COURAGE

povezivanje zbirki

An exhibition entitled First Point: Freedom of the Press displayed a selection of samizdats in the Vera & Donald Blinken Open Society Archives in spring of 2018. The special curators were students and teachers at a secondary school in Budapest. The aim of this initiative, within the international project “Building Democratic Europe Together,” was to expose the generation of the digital age to the methods and techniques used in the preparation of samizdat materials and also the topics which were typically covered and the community of creators. The exhibition attempted to do this by presenting the objects used in this process.

The Collection of Jaroslav Meznik documents his activities as a Charter 77´s signatory, his work as a professor of History and later Dean of the Faculty of Arts at Masaryk University.  In April 2018, the collection was donated by a librarian of the department of History (Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University) to the Masaryk University Archives.  

The book-album Bucureștiul mutilat (Mutilated Bucharest, 2018) offers an anthology of over 150 photographs taken by Andrei Pandele and several dozen others by some of his friends and colleagues (Dan Vartanian, Dan Dinescu, Sorin Vasilescu, Peter Derer, Şerban Lăcriţeanu, Andrei Bîrsan, Nic Hanu, and Radu Ştefănescu). Through a photographic discourse of great visual and emotional impact, the book presents the most important landmarks in the terrible operation of mutilation and uglification of the capital in the last years of Romanian communism. It also draws attention, through some dozens of photographs, to some important aspects of everyday life during communism in the period 1975–1989, especially in Bucharest. “On the orders of a primitive and megalomaniac tyrant, more was demolished in peace time than that was destroyed by two world wars and two major earthquakes (those of 1940 and 1977),” states Andrei Pandele. Bucureștiul mutilat tells the story of many of the areas demolished according to the directions of the Ceaușescu couple, and is in a way an act of justice on the level of history inasmuch as the photographs in the book represent part of the memory lost  and the beauty destroyed, savagely, in Bucharest by communism. In short, it is a photographic commemoration of the destructions ordered by the officials of the communist regime in the 1980s, as a consequence of which a large part of the centre of the capital was truly mutilated. In basic, concrete terms: 5.86 km² of the historic centre demolished; 1.66 km² turned to waste ground overgrown with weeds; approximately 20,000 properties destroyed; over 60,000 families forced to move; 19 streets blocked or no longer existing at all; Orthodox churches, monasteries, synagogues, and other monuments wiped from the face of the earth; eight churches translated and hidden among apartment blocks. The book Bucureștiul mutilat was published, to a high graphic standard, at the most prestigious publishing house in Romania, Humanitas, and enjoyed considerable public and media exposure. The principal moment of public debate regarding the volume was moderated by Cristian Pătrășconiu, a researcher in the COURAGE H2020 project.

The collection was made after an interview with Vytautas Umbrasas about the Student Scientific Society at Vilnius University. During the first interview (on 17 January 2018), Umbrasas mentioned briefly that he may have some letters and documents about the society's activities, and correspondence with Mart Laar. The researcher of the project Grybkauskas stressed the importance of this kind of documentation. During the second interview (25 January 2018), Umbrasas gave letters, drafts and other documents to the researcher to be deposited in the archives of the Lithuanian Institute of History, thus establishing the collection.