pilot studies conducted in various countries. His impression was that the healthy diet was eaten along the Mediterranean shores of Italy, former Yugoslavia, and Greece, characterized by a large intake of bread, cereals, vegetables, fruit, and olive oil, with a small intake of meat, milk, dairy, and sugar products. The SCS was conducted across 16 cohorts of middle-aged men in seven countries (USA, Finland, the Netherlands, Italy, former Yugoslavia, Greece, and Japan), with assessments of usual eating habits, repeated medical examinations, and long-term follow-up. Analyses by Keys on the data from the first 15 years of follow-up indicated that low intake of saturated fatty acids (SAFA), usually derived from animal foods, was associated with the lower occurrence of and mortality from CHD, confirming the idea that a diet such as the Mediterranean Diet could be healthy. Further analyses by collaborators of the SCS, over a longer follow-up period, included the use of food groups and dietary scores of different types, confirming that cohorts with a Mediterranean Diet had a lower risk and death rate from CHD, whereas the reverse occurred in populations consuming an unhealthy diet. Full article

Through the lens of the theory of mediamorphosis, the authors intend to demonstrate scientific contributions in the native languages of Croatian and Slovenian scholars to the study of digital journalism. This paper provides an insight into the common points but also similarities and differences in the evolution of interests and approaches of these scientific communities, which are special in that they are the only two members of the European Union that also share the legacy of the socio-political system of the former Yugoslavia. The central goal of this study was to identify, evaluate, and synthesize all the relevant empirical research, categorized only as original scientific papers that had been published from 1994 to 2024, together with scientific monographs on digital media and journalism, in order to contribute to filling the gap in regard to the review of local literature and internationalized local research. The primary search on the following terms and keywords: digital media, digital journalism, electronic publications, Internet, Internet journalism, Internet portals, new media, online media, online journalism, online portals, and web portals was conducted via several local databases (HRČAK, CEEOL, SCIndex, and COBISS). Using a systematic literature review strategy and content analysis methods, this study deeply explored several aspects of the empirical studies (N = 24) it found: metadata, theoretical background, research objects, methodology, and results. The articles were, in principle, published in local journals with high international impact and included in major databases WOS and SCOPUS. The findings show the first articles in Croatia date only from 2007 and from 2010 in Slovenia. With some interruptions, they are published relatively regularly. In the corpus analyzed, two scientific monographs from Croatia and one from Slovenia were included. The research confirms that the topics studied in this region and the methodologies used are characteristic of the contemporary trends in digital journalism studies. Although the thematic focuses are somewhat similar—journalistic texts and writing; editorial protocols; practices; policies; division of labor; organization; platform regulations and preferences; and audience behavior—there is a significant difference in the methodological approach; Croatian scholars rely on output manifestation and the analysis of media content; while Slovenian colleagues mainly research media organizations from the inside; through interviews. Full article

The relations between religion and the state in the socialist-governed states of Eastern Europe in 1945–1989 are generally framed using the term “persecution of religion”. On the other hand, significant differences existed in the region, from limited freedom of religion in Yugoslavia to a prohibition of religious practice in Albania. From the side of religion, these relations were significantly formed by the attitudes and activities of religious leaders. Which options were adopted by key religious actors in a political environment hostile to religion? What is to be learned about religion in authoritarian systems? This qualitative study draws on the case of the German Democratic Republic (GDR), governed in 1949–1989 by the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. We studied professional biographies of prominent religious dignitaries and a comprehensive volume of files from the Ministry for State Security of the GDR in order to conceptualize their attitudes and activities according to a two-dimensional classification (towards the state and towards society), which enabled an overview of the range of their options, and identified the types of religious dignitaries in authoritarian systems. This analysis revealed that a variety of attitudes and activities of religious leaders existed in the GDR. Full article

The post-communist period has seen several wars in regions with a majority of Eastern Orthodox Christians. These conflicts have prompted Eastern Orthodox churches to formulate stances on war and develop new doctrines of righteous war. These responses draw on a long lineage of Eastern Roman and Slavonic traditions, particularly the Cyrillian doctrine of righteous war expounded in the Life of Constantine-Cyril. This paper examines the theological responses of the Serbian Orthodox Church to the wars in the former Yugoslavia, providing a reference point for comparison with the current theological debates and assessment of doctrines of warfare in light of the war in Ukraine. The focus is on the biblical hermeneutics and theological framing of various Serbian-centered doctrines. These new outlines draw on diverse traditions within Slavonic and Eastern Orthodox theology. The paper aims to provide insights into the shaping of Eastern Orthodox positions on war and the theological genesis of justifications for war. The discussion sheds light on the intricate relationship between war and Christianity within the Eastern Orthodox context in Serbia. Full article

This article critically examines the Islamic Religious Community (IRC) in North Macedonia, focusing on its significant role in influencing religious practices, socio-political dynamics, and interfaith relations within the country. Since its inception following the dissolution of Yugoslavia, the IRC has been central to redefining the public role of Islam, advocating for religious freedoms, and supporting the development of democratic values. Through a mixed-methods approach, this research traces the historical evolution of the IRC, analyzes its constitutional and legal framework, and assesses its impact on North Macedonia’s multi-ethnic and multi-religious society. While the IRC’s contributions to promoting interfaith understanding and national stability are highlighted, the study also critically engages with the institution’s shortcomings, particularly the controversies related to its leadership and the challenges posed by its political entanglements. These issues have, at times, compromised the IRC’s efforts in fostering social cohesion and interfaith harmony. The findings provide valuable insights into the complex role of religious institutions in enhancing social stability and democratic governance in diverse societies, positioning the IRC as a significant case study with implications for similar contexts globally. Full article

Marburg virus (MARV), a filovirus, was first identified in 1967 in Marburg, Germany, and Belgrade, former Yugoslavia. Since then, MARV has caused sporadic outbreaks of human disease with high case fatality rates in parts of Africa, with the largest outbreak occurring in 2004/05 in Angola. From 2021 to 2023, MARV outbreaks occurred in Guinea, Ghana, New Guinea, and Tanzania, emphasizing the expansion of its endemic area into new geographical regions. There are currently no approved vaccines or therapeutics targeting MARV, but several vaccine candidates have shown promise in preclinical studies. We compared three vaccine platforms simultaneously by vaccinating hamsters with either a single dose of an adenovirus-based (ChAdOx-1 MARV) vaccine, an alphavirus replicon-based RNA (LION-MARV) vaccine, or a recombinant vesicular stomatitis virus-based (VSV-MARV) vaccine, all expressing the MARV glycoprotein as the antigen. Lethal challenge with hamster-adapted MARV 4 weeks after vaccination resulted in uniform protection of the VSV-MARV and LION-MARV groups and 83% of the ChAdOx-1 MARV group. Assessment of the antigen-specific humoral response and its functionality revealed vaccine-platform-dependent differences, particularly in the Fc effector functions. Full article

The evolution of map development has been shaped by advancing techniques and technologies. Nevertheless, field and remote mapping with cabinet data analysis remains essential in this process. Geological maps are thematic maps that delineate diverse geological features. These maps undergo updates reflecting changes in the mapped area, technological advancements, and the availability of new data. Herein, a geological assessment example focused on enhancing mapped data using digitally processed historical (legacy) aerial images is presented for a case study in the Dinarides karst area in Croatia. The study area of Bribirske Mostine is covered by the Basic Geological Map of Yugoslavia (BGMY) at a 100,000 scale, which was developed during the 1960s. As the BGMY was developed 60+ years ago, one of its segments is further analyzed and discussed, namely, faults. Moreover, applying modern-day technologies and reinterpretation, its data, scale, presentation, and possible areas of improvement are presented. Georeferenced digital historical geological data (legacy), comprising BGMY, archive field maps, and aerial images from 1959 used in BGMY development, are reviewed. Original faults were digitalized and reinterpreted within the geographic information system with the following conclusions: (i) more accurate data (spatial positioning) on faults can be gained by digitally processing aerial photographs taken 60+ years ago with detailed review and analysis; (ii) simultaneously, new data were acquired (additional fault lines were interpreted); (iii) the map scale can be up-scaled to 1:25,000 for the investigated area of Bribirske Mostine; and (iv) a newly developed map for the Bribirske Mostine study area is presented. Full article

In this experimental text that critically juxtaposes autoethnographic narration, reflection, and analysis with theoretical engagements, I suggest that the power dynamics that diminish and dispossess the lives of refugees and other displaced people also constrain and censor critical refugee epistemologies. Refugees are frequently impelled to speak, implored to speak, coached to speak, interrogated and ordered to speak, but on the condition that we consent to having our voices policed. Our narratives are welcomed if they affirm the humanitarian liberal order, but the knowledge we possess challenges it. Presented as benevolent and caring, the incessant demands for refugee stories and trauma erotics are also mechanisms of putting refugees in place: they assign the refugee a subject position of a conditionally accepted narrator who is refused authorship and self-possession. Our narratives fail to count as knowledge unless they are converted into writing by citizen ghost writers or coauthors. And when we refuse to recite trauma stories and instead disrupt the order of things by critically analyzing violent regimes of refuge and liberal complicity, we are censored. Refugees have things to say as ethnographers of their own lives, analysts of upside-down mobility, and critics of violent bureaucracies. This knowledge is needed and wanted. Rather than orienting our work to liberal publics, we are creating alternative, self-authorized structures that uphold displaced people as knowledgeable and world-building subjects, as people able to host others. Full article

The theology of the ethnocultural empathic turn, on the general level, encompasses ethnocultural empathy, which, as a branch of social psychology, strives for a thorough understanding of the life context of those ethnically and culturally different from ourselves. In the context of Christian theology, this turn also embraces the turn reflected in Mt 15:21–28 (Mk 7:24–30), in which Jesus expands his missionary work from the locally based “House of Israel” into the global realm to include the entire “inhabited world”. In this essay, the theological discourse of ethnocultural empathic turn is embedded within a specific sociopolitical context, which brings us to the Balkans, i.e., the post-Yugoslav framework, where we discuss the legacy of Bishop Srećko Badurina and layperson Franjo Starčević. During the disintegration of the Yugoslav Federation, they vigorously resisted the dominant ethnonationalist-religious persuasions of the Croatian Catholic and Serbian Orthodox communities. They stood up for those who faced elimination due to the policy of ethnic cleansing. Today, both can serve as the foundation for the establishment of the theology in question, aiming at the development of the first post-Yugoslav contextual theology based on the political theology and the theology of liberation, capable of tackling the phenomenon of ethnoreligiosity as one of the most pressing problems plaguing this region. Full article

Masonry has been widely used for the construction of residential buildings in Serbia and the majority of European countries. Confined masonry (CM) is a contemporary masonry technology that consists of load-bearing masonry walls enclosed in lightly reinforced horizontal and vertical reinforced concrete (RC) confining elements. CM has been widely used for the construction of low-rise and mid-rise residential buildings in Serbia and the region (Yugoslavia) since the 1960s. The design case study of a typical multi-family residential building located in Niš, Serbia (the third-largest urban center in the country), is discussed in this paper. This building was initially designed as a five-story CM structure in accordance with the 1981 Yugoslav seismic design code PTN-S, which was enforced in Serbia until 2019, when the Eurocode was adopted for official seismic design codes. Due to architectural constraints, the original design solution involving the CM system was not compliant with the code; hence, an alternative design using an RC-frame system with masonry infills was adopted. A comparison of two different design solutions provides insight into the different requirements of seismic design codes that have been used in the region. It is important to observe that seismic forces for RC structures determined in accordance with the PTN-S code are considerably lower compared to the ones determined according to EC 8-1, with the ratio ranging from 0.37 to 0.69. The seismic shear force according to Eurocode 8 is 1.46 times higher than the force that was used for seismic design according to the PTN-S code in the case of RC-frame structures. The results of an analysis of CM structures show that the seismic shear force in accordance with Eurocode 8 is almost 2.6 times higher than the force that was used for seismic design in accordance with the PTN-S code. The findings of this study are believed to be useful for understanding the difference in seismic design solutions for previous seismic design codes (which were used in the region for more than 40 years) and the present codes (Eurocodes). Full article

During the existence of Yugoslavia (1945–1991), the leading political ideology of “brotherhood and unity” had to be manifested in all forms of cultural life. Promoting the physically capable body as part of a larger cultural movement, Yugoslavia witnessed the transformation of physical daily regimens into mass bodily spectacles performed at stadiums, called sletovi, demonstrating the power of mass-choreographed discipline. Similarly, Yugoslav choreographers were encouraged to develop a distinct performance aesthetic based on stylization as a rhetoric for modernization, using folk dance as a medium to showcase and promote the collective body of the people through choreographed folklore spectacles. Focusing on these two case studies that exemplify how mass choreography was used as a strategy to choreograph the Yugoslav society, this paper analyzes how political ideologies and their constructions through physicality supported the Yugoslav state project, thereby pointing to the present-day remnants of these aesthetics in the post-Yugoslav republics, evident in mass protests. By utilizing archival and choreographic analysis, I demonstrate how movement and dance impacted the public understanding of unity and helped the creation of a Yugoslav socialist society, drawing from Andrew Hewitt’s thesis on “social choreography”. Full article

This article will cover the different types of migration in Macedonia and its Prespa region at the end of the 19th and 20th centuries through the Jonovski family from the village of Orovo. Poverty and wars caused many men to look for work and to earn money in distant places. Joshe, who was born around 1766, was first an economic migrant with his father, Marko, internally within the Ottoman Empire in Asia Minor (1880–1890). Later, he immigrated to the USA (1914–1918), before returning home to his family. However, after WWI, with the harsh attitude of the Greek government toward the Macedonian minority, this turned into permanent migration. His sons would be migrant workers in the USA, France, and Australia, while their wives and children stayed in Orovo. The village was destroyed and depopulated at the end of the Greek Civil War (1946–1949). Joshe and the remaining family reunited in Wroclaw, Poland, where in the 1950s Joshe died, and his daughters-in-law finally joined their husbands in the USA and Australia. His son Boris, with his family, moved to Skopje, Macedonia, Yugoslavia in 1968. We will look at the life and migrations of Joshe, his four children, and four grandchildren. Full article

Serbia is a country with a long tradition of emigration. The increase in the number of displaced people sharply rose in 1992 when all the diplomatic options to preserve Yugoslavia had failed. The ensuing ethnic conflict resulted in mass mobilization by young adults who were required to go to war, mainly against their will. The main purpose of the paper is twofold: to draw attention to the key challenges that displacement plays on individuals and to show how traumatic events, such as the war in Ukraine, can mobilize historical traumas. To elicit deeper and new understandings of how displacement impacts people, conversations with my elementary school classmates of Hungarian ethnic origin, including those who were serving the Yugoslav People’s Army (JNA) between 1991 and 1992, were analysed through the lens of the author’s autoethnographic positioning. It shows how life stories are co-produced through narrative inquiry and, by ‘co-reflecting’ on the past, it shows how they are simultaneously positioned within social categories of intersectionality, such as gender, social inequality, stayed and displaced. These reflections offer a broader understanding of how qualitative research can enrich existing knowledge of the effect of this specific conflict, and ethnic conflict in general. Full article

This article explores visual arts and literature in the Slovenian diasporic community in Argentina, founded by post-World-War-II refugees who fled Slovenia at the end of the war and the beginning of the communist revolution in Yugoslavia. Based on the ethnographic data collected among the Slovenes in Argentina and biographical interviews with selected Slovene artists, the article addresses how art and cultural production in the diaspora, imbued with social memories and themes of war, violence, mass executions in the post-war period, and exile from the homeland is encompassed in three levels of cultural policies: (a) an Argentinean framework of cultural pluralism that integrated migrant communities into the national identity and narrative, allowing them to preserve and express their ethnic and cultural backgrounds and identities; (b) a diasporic level that institutionalized specific themes important for diasporic ideologies, some explicitly related to violence, exile, and mass executions; and (c) a transnational level that facilitated the integration of artists from the diaspora into Slovenian and international “art worlds”. These cultural policies were often contradictory and required artists to shift between inclusion in the Argentinean art domain and the diasporic one, which favored partial social exclusivism. Full article

There is a significant building stock of post-WWII low- and mid-rise unreinforced masonry (URM) buildings in Serbia and the region (former Yugoslavia). Numerous buildings of this typology collapsed due to the devastating 1963 Skopje, Yugoslavia earthquake, causing fatalities, injuries, and property losses, as well as experienced damage in a few recent earthquakes in the region, including the 2010 Kraljevo, Serbia earthquake (M_W 5.5) and the 2020 Petrinja, Croatia earthquake (M 6.4). These buildings are three- to five-stories high, have clay brick masonry walls, and rigid floor slabs, usually with an RC ring beam at each floor level. This paper presents a case study of a URM building which was damaged due to the 2010 Kraljevo earthquake and subsequently retrofitted. A comparison of seismic analysis results, including the capacity/demand ratio and displacement/drift values, for the original and retrofitted building according to the seismic design and retrofit codes which were followed in Serbia as well as some of the neighboring countries for several decades and Eurocode 8 has been presented. The results of this study show that the selected retrofit solution that satisfied the Yugoslav seismic code requirements is not adequate according to the Eurocode 8, primarily due to significantly higher seismic demand. Full article