Bulgarian Whites

Perhaps understandably, I failed to mention the annual 2 day Bulgarian wine fair I attended 2 weekends ago here in Sofia. 
It was hard work – and required a rest afterwards! For 10 euros I had a 2-day pass and more than 200 wines to taste. 
I did my best on the Saturday – the white and rose day - but found red Sunday a bit of a slog – with my pallet and tongue fairly quickly getting badly coated!

For some reason, I decided to score the wines out of 6.0 and the white wines I appreciated came out as follows -

• Lovica - Chardonnay (6 levs!) 4.5 out of 6.0
• LV - Colombard (5 levs! and 4.5 score) and Sauvignon Blanc (SB)
• Black Sea Gold - Muscat El Mar (6 levs) - find of the day! Salty Hills Chardonnay and Sauvignon Blanc (15 levs) - one of the best (Silver medal)
• Minkov - Rheinriesling 
• Katarzyna - SB (4.2)
• Marvin - Viognier and Chardonnay and Viognier - both 4.5s in my scoring
• Villa Yustina - Blanc Cuvee (8 levs)
• Zagreus - white Mavrud - 4.5 on my scoring
• Medi Valley - Chardonnay Incanto (4.9!!) 18 levs and Chardonnay and Viognier
• No Man's Land 600 SB  12 levs
• Kapatovo - Chardonnay and Viognier 4.5 (18 levs) 

On Sunday, the only wine which impressed me was the Ethno range of wines. They are from the Sungurlare valley near Burgas on the Black Sea and the Chardonnay I am now drinking (3 euros) got a silver medal (in the 2013 "Chardonnays of the World" somewhere). How do they do it??

Tomorrow I will try to find some specimens of all these wines in the CaseVino chain - the Bulgarian version of Oddbins – and subject them in the next week to some tough tasting and testing. 
No rest for the conscientious!!

The photo is of the wine museum in Sungurlare village - the wine area very near Burgas

Danube Divides

The Danube may be a busy river but it has also acted as a barrier between Bulgaria and Romania who have had, over the years, a rather strained relationship – not helped by the open conflict during the two Balkan Wars a hundred years ago and the absorption by Romania in 1918 for 22 years of a significant section of Bulgarian territory on the southern banks of the Danube (the Dobrogea area of the North-East).

Although I have visited the city of Dobrich in the heart of that area - and Balcik on the Black Sea which was a famous art colony then for the Bucharest glitterati, I have not yet managed the various settlements which scatter along the eastern Danube banks particularly Silistra (this is one of the paintings in my collection of that city – by one Hristo Danev from 1910)

I was therefore delighted to come across just now a post from a Romanian blogger I admire about Tutrakan and the museum and monument there which mark the battles; the role played by such outsiders as the Germans; and the eventual liberation of the area in 1940. What I particularly appreciated about the post (apart from the photographs and history) was the recognition of the dubious nature of the encroachment in the first place – the author admitting that the visit made him appreciate that this was a bit of Romanian imperialism

Although a lot of Romanians make the journey by road to Varna in the summer, there is, it seems to me, still little love lost between the nations. I do occasionally worry about my Romanian numberplates here!!

I was looking these days at some text about the characteristics of Bulgarians and those who are their neighbours. I was told (by When Cultures Collide) that -

Bulgarians differ considerably from other Slavs in their values and communication style, probably because of their origins. In general they are cooler and more pragmatic than many Slavs, particularly when compared with Serbs. Quiet and soberness are valued; you will see little of the hotheaded discussion or noisy public disputes that are only too common in Belgrade.They do, however, share with other Slavs a widespread feeling of pessimism about national helplessness. In general, Bulgarian values tend to be rural, with homespun virtues, as one might expect from people living in a predominantly agricultural society. Basic values are disciplined/sober; pragmatic/cautious; persistent/stubborn; good organizers; industrious/determined; steady/suspicious but tolerant of foreigners; inventive; highly literate/thorough

Before giving full expression to their feelings or opinions, Bulgarians engage in a series of preliminary encounters, during which they sound out and size up (albeit in a friendly manner) their conversation partners. During this period they are decidedly less flowery or rhetorical in their speech than the Yugoslavs, Romanians or Hungarians. At this stage, it is very difficult to extract opinions oreventual attitudes from them. When this exploratory period has passed, Bulgarians open up to display a modicum of quiet charm and make their requests in a circuitous manner, avoiding confrontation whenever they can. They enjoy conversation—an art for them—but are less prone to exaggeration than South Slavs or other Mediterranean people.

And here's an interesting report which makes the case for a different sort of leadership than that which the modern (and post-modern) world has inflicted on us. 

When Money Rules

Noone documents the Kafka-esque world of contemporary Russian life better than Peter Pomerantsev -  a television producer whose life has spanned Moscow and London and whose writing I first came across earlier this year in Eurozine. His position and linguistic abilities allow him to give detailed exposes of the make-believe world of politics, judiciary, business and bureaucracy and reveal the Hobbesian world that is now apparently Russia.

His current Diary piece in the London Review of Books reveals a frightening picture -   

A year of national service is in theory mandatory for males between 18 and 27 (with some exceptions), but anyone who can avoids it. The most common way out is a medical certificate. Some people play mad and spend a month at a psychiatric clinic. Their mothers bring them in. ‘My son is psychologically disturbed,’ they say, even though they know the doctors know they are pretending. Several weeks in a loonie bin will set you back in the region of five to ten thousand dollars. You will never be called up again – the mad are not trusted with guns – but you will have a certificate of mental illness hanging over you for the rest of your career. Other medical solutions are more short-term: a week in hospital with an injured hand or back, but this will have to be repeated every year as April and October approach because this is when the drafts take place, leaving hospitals full of pimply youths simulating back trouble. The medical route takes months of preparation and research, finding the right doctor and settling on the appropriate ailment. The ailments that can exempt you change all the time. You turn up at the military centre with the little stamped registration that your mother has spent months organising and saving for, only to be told by the local recruitment commission that this year flat feet or short sight is no longer a legal excuse – which may be the truth and may be an attempt to extract another bribe.If you’re at university you can avoid military service (or take part in tame drills at the faculty instead): there is no greater incentive for young men to explore the world of higher education. And if you’re not good enough to make it to college? Then you must bribe your way into an institution: there are dozens of new universities which have opened to service draft-avoiders. For poorer people, it’s a matter of hide and seek. During the spring and autumn drafts soldiers will grab anyone off the street who looks the right age, demand to see their documents and their letters of exemption, and if they don’t have them, march them off to the local recruitment centre. So the young devote their energy to staying clear of metro stations, or hiding behind columns and darting past when they spot a cop flirting with girls or scrounging cigarettes off passers-by. You often see teenagers sprinting through the long, dark, marble corridors of the underground with figures in blue giving chase (they could of course be looking for drugs). When soldiers come by apartment blocks potential conscripts barricade themselves behind the door, holding their breath until the visitors go away. But by now they are in trouble: every time their documents are checked by the police, they tremble; every time they go into the underground, every time they cross a main road, or meet friends near a cinema, or even leave their little yard, they will be in a state of high anxiety. As a draft-dodger, you live semi-legally until you are 27.

This is the genius of sistema: even if you manage to avoid the draft, you, your mother and your family have become part of the network of bribery, fear, simulation and dissimulation. You have learned to become an actor playing different roles in relation to the state, the great intruder you wish to avoid or outwit or simply buy off. You are already semi-legal, a transgressor, but that’s fine for sistema: as long as you only simulate, you will never do anything real, you will always look for compromise and you will feel just the right amount of discomfort. You are now part of the system. If a year in the army is the overt process that binds young Russians to the nation, a far more powerful induction comes with the rituals of avoiding military service.

Another film he was working on was about a successful young businesswoman called Yana Yakovleva, who had founded a pharmaceuticals company that imported and sold industrial cleaning agents to factories and military bases. 

One morning she woke up to find herself under arrest: the Federal Drugs Control Service had reclassified her cleaning agent, diethyl ether, as a narcotic. She was now a drug dealer behind bars, awaiting trial. She assumed it was a case of reiderstvo, the most common form of corporate takeover in Russia with hundreds of reported, and probably tens of thousands of unreported cases a year, earning an estimated four billion dollars in profit. Business rivals or bureaucrats – long since interchangeable – pay for the security services to have the head of a company arrested; while they are in prison their documents and registrations are seized, the company is re-registered under different owners, and by the time the original owners are released the company has been bought, sold and split up by new owners. The usual way out is a bribe and there is a whole industry of pay-offs. Good ‘lawyers’ are not the ones who can defend you in court – the verdicts are pre-determined – but those who have the right connections and know who to pay off in the judiciary and the relevant ministry. It’s a complex game: pay off the wrong person and you’ve just wasted your money. Soon enough an array of middlemen appear, trying to persuade you that they, and only they, know how to pay the right person off. Yakovleva knew her parents were looking for that person on the outside. They had found a ‘lawyer’ who said he could help: he suggested she admit to the charges and then he could get everything sorted. The bribe would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yakovleva smelled a rat. Her company had done nothing wrong, shouldn’t she stick to her story? And what exactly was she meant to own up to? That she’d traded what she traded? Face up to absurdity? If she started to negotiate, she told me, it would be like relinquishing a part of her sanity, letting the sistema dictate the terms – at which point everything starts to slip.

A year ago today, I posted some detail on my working methods for a good project trying to build the capacity of local government in Kyrgyzstan. One of the things I enjoyed about my decade of working in Central Asia was the freedom I was given to develop activities which seemed to suit the particular circumstances of the place and time. In Bishkek I asked a simple question which seems all too rarely to be asked - what can a small temporary project do that is distinctive and will leave a useful legacy?
One of the reasons I now turn down all projects is that such creativity is now absolutely forbidden. The logframe rules all.

Another new nation?

As befits a blog called “Balkan and Carpathian Musings”, I’ve been writing a lot in recent weeks about the Balkans – but I am a Scot (through and through) even if I haven’t lived in that country for 23 years and have these days to draw attention to the large (670 pages in my pdf version) and probably unique document which was published yesterday by the current “Scottish Executive” on the subject of Scottish Independence – or, more literally and prosaically, “Scotland’s Future”. 200 of the pages deal with more than 600 questions which have been raised about the issue of independence over the past few years.

Ours may be a small nation (5 million) – but there is a large diaspora throughout the world (including me) which takes an intense interest in its affairs and development. The Guardian site gave good coverage to the publication of the document yesterday   

The PM (Salmond) says the white paper is the most detailed blueprint any people have been offered anywhere in the world as a basis for becoming independent.
Scotland would become independent in better circumstances than almost any other country in the world.
This reflects Scotland's "vast potential". It has an outstanding natural heritage, and skilled and inventive people.
With independence, it could build a fairer nation, he says.
But, to maximise its potential, Scotland needs to be able to take decisions for itself.
It needs to be able to develop its productivity and competitive advantage. And it needs to create a fair society.
Salmond says the white paper answers 650 questions.
But there really is only one question: should Scotland take decisions for itself?
He says he wants a positive debate (before the referendum in September 2014).
The referendum won't be decided by him, or by the media. It will be decided by the people.
Scotland's future is now in the hands of the Scottish people.
The Deputy PM (Sturgeon) says the white paper also sets out the "seamless" process by which Scotland could stay in the EU.

Kruchma and chibouk

I have to confess to a taste for cigars – indulged in private. About one a day. Even worse, I admire the remnants of the tobacco culture one finds here in Bulgaria – the brazenness with which the owners of the tiny shops which line the narrow streets of Sofia city centre squat on their doorsteps and smoke the weed and drink their coffee. I have become an avid collector of the aquarelles of Grigor Naidenov who celebrated the café culture here of the inter-war and post-war years.

Balkan smoke – tobacco and the making of modern Bulgaria paints a fascinating picture of the role of tobacco in the social, economic and political life of modern Bulgaria. It's by Mary Neuburger

It was not until the nineteenth century that Bulgarians began to enter the Muslim coffeehouse, where they conducted commerce and local administration, read newspapers, and engaged in debate. It was then that they learned to smoke, as they came of age politically and culturally, and as their national movement gained momentum. Indeed, over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, smoking, like the tobacco industry itself, drove social change, accompanying and even propelling a certain “coming of age” for social groups who joined the ranks of passionate smokers.
As Bulgarians entered the coffeehouse at home, they also began to frequent European cafes and discover themselves as “Bulgarians” abroad, amidst the intellectual ferment of Paris, Vienna, and St. Petersburg. Soon Bulgarians began to establish coffeehouses at home that took on increasingly European characteristics, mainly aesthetically. For example, the traditional hookah was replaced by the newly minted cigarette. Coffeehouses became places of intellectual and cultural activity, and tobacco became a muse for generations of the Bulgarian elite. In the interwar period, in particular, the coffeehouse was at the heart of intellectual life, though other kinds of smoke-filled venues mushroomed in the Bulgarian capital and elsewhere in Bulgaria.
Smoking became the quintessential modern habit, a necessary accoutrement for the modern man and eventually woman, in both the sober coffeehouse and the drunken tavern.  Women and youth slowly entered this world of public smoking in the course of twentieth century, a fact that impelled anti-smoking impulses (however meagre).

In some respects this is a familiar story, with obvious global parallels, yet the Bulgarian context continually reveals it own particular nuances. In pre-1945 Bulgaria, for example, anti-smoking impulses flowed from two rather disparate sources, American (and Bulgarian convert) Protestants and the communist left. Both had a radical vision for “moral uplift” and social reform and utopian visions of the future. But both were also, in a sense, foreign, and so faced local and official hostility in the period before 1945. Most Bulgarians simply did not want to give up their new found pleasures, and the state was an important beneficiary of tobacco industry revenues and consumption taxes.

In the post World War II period, the dramatic change to a communist form of government brought an entirely new set of practical and theoretical quandaries. The Bulgarian tobacco industry took off, producing ever greater numbers of increasingly luxurious cigarettes for the enormous “captive” Soviet and Bloc market.
 There was also a veritable explosion of state built and run restaurants, cafes, hotels and sea-side resorts in the later decades of period, as the state sought legitimacy by providing the “good life” to its workers. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, communist state-directed abstinence efforts emerged, along with heightened concerns over the growing numbers of smoking women and youth. The Bulgarian communists continually connected smoking to “western” moral profligacy and “remnants” of a capitalist past, as well as “Oriental” degeneracy—or Bulgaria’s backwards, Ottoman past. Yet the state continued to provide cheap cigarettes and places to smoke them as never before. Bulgarian smoking rates skyrocketed under communism and the period generated a society of smokers for whom the voice of abstinence was just another form of state propaganda.

A reference in the text to the famous Bulgarian writer Ivan Vazov’s Under the Yoke has encouraged me to read this classic novel about life under the Ottomans in the late 19^th century.

NB Kruchma was a village tavern where long pipes (Chibouks) were smoked before being replaced by cigarettes. The same bakal (shop) in villages would be a kafene during the day and kruchma in the evening – with rakia replacing the coffee and cigarettes the chibouks of an earlier age.

A year ago today I had an interesting post about "the disease of managerialism" 

And a nice post about an Austrian painter who was once the toast of Vienna. 

How the European powers created and destroyed the Balkans

Andrew Hammond’s literary romp through the Balkans is a real insight – his mix of diary collage, historical context and deconstruction a very illuminating commentary on British perspectives of the late 19th and 20th Century perceptions of Balkans

I’m looking forward to getting a copy of the anthology – Through Another Europe - which he published in 2009 based on his work and findings

Few (if any) of these travellers’ tales bothered to attempt to put the scenes they saw in a wider political perspective but it is this which Hammond occasionally offers us -

At the end of the nineteenth century, once their ties with the Porte finally loosened, the Great Powers had advanced loans to Greece, Serbia and Bulgaria and, with much of that money being spent amongst the western arms manufacturers (strong national armies being deemed as useful an obstacle to Russian advance as a strong Ottoman Empire), bankruptcy and western control over domestic economies began to prevail throughout the region.' (p83)…..
 Clearly, with the Dual Monarchy and the Ottoman Empire now ranged on the enemy side, and the former's `Drang nach Osten' assuming more sinister prospect since its alliance with Germany, the only means by which to protect Allied interests in the region, both during and after the war, was to carve out strong, resilient independent territories, moulding them into nation-states through all the signs, images, tropes and evaluations of a nationalist discourse, and reassigning them the value of national ally rather than cultural other (p163)…..

But, as Hammond shows, British writers’ generally sympathetic treatment of the area changed once again very dramatically after the Second World War

And as I shall go on to explore, the economic difficulties of the period, the political relations between the West and the authoritarian regimes of south-east Europe, the redrawing of boundaries after the two world wars, all showed that the West was not about to be a benevolent master, a point the war generation often exemplified personally. The traces in their work of a lingering authority, and readiness to condemn the locals when they failed to obey that authority, both indicate that a very British attitude to abroad was still at work (p165)…….

Misha Glenny has given us quite a few (historical) books on the Balkans and offered a good angle in a London Review of Books piece on 2 other books which detail and critiques how outsiders have created images of the Balkans - Inventing Ruritania by Vesna Goldsworthy and Imagining the Balkans by Maria Todorova - 

The First and Second Balkan Wars of 1912 and 1913 are widely believed - writes Glenny - to offer definitive proof of ‘medieval’ behaviour on the part of Balkan warriors. But the Balkan nationalism and militarism expressed in these wars were much more closely related to the practices and morality of Great Power imperialism than to local traditions. The Balkan armies were largely funded by Western loans, Western firms supplied them with weapons and other technology, their officers were schooled and organised by Frenchmen, Germans, Russians and Britons. The armies were staffed, and in the case of Turkey commanded, by Westerners. Representatives of Krupp, Skoda, Schneider-Creusot and Vickers participated in the wars as observers and wrote reports on the effectiveness of their weaponry which were used to advertise the superiority of their products over those of their competitors.
Anything anyone in the West knows about the Balkan Wars has been learned from the report published in early 1914 by the Carnegie Endowment’s Commission of Inquiry into the Causes and Conduct of the Balkan Wars. It is an important document and the Commission’s members were serious and well-intentioned. This is a passage from the introduction:
"What finally succeeds in bringing armed peace into disrepute, is that today the Great Powers are manifestly unwilling to make war. Each one of them, Germany, England, France and the United States, to name a few, has discovered the obvious truth that the richest country has the most to lose by war, and each country wishes for peace above all things. This is so true that these two Balkan wars have wrought us a new miracle, – we must not forget it, – namely, the active and sincere agreement of the Great Powers who, changing their tactics, have done everything to localise the hostilities in the Balkans and have become the defenders of the peace that they themselves threatened thirty-five years ago, at the time of the Congress of Berlin.

Five months later, despite the Commission’s belief in the inherent wisdom of the Great Powers, imperialist rivalry reached its zenith, persuading the club’s senior members to divert their enormous economic and technological resources into one vast industrial conglomerate of death".

The vast massacres of the First World War relegated the ruinous social and economic impact of the Balkan Wars to the background. But those who witnessed or participated in them were afforded a unique insight into what the 20th century had in store. Several battles pitted forces larger than Napoleon’s mightiest army against one another. This despite Serbia, for example, having a population of less than three million. The Bulgarians mobilised 25 per cent of their male population, just under half a million men. The fighting was characterised by trench warfare and merciless sieges; and by pitiless artillery assaults on unprotected infantry and civilians. All sides, except Montenegro and Romania, deployed aeroplanes against the enemy, mainly for reconnaissance or dropping leaflets but also for the occasional bombing raid. For the first time, technology enabled fighting to last 24 hours a day, as huge searchlights illuminated enemy defences. This was not Balkan warfare – this was Western warfare.

The violent capriciousness of the Balkans was used as an alibi by the Great Powers for covering up their own role in various crimes and for pointing the finger at countries who were acting as unwilling or unwitting proxies in a broader Great Power struggle.

‘The Balkans was never the powder-keg but just one of a number of devices which might have acted as detonator. The powder-keg was Europe itself.

Romance of the Balkans

For the past 23 years I have wandered in central Europe, the Balkans, Central Asia and the Caucasus – spending an average of 2 years in some eleven countries and having about 30 different homes. Verily I am a nomad  - although, for the past 5 years, with bases in the Carpathian Mountains, Bucharest and Sofia. Hardly surprising therefore that I am drawn to travel literature – the scribbles of those who seek to give us a sense of life in other places. 

Jan Morris is one of my favourites (the link gives a marvellous interview with her by the indominatable Paris Review) – but I have been overwhelmed in recent days by a post-modernist account of this genre which I found on the internet – about British travel in the Balkans in the last century - complete with about 500 bibliographical references……The version I have is a PhD thesis - The Debated Lands which looks first at the motifs of discord, savagery, backwardness and obfuscation which characterise the 19^th century books on the area. In the approach to the First World War all of at changed; specific countries were embraced by economic and military alliances and some countries acquired what has been called a "pet state" status -

Todorova sums up as the pet state approach to south-east Europe: the choosing from amongst the Balkan states a people whose predicaments to abhor, whose history and indigenous leaders to commend, whose political grievances to air, and whose national aspirations to advocate. Along with challenging the discourse's imperialist tendencies, national advocacy would undercut both the denigratory format of dominant balkanism and its racialist codifications of the Balkan peninsula as a homogenised zone of misfortune and degeneracy with writers retaining the denigratory approach even as they delineated - without any awareness of the paradox -a people that apparently broke with the imputed essence. In this way, Trevor's valorisation of the Montenegrins, Vivian's romanticisation of the Serbs, Upward's endorsement of the Greeks, or Peacock's and Durham’s clear preference for the Albanians, are all based on contrasting the positive attributes of their chosen peoples with the thoroughly negative qualities of the Balkan ethnicities surrounding them; a source of genuine confusion for the general reader, no doubt, who might find the Serbians, say, lauded against the Bulgarians in one text, and then the very opposite in the next…….

Until reading the book, I had not realised, for example, how many British women volunteered for duty in the Serbian field hospitals and how media and literary coverage of this phenomenon brought that country into the British consciousness - and how positively. That was followed by a strand of writing in the late 1920s which took the romanticisation into deeper territory – with a revolt against western modernity and mass society -

By the 1920s, Foster Fraser's misgivings about western society had not only become a prevailing feature of British travel writing on the Balkans, but gained widespread expression within intellectual circles of the day. The pace of modernisation had already been alarming such influential commentators as Arnold, Ruskin and Tennyson in the latter half of the nineteenth century. The economic rate of growth of Britain, France and Germany had reached unprecedented levels, industrial development and exports were greater than ever, producing via rapidly burgeoning empires, a global network of commercial and financial influence. Urbanisation had been radically altering the forms and values of national life, as well as eroding England's enduringly pastoral self-image and technology was achieving bewildering levels of progress.
In the place of Victorian certainty came a sudden surge in scepticism, as Freud and Bergson challenged rationality and objectivity, feminism challenged patriarchal assumptions, working class radicalism increasingly threatened middle class security, and science asked ever more pertinent questions of Christianity. During the second decade of that century, even those who had put their faith in science and progress were to find that faith severely tested.

From the end of the First World War until the outbreak of the Second, travellers were finding in this previously depraved corner of Europe…. " a peace, harmony, vivacity and pastoral beauty in utmost contrast to the perceived barrenness of the West, and which produced benefits for those weary of modernity that ranged from personal rejuvenation to outright revelation. According to this alternative balkanism, violence had disappeared from the region, savagery became tamed, obfuscation turned to honesty and clarity, and the extreme backwardness that had formerly been the gauge of Balkan shortcoming was now the very measure by which it was extolled. For many travellers, any mystery that did remain around the geographical object became less the marker of a befuddled and dishonest culture than a vital indication of spiritual depth…….
When placed in the context of the extreme denigration of earlier periods, the speed with which an established representational paradigm, its accumulated motifs and evaluations becoming rapidly outmoded, could be rejected, dismantled, and utterly brushed aside in written record was remarkable in the extreme. 
Trickling out in 1915, and reaching a flood by 1916, the textual sources of knowledge on Serbia elevated it into a complex, reliant, independent, `plucky little nation'' far more germane to the modern requirements of power. ……

Retribution and Reconciliation.....an ongoing process

What do we – what can we – really know about one another? We all exist in worlds defined by strongly-protected boundaries of nation, gender, age, class, education and a variety of more deliberative affiliations (of friendships, clubs, channels of viewing and readership etc) which help create and sustain our particular “world view” – be that optimistic or pessimistic, authoritarian or libertarian., about ourselves or about others

The world is so complex that we seem to need “simplifying devices” which help cocoon us from uncomfortable realities. Age and experience should, however, let us see these devices as crutches – which can and should be thrown away.

I often think that the greatest service a writer can do is to challenge these preconceptions we have of other systems and countries and their ways of thinking and behaving.

I have blogged before about the rarity of authors who offer real insight into the culture and societies of individual European countries – such as Theodor Zeldin for France; Simon Winder and (more at the ideas level) Peter Watson for Germany.

I am currently reading a 1996 book - Dinner with Persephone - by a young American woman poet with an undefined background in Greek (there is a nice classification for you) who immersed herself in Greece for a year and has produced a scintillating "historologue" - my word for an account of conversations, myths and impresssions based on an impressive grasp of words and meanings. Having been reading recently (as a Scot!) about historical Bulgarian attitudes to the Greeks, I find this account from the other side doubly satisfying - particularly on the vexed issue of Macedonia.
The Balkans have been a killing field over the past century and more (used arguably in the Balkan Wars of a hundred years ago as a surrogate field for the jostling which was going on amongst developed economies of north- west Europe) and the imagined communities of this area still need therapy.......

Conventional academic histories focus too much on political events – but social histories of the British sort I referred to recently can be too detailed and miss the essence. Historian Jeremy Treglow has just published Franco’s Crypt – Spanish culture and memory since 1936 which seems to offer a wonderful prism with which to view events which are still (just) within living memory - vengeance and retribution.

In a 2007 article in the Dublin Review of Books, the author puts it very succinctly

Given the sheer volume, then, as well as the quality of narratives – historical, fictional, cinematic – examining Francoism which appeared either during the caudillo’s lifetime or in the decade following his death, why should ‘historical memory’ be an issue in Spain, all these decades on?
It’s a global phenomenon, of course: one which the American social scientist John Torpey argues is a substitute for the utopian politics in which we have lost faith. No longer able to dream of a better future, we put such moral energy as we have into trying to repair the past. The historian Roy Foster has written with valuable firmness about the inadequacy, as well as the selectiveness, of reparations politics in the case of Ireland, situating the topic both in its historiographical context (the influence of Pierre Nora’s workLieux de Mémoire, 1984) and its current cultural one: Christians in Jerusalem in 1999 apologizing for the Crusades, Queen Elizabeth II apologizing to the Maoris, and so on. Like Santos Juliá, Foster sees the impulse as essentially psychological, an attempt to assuage guilt. ‘After the oversimplifications and illogical pieties that surround the business of “memory” these days,’ he writes, ‘it is hard to disagree with a suggestion from the Irish literary critic Edna Longley …: “for politicians, the next step should be to erect a monument to Amnesia and forget where they put it”.’