Vampire
A vampire is a being from folklore that subsists by feeding on the vital force of the living. In European folklore, vampires were undead beings that visited loved ones and caused mischief or deaths in the neighborhoods they inhabited while they were alive, they wore shrouds and were described as bloated and of ruddy or dark countenance, markedly different from today's gaunt, pale vampire which dates from the early 19th century. Vampiric entities have been recorded in most cultures. Local variants in Eastern Europe were known by different names, such as shtriga in Albania, vrykolakas in Greece and strigoi in Romania. In modern times, the vampire is held to be a fictitious entity, although belief in similar vampiric creatures such as the chupacabra still persists in some cultures. Early folk belief in vampires has sometimes been ascribed to the ignorance of the body's process of decomposition after death and how people in pre-industrial societies tried to rationalise this, creating the figure of the vampire to explain the mysteries of death.
Porphyria was linked with legends of vampirism in 1985 and received much media exposure, but has since been discredited. The charismatic and sophisticated vampire of modern fiction was born in 1819 with the publication of "The Vampyre" by John Polidori. Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula is remembered as the quintessential vampire novel and provided the basis of the modern vampire legend though it was published after Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872 novel Carmilla; the success of this book spawned a distinctive vampire genre, still popular in the 21st century, with books, television shows, video games. The vampire has since become a dominant figure in the horror genre; the Oxford English Dictionary dates the first appearance of the English word vampire in English from 1734, in a travelogue titled Travels of Three English Gentlemen published in The Harleian Miscellany in 1745. Vampires had been discussed in French and German literature. After Austria gained control of northern Serbia and Oltenia with the Treaty of Passarowitz in 1718, officials noted the local practice of exhuming bodies and "killing vampires".
These reports, prepared between 1725 and 1732, received widespread publicity. The English term was derived from the German Vampir, in turn derived in the early 18th century from the Serbian vampir; the Serbian form has parallels in all Slavic languages: Bulgarian and Macedonian вампир, Bosnian: vampir / вампир, Croatian vampir and Slovak upír, Polish wąpierz, upiór, Ukrainian упир, Russian упырь, Belarusian упыр, from Old East Slavic упирь. The exact etymology is unclear. Among the proposed proto-Slavic forms are *ǫpyrь and *ǫpirь. Another less widespread theory is that the Slavic languages have borrowed the word from a Turkic term for "witch". Czech linguist Václav Machek proposes Slovak verb "vrepiť sa", or its hypothetical anagram "vperiť sa" as an etymological background, thus translates "upír" as "someone who thrusts, bites". An early use of the Old Russian word is in the anti-pagan treatise "Word of Saint Grigoriy", dated variously to the 11th–13th centuries, where pagan worship of upyri is reported.
The notion of vampirism has existed for millennia. Cultures such as the Mesopotamians, Ancient Greeks, Romans had tales of demons and spirits which are considered precursors to modern vampires. Despite the occurrence of vampire-like creatures in these ancient civilizations, the folklore for the entity known today as the vampire originates exclusively from early 18th-century southeastern Europe, when verbal traditions of many ethnic groups of the region were recorded and published. In most cases, vampires are revenants of evil beings, suicide victims, or witches, but they can be created by a malevolent spirit possessing a corpse or by being bitten by a vampire. Belief in such legends became so pervasive that in some areas it caused mass hysteria and public executions of people believed to be vampires, it is difficult to make a single, definitive description of the folkloric vampire, though there are several elements common to many European legends. Vampires were reported as bloated in appearance, ruddy, purplish, or dark in colour.
Blood was seen seeping from the mouth and nose when one was seen in its shroud or coffin and its left eye was open. It would be clad in the linen shroud it was buried in, its teeth and nails may have grown somewhat, though in general fangs were not a feature. Although vampires were described as undead, some folk tales spoke of them as living beings; the causes of vampiric generation were many and varied in original folklore. In Slavic and Chinese traditions, any corpse, jumped over by an animal a dog or a cat, was feared to become one of the undead. A body with a wound that had not been treated with boiling water was at risk. In Russian
Croatian Military Frontier
The Croatian Military Frontier was a district of the Military Frontier, a territory in the Habsburg Monarchy, first during the period of the Austrian Empire and during Austria-Hungary. Founded in the late 16th century out of lands of the Habsburg Kingdom of Croatia, it was a nominal part of that Kingdom, to be transferred in 1627 to direct imperial rule as part of the Military Frontier; the Frontier was located on the border with the Ottoman Empire. In the Frontier zone, the king-emperors promised free land and freedom of religion to people who came to the area with the majority of the population being Croats and Serbs. In exchange, the people who lived in the area had an obligation to militarily fight for the Empire, to protect the land. In 1630 Emperor Ferdinand II enacted the Statuta Valachorum laws, it was known that the soldiers had to fulfill military service from the age of 16 until 66. In the end of the 17th century, Habsburg Monarchy expanded its borders and territory of Croatian Military Frontier was expanded to include some former Ottoman territories in the east.
In 1783 it was placed under the unified control of the Croatian General Command headquartered in Zagreb. The Military Frontier was demilitarized on 8 August 1873. Croatian Military Frontier existed until 15 July 1881, when it was abolished and incorporated into the Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia; this part of the Military Frontier included the geographic regions of Lika, Kordun and bordered the Adriatic Sea to the west, Venetian Republic to the south, Habsburg Kingdom of Croatia to the north-west, the Ottoman Empire to the south-east, Habsburg Kingdom of Slavonia to the east, Habsburg Kingdom of Hungary to the north. It extended onto the Slavonian Military Frontier near the confluence of the Una river into the Sava. Like the rest of the Military Frontier, it ceased to exist as a political entity in the late 19th century. Croatian Military Frontier included three General Command sections which were divided into eight Regiments: Varaždin General Command Križevci Regiment N°V Đurđevac Regiment N°VI Karlovac General Command Lika Regiment N°I Otočac Regiment N°II Ogulin Regiment N°III Slunj Regiment N°IV Zagreb General Command Glina Regiment N°X Petrinja Regiment N°XI In 1802, the estimated population consisted of: 195,300 Roman Catholics 180,800 Orthodox ChristiansIn 1820, estimated population of Croatian Military Frontier included: 207,747 Catholics 198,728 Orthodox ChristiansAccording to Hungarian statistician Elek Fényes, in 1840 the Croatian Military Frontier was populated by 498,947 people and the ethnic structure was: 258,454 Croats 240,493 SerbsThe first modern census from 1857 recorded the religion of the populace of Croatian Military Frontier: 285,344 Roman Catholics 253,429 Orthodox Christians 5,433 Eastern Catholics74.8% of the active population in Croatian-Slavonian Military Frontier were employed in agriculture, 18.63% were inactive soldiers, while 3.11% were working in industry.
Slavonian Military Frontier Banat Military Frontier Kingdom of Croatia Kingdom of Croatia-Slavonia Hundred Years' Croatian–Ottoman War Rothenberg, Gunther E.. "The Origins of the Austrian Military Frontier in Croatia and the Alleged Treaty of 22 December 1522". The Slavonic and East European Review. Maney Publishing. 38: 493–498. Rothenberg, Gunther E.. "The Struggle over the Dissolution of the Croatian Military Border, 1850–1871". Slavic Review. American Association for the Advancement of Slavic Studies. 23: 63–78. Doi:10.2307/2492376. Fodor, Pál. Ottomans and Habsburgs in Central Europe: The Military Confines in the Era of Ottoman Conquest. BRILL
Duchy of Carniola
The Duchy of Carniola was a State of the Holy Roman Empire, established under Habsburg rule on the territory of the former East Frankish March of Carniola in 1364. A hereditary land of the Habsburg Monarchy, it became a constituent land of the Austrian Empire in 1804 and part of the Kingdom of Illyria until 1849. A separate crown land from 1849, it was incorporated into the Cisleithanian territories of Austria-Hungary from 1867 until the state's dissolution in 1918, its capital was Ljubljana. The borders of the historic Carniola region had varied over the centuries. From the time of the duchy's establishment, it was located in the southeastern periphery of the Holy Roman Empire, where the Gorjanci Mountains and the Kolpa River formed the border with Croatia part of the Hungarian kingdom. In the north, it bordered the Imperial Duchy of Carinthia, from the Predil Pass and Fusine along the main ridge of the Karawanks range up to Jezersko. In the northeast and east, it bordered on the Duchy of Styria, i.e. the present-day Štajerska or Lower Styrian lands beyond the Sava River, which until 1456 were held by the Counts of Celje.
In the west, the peaks of the Julian Alps high above Lake Bohinj marked the border with the historic Friulian region held by the Patriarchs of Aquileia, but conquered by the Republic of Venice and incorporated into the Domini di Terraferma by 1433. In the southwest, beyond the Dinaric Alps, the Counts of Görz held the remaining Friulian territory, which in 1754 became the Austrian crown land of Gorizia and Gradisca; the remains of the Margraviate of Istria south of the Karst Plateau and the Brkini Hills were administered from Carniola. In its final extent, re-established in 1815, the duchy had an area of 9,904 square kilometres. In 1914, before the beginning of World War I, it had a population of a little under 530,000 inhabitants. According to the topography The Glory of the Duchy of Carniola written by the scholar Johann Weikhard von Valvasor, the territory was traditionally divided into three sub-regions: Upper Carniola, the mountainous part in the north, with the towns of Kranj and Kamnik Lower Carniola, in the southeast, with Novo Mesto, Kočevje and Krško, including White Carniola and the former Windic March Inner Carniola, in the southwest, around the towns of Idrija and Postojna.
Until 1860, these sub-regions coincided with the districts of Novo Mesto and Postojna. They were divided into smaller units, called political districts. Between 1861 and 1918, Carniola was divided into eleven districts consisting of 359 municipalities, with the provincial capital serving as the residence of the imperial governor; the districts were: Kamnik, Radovljica, the neighbourhood of Ljubljana, Postojna, Litija, Krško, Novo Mesto, Črnomelj, Kočevje. The political districts were in turn divided into 31 judicial circuits; the former March of Carniola, i.e. Upper Carniola and the Windic March, had been separated from the Duchy of Carinthia in 1040 by King Henry III of Germany, it was temporarily still held by the Carinthian rulers in personal union, like the Meinhardiner duke Henry VI, who died in 1335 without a male heir. His daughter Margaret only was able to keep the County of Tyrol, while the Wittelsbach emperor Louis IV the Bavarian passed Carinthia together with the Carniolan march to the Habsburg duke Albert II of Austria.
Albert's son Rudolf IV of Austria, "the Founder", in the course of his Privilegium Maius, awarded himself the title of a "Duke of Carniola" in 1364—though without consent by the Holy Roman Emperor. Rudolph founded the town of Novo Mesto in Lower Carniola named Rudolphswerth. After his death, as a result of the quarrels between his younger brothers Albert III and Leopold, Carniola by the 1379 Treaty of Neuberg became part of Inner Austria ruled from Graz by Leopold, ancestor of the Habsburg Leopoldian line. In 1457, the Inner Austrian territories were re-united with the Archduchy of Austria under the rule of the Habsburg emperor Frederick III; when Frederick's descendant, Emperor Ferdinand I, died in 1564, Carniola was separated again as part of Inner Austria under the rule of Ferdinand's son Archduke Charles II. Charles' son, Emperor Ferdinand II, inherited all the dynasty's lands in 1619 and the duchy formed a constituent part of the Habsburg Monarchy since. In the late 15th century, as part of the Habsburg westward expansion, the Duchy of Carniola acquired many new territories: Idrija and the surrounding parts of the Karst Plateau, Kastav and the interior areas of Istria, centered around Pazin.
It had nominal control over the port of Rijeka, which however de facto remained an autonomous city. In the 19th century, these areas were incorporated in the Austrian Littoral, Carniola thus became a landlocked region once again. With the Treaty of Schönbrunn in 1809, Napoleon formed the short-lived Illyrian Provinces from the annexed territories in Carniola, Croatia and Gradisca, Trieste; the Final Act of the 1815 Congress of Vienna restored the Illyrian Provinces to the Austrian Empire. Carniola formed the central part of the territory of the Austrian Kingdom of Illyria, whose capital was Ljubljana, including the Carniolan and Carinthian duchies as well as the Austrian Littoral with Gorizia and Gradisca, the Margraviate of Istria and the Imperial Free City of Trieste. After the dise
Ljubljana
Ljubljana is the capital and largest city of Slovenia. It has been the cultural, economic and administrative centre of independent Slovenia since 1991. During antiquity, a Roman city called. Ljubljana itself was first mentioned in the first half of the 12th century. Situated at the middle of a trade route between the northern Adriatic Sea and the Danube region, it was the historical capital of Carniola, one of the Slovene-inhabited parts of the Habsburg Monarchy, it was under Habsburg rule from the Middle Ages until the dissolution of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1918. After World War II, Ljubljana became the capital of the Socialist Republic of Slovenia, part of the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, it retained this status until Slovenia became independent in 1991 and Ljubljana became the capital of the newly formed state. The origin of name of the city, Ljubljana, is unclear. In the Middle Ages, both the river and the town were known by the German name Laibach; this name was in official use as an endonym until 1918, it remains frequent as a German exonym, both in common speech and official use.
The city is alternatively named Lublana in many English language documents. The city is called Lublana in Silesian, Lubiana in Latin: Labacum and anciently Aemona. For most scholars, the problem has been in how to connect the German names; the origin from the Slavic ljub- "to love, like" was in 2007 supported as the most probable by the linguist Tijmen Pronk, a specialist in comparative Indo-European linguistics and Slovene dialectology, from the University of Leiden. He supported the thesis; the linguist Silvo Torkar, who specialises in Slovene personal and place names, argued at the same place for the thesis that the name Ljubljana derives from Ljubija, the original name of the Ljubljanica River flowing through it, itself derived from the Old Slavic male name Ljubovid, "the one of a lovely appearance". The name Laibach, he claimed, was a hybrid of German and Slovene and derived from the same personal name; the symbol of the city is the Ljubljana Dragon. It is depicted on the top of the tower of Ljubljana Castle in the Ljubljana coat of arms and on the Ljubljanica-crossing Dragon Bridge.
It symbolises power and greatness. There are several explanations on the origin of the Ljubljana Dragon. According to a Slavic myth, the slaying of a dragon releases the waters and ensures the fertility of the earth, it is thought that the myth is tied to the Ljubljana Marshes, the expansive marshy area that periodically threatens Ljubljana with flooding. According to the celebrated Greek legend, the Argonauts on their return home after having taken the Golden Fleece found a large lake surrounded by a marsh between the present-day towns of Vrhnika and Ljubljana, it was there. This monster has evolved into the dragon, it is more believable that the dragon was adopted from Saint George, the patron of the Ljubljana Castle chapel built in the 15th century. In the legend of Saint George, the dragon represents the old ancestral paganism overcome by Christianity. According to another explanation, related to the second, the dragon was at first only a decoration above the city coat of arms. In the Baroque, it became part of the coat of arms, in the 19th and the 20th century, it outstripped the tower and other elements in importance.
Around 2000 BC, the Ljubljana Marshes in the immediate vicinity of Ljubljana were settled by people living in pile dwellings. Prehistoric pile dwellings and the oldest wooden wheel in the world are among the most notable archeological findings from the marshland; these lake-dwelling people lived through hunting and primitive agriculture. To get around the marshes, they used dugout canoes made by cutting out the inside of tree trunks, their archaeological remains, nowadays in the Municipality of Ig, have been designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site since June 2011, in the common nomination of six Alpine states. The area remained a transit point for numerous tribes and peoples, among them the Illyrians, followed by a mixed nation of the Celts and the Illyrians called the Iapydes, in the 3rd century BC a Celtic tribe, the Taurisci. Around 50 BC, the Romans built a military encampment that became a permanent settlement called Iulia Aemona; this entrenched fort was occupied by the Legio XV Apollinaris.
In 452, it was destroyed by the Huns under Attila's orders, by the Ostrogoths and the Lombards. Emona housed 5,000 -- 6,000 played an important role during numerous battles, its plastered brick houses, painted in different colours, were connected to a drainage system. In the 6th century, the ancestors of the Slovenes moved in. In the 9th century, they fell while experiencing frequent Magyar raids. Not much is known about the area during the settlement of Slavs in the period between the downfall of Emona and the Early Middle Ages; the parchment sheet Nomina defunctorum, most written in the second half of 1161, mentions the nobleman Rudolf of Tarcento, a lawyer of the Patriarchate of Aquileia, who had bestowed a canon with 20 farmsteads beside the castle of Ljubljana to the Patriarchate. According to the historian Peter Štih's deduction, this happened between 1112 and 1125, thus representing the earliest mention of Ljubljana. Owned by a number of possessors, until the first half of the 12th century, the territory south of the Sava where the town of
Lake Cerknica
Lake Cerknica is an intermittent lake in the southern part of the Cerknica Polje, a karst polje in Inner Carniola, a region in southwestern Slovenia. The lake, oriented in the Dinaric direction from northwest to southeast, is present for the most part of the year; when full, it is the largest lake in the country. The plain is surrounded by the Javornik Hills to the south and Slivnica to the north, both belonging to Dinaric Alps; the area of the lake reaches 28 square kilometres, but can reach up to 38 km2 and the surface level varies from 546 m to 551 m above sea level. The lake is an important wildlife resort as a nesting place for many bird species. Botanically, it is distinguished by amphibious plants, it is therefore a part of two Natura 2000 areas of protection and the focus of the Inner Carniola Regional Park, which covers additional Natura 2000 areas in the broader region. The climate in the area is continental, with a mean temperature of 9.2 °C and the annual precipitation about 1,700 millimetres.
The largest settlement at the border of the lake is Cerknica, located north of the lake. Various watersports, including rowing, are popular on the lake; the lake, which under ordinary conditions has an area of about 26 km2 and a mean depth of 6.1 m, communicates through a number of openings with a series of subterranean reservoirs or caverns, some of which are above the lake level in the surrounding hills. In the summer, when the rainfall is slight, the lake is drained into the reservoirs lying below its level, its bed is speedily covered with rich vegetation. With the returning heavy rains in autumn, the surrounding higher reservoirs are filled and discharge through the subterranean passages into the lake, so that the latter rapidly regains its ordinary volume and may inundate the surrounding country; the changes in level are, however irregular. Sometimes the lake does not disappear for several years, it can remain dry for over a year, as it did in 1834–35, it is rich in fish, which return with the water.
Strabo in his Geography mentions a "marsh called Lugeon", identified with Lake Cerknica, Lougeon being Strabo's Greek rendition of a local toponym of Illyrian origin. It is Romanized as Lugeum. In November 1687 the Carniolan polymath Johann Weikhard von Valvasor described the lake in his letter to the Royal Society, an excerpt of, published in the Society's Philosophical Transactions in December that year, he proposed a model of emptying the lake, based on Cartesian mechanics. The first to describe the functioning of Lake Cerknica was Tobias Gruber in 1781, followed in 1784 by Belsazar Hacquet. Lake Cerknica at official Slovenia travel guide
Croatian State Archives
The Croatian State Archives are the national archives of Croatia located in its capital, Zagreb. The history of the state archives can be traced back to the 17th century. There are regional state archives located in Bjelovar, Gospić, Osijek, Rijeka, Slavonski Brod, Varaždin and Zadar; the Croatian State Archives trace their origin to a 1643 decision of the Croatian Sabor in which the Kingdom's treasurer Ivan Zakmardi is instructed to create an inventory of all the laws and other documents. This was followed by the comission to construct a special chest at the Kingdom's expense which would house the most important documents in the aforementioned inventory; the chest only had symbolic meaning, since it could only house a negligble amount of documentation and was located on the grounds of the Bishopric of Zagreb. The number of laws and regulation were subsequently passed in relation to archiving documents; the Croatian Parliament named Ladislaus Kiraly as the first archivist of the kingdom in 1744, transferring the chest and the rest of the documentation to the Saint Mark's square in 1763.
National Library of Croatia List of national archives Croatian Film Archive Media related to Croatian State Archives at Wikimedia Commons Official website Hrvatski državni arhiv
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Illustration from critique of first volume of Die Ehre deß Hertzogthums Crain published in Acta Eruditorum, 1689
