After the signing of the so-called Ciano-Stojadinovic Pact (March 1937), Italian-Yugoslav relations suddenly improved. The turnaround in bilateral relations between the two countries (destined, however, to remain ephemeral) was clearly visible in the field of cultural relations. This essay aims to show how, after 1937, the Italian authorities tried to promote Italian culture and language in a big style in the capital of the Kingdom, Belgrade, in an attempt to counteract the supremacy enjoyed up to then by the cultural action of other countries such as France, Germany, etc., in order to promote the Italian language and culture. The fascination with the Italian civilization was also meant to contribute to bringing Yugoslavia politically and ideologically closer to the Fascist regime. Despite the invested resources and the success of some major events (for example, the great exhibition of Italian portraits through the centuries) the results were disappointing, showing once again the structural limits of Fascist political and cultural action abroad.

This paper seeks to thoroughly describe the 1941 Ustasha funerals of Mijo Babic and Antun Pogorelec, two of the most important early Ustasha martyrs, and to demonstrate the centrality of funeral practices in the Ustasha project to reconfigure Croatian society in the 1940s and its role in mediating the relationship between the individual and the state. Funeral practices are not seen only as cultural values imposed from above, but also as events of importance for the members of the movement as well as their supporters in the wider local community that participated in them.

This paper takes a comparative look at the missions and ideologies of the most influential periodicals in Serbian and Italian cultures in the years preceding the First World War, the Srpski knjizevni glasnik (Serbian Literary Herald) and La Critica. It also describes the public roles and political ideas of the editor of La Critica, Benedetto Croce, and the editors of the Glasnik, Bogdan Popovic, Pavle Popovic and Jovan Skerlic. It looks at the interpretations of Croce?s political ideas put forward in the Glasnik, recognizing a closeness between the liberal literary and political renewal programmes of Benedetto Croce, on the one hand, and Bogdan Popovic, Pavle Popovic and Jovan Skerlic, on the other. Finally, it points to the Glasnik?s repulsion towards the imperialist ideas of Gabriele D?Annunzio, Croce?s main rival in the Italian culture of the period. But under the editorship of Jovan Skerlic, at the time when Serbia was subjected to Austria-Hungary?s pressure and war threat, the Glasnik published D?Annunzio?s short stories and advocated the ideals of activism, vitalism and heroism.

The brief sojourn of St Hilarion to a setting not far from Epidaurus in Dalmatia in circa 365 CE was depicted by St Jerome in Vita Sancti Hilarionis, portraying the two notable miracles of the famous Palestinian anchorite - the slaying of the dragon Boas ravaging the area and the rescue of the city from the giant waves that threatened to devastate it. Both miracles have been interwoven into the later narratives of both medieval writers and the Renaissance chroniclers of Dubrovnik, especially Thomas the Archdeacon (of Split), Anonymous, Nicolo Ragnina and Serafino Razzi. The paper discourses these historians? interpretations (along with the accounts of later Dubrovnik chroniclers) of the glorious miracles of St Hilarion. In the Dubrovnik chronicles, the miracle of the dragon is correlated with the legend of the Theban king Cadmus, who was transformed into a serpent upon his arrival in the area, or with Asclepius, the Greek god of medicine whose most famous sanctuary was the homonymous town in the Peloponnese and whose symbol was a serpent or snake on a rod. In accordance with the local legend, the mentioned chroniclers unambiguously correlated the liberation of the city from beast with the ending of paganism and the baptising of the Dubrovnik populace. Furthermore, the paper discusses the elements related to the cult of St Hilarion in Dubrovnik and its vicinity, drawing attention to the lore preserved in oral tradition.

In the months between the Italian armistice (September 1943) and the end of the war (May 1945), Italy became the destination of a large group of Yugoslav exiles who, in various ways, opposed Tito and the Socialist and Federal Republic in the process of being formed. These exiles, divided by nationality and political affiliation (ranging from exponents of the resistance linked to the government in exile in London to the most radical collaborators with the Nazis), were united by their staunch anti-communism. Carefully observed by both the Italian secret services and the Allied military government, with the approach of the Cold War this Yugoslav ?refractory community? was increasingly used as a centre of propaganda and in part also of information by the West. After the Tito-Stalin split, this function was reduced, and the community waited for new developments that would only appear forty years later with the dissolution of the disdained Federal and Socialist Republic. This essay is an integral part of research based on the archives of the Italian Military Intelligence Service (SIM) kept at the Historical Office of the Italian Army General Staff in Rome, in the fonds of the Confidential Affairs of the General Directorate of Public Security of the Italian Ministry of the Interior and in the ?Affari Politici - Jugoslavia? collections of the Historical-Diplomatic Archive of the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The research is still in progress and aims to create a map of the Yugoslav anti-communist community in Italy from the end of the Second World War until the dissolution of the Federal Republic between 1989 and 1992.

The paper explores the ways religious grassroots actors in the borderlands contribute to the new understanding of cross border regions and religious groups in the space between the Serbian and Romanian Banat from the perspective of the anthropology of borders. The border region included in this paper was the place of interreligious and interethnic encounter, where religions and languages mixed and there was a continuous interaction between Orthodox Christians, Catholics and Protestants. By studying the region that had strong cultural, historical and religious connections, the aim is to provide new insights on the borders and religious groups that are understudied. This article explores the ?liminal? character of religious identities, development of renewal movements and crossing symbolic boundaries with the examples of the ?home-grown? religious movement of the Lord?s Army (Rom. Oastea Domnului) emerged in the first decades of the 20th century.

The paper offers a critical survey of vulnerable and endangered languages and linguistic varieties in Serbia presented in three international inventories: UNESCO?s Atlas of the World?s Languages in Danger, Ethnologue and The Catalogue of Endangered Languages. As the inventories differ widely in terms of assessing the exact level of language endangerment and vulnerability, and lack to provide empirical support for their assessment, the paper provides thorough information from official local sources, relevant studies and the authors? own field research, when available, on the language categorized as endangered (Aromanian, Banat Bulgarian, Judezmo, Vojvodina Rusyn, Romani), but also presents additional linguistic varieties which have not been registered yet by any of the mentioned inventories (Megleno-Romanian, Bayash Romanian and Vlach Romanian).

Josip Broz vint a Moscou en f?vrier 1935 pour parfaire son parcours de r?volutionnaire au sein du Komintern, le passage oblig? pour tous les cadres du Parti communiste yougoslave. Or, son s?jour a Moscou n?avait rien d?habituel, car il y devint le confident du tout-puissant D?partement des cadres de l?Internationale communiste dans le Parti yougoslave. Gr?ce a l?appui du D?partement des cadres, qui avait la charge de contr?ler les cadres des partis freres au sein du Komintern, Broz devint le num?ro deux du Parti yougoslave et repartit de Moscou en octobre 1936 pour diriger l?action du Parti en Yougoslavie. Cette nouvelle fonction lui permit d?effectuer sa deuxieme mission a savoir de contr?ler l?action des cadres yougoslaves.

The paper deals with the phenomenon of popular piety in the eighteenth century and its reflections in art media through several prints made by the Serbian engraver Zaharija Orfelin. Paper icons, the cheapest means of meeting the spiritual needs of Orthodox Serbs in Hungary in the eighteenth century, were mass produced and easy to transport to remotest places. As they were the main channels of expressing piety, it is not unexpected that some artists-entrepreneurs such as Orfelin started such a lucrative production. Orfelin shaped the iconography of those images, combining the traditional Orthodox heritage and contemporary Baroque models that had migrated from Central European religious art. His imagery included particular national saints and their patriotic cults, dogmatic and doctrinal views of the church, as well as images of the Mother of God.

Based on the preserved and accessible sources from seven archives and from the relevant literature, the authors seek to reconstruct the causes, course and consequences of the crime committed by the Ustashas against the Serbs of the villages of Drakulic, Sargovac and Motike, and in the Rakovac mine, near Banja Luka on 7 February 1942. The authors attempt to point to the main instigators and perpetrators of the crime and to estimate the number of victims. For understanding the broader context of the events, they point out the ideological roots and main features of the genocidal policy pursued by the Independent State of Croatia (NDH) against the Serbs from 1941 to 1945. Special attention is paid to the events in the area of Banja Luka during 1941, because they provided the chronological and spatial context for the crime that followed in February 1942.