Introductory Comments

Abstract

The twelfth issue of Colloquia Humanistica (2023) contains a thematic block titled Centre-Periphery Relation and the Formation of Collective and Individual Identities in the Balkans and Central Europe. The topic makes readers aware how variable centres and peripheries are and how unstable borders can be, not only in the Balkans and Central or Eastern Europe. A wider perspective on the subject is brought by the example of the settlement of Vlachs, who crossed the borders of countries and empires, and also by the context of Western European culture that we find in postimperial Georgia in the years 1918–1921 and in the cross-cultural art of Chinese artist Pan Jianfeng who lives in Finland. The reviews found in issue 12 supplement the subject matter with Siberian and Balkan illustrations. In the Materials section we publish a letter, recently discovered in the Petko and Pencho Slaveykov Museum in Sofia, from the son of Adam Mickiewicz (1798–1855), Władysław (1838–1926), to Bulgarian poet Pencho Slaveykov (1866–1912).