This article deals with naming practices among the Czechs who lived in the first half of 20th century in two Bulgarian villages - Vojvodovo and Belinci. It is based on fieldwork carried out among the people who migrated in 1950 from Bulgaria and settled in several towns and villages in South Moravia (region of Mikulov and Valtice), and their descendants. Naming practices of the Bulgarian Czechs are analyzed in relation to naming strategies of the Bulgarians in the given period, and it is argued that the role that was fulfilled by surnames among the Czechs was fulfilled by first names among the Bulgarians. Relationship between the naming strategies and ideas about kinship and gender are discussed further.
The Donation of Stará Boleslav chapter includes statement on duties of several Moravian, i.e. geographically distant subjects, which had to pay to the chapter ‘marchae’ and ‘boves’. The Latin word ‘boves’ (sg. ‘bos’) has been traditionally translated as ‘cattle’. However, this interpretation is not consistent with archeozoological data. It is argued, that ‘bos’was a literal translation of Czech word ‘skot’, which meant both (domestic) cattle and a kind of currency in the Middle Ages. Moravian subjects thus probably paid to the Stará Boleslav chapter taxes in money, not in cattle.
The Croatian society is still coping with traumatizing events (World War II and civil war) and memories of them. The politics of memory, articulated by Tudjman´s strategy of generational and memory reconciliation of the society in the early 1990s, led to the relativization and even promotion of the pro-fascist Ustashe regime, and simultaneously to the marginalization and stigmatization of narratives relating to the role of national liberation struggle within multi-ethnic partisan movement. This also included members of local Czech minority. The study shows how - despite this - the narratives concerning the partisan resistance are still alive in family memory, and they form, through generational transmission, a value alternative to the contemporary nationally-oriented state ideology as well as to the cultural presentation of Czech minority. Family memory works as an autonomous ”intimate space/area” of expatriates in Croatia, which is based on searching for a generational value continuities in the period of post-communist social uncertainties.