• Poor Visibility Looking Westward

    On Zlatko Pranjić and Nanna Frank Møller’s The Sky Above Zenica (2024) Zlatko Pranjić and Nanna Frank Møller, The Sky Above Zenica, 2024. Available in Croatian here. When in 1892 an ironworks was founded in Zenica, Bosnia and Herzegovina had already been under Austro-Hungarian rule for 14 years. The industrial development of the city with…

  • Myth and Reality in Romania

    On Alexandru Solomon’s Arsenie: An Amazing Afterlife (2023) Alexandru Solomon, Arsenie: An Amazing Afterlife, 2023. If one looks up Father Arsenie Boca online, truly captivating stories pop up. A Romanian priest, eventually abbot, theologian, mystic and artist, Boca enjoys the status of one of the most important Orthodox Christian clerics of the 20th century. Today,…

  • New Slovak Documentary Cinema

    A Report on the State of Things from the Heart of Central Europe Robert Mihály, The Most Beautiful Corner of the World, 2023. This is an expansion of some thoughts gathered here. What is happening in Slovakia? As a rule, the European, let alone the international press does not pay particularly much attention to it.…

  • War as a Private Matter

    Shoghakat Vardanyan, 1489, 2023. Access the Croatian original here. When in 2020 the decades-long conflict between Armenia and Azerbaijan over Nagorno-Karabakh flared up again, Soghomon Vardanyan was serving in the army. He was only 21 years old; he was a student, a saxophonist, and his parents and older sister were waiting for him to come…