Lithuanian is riddled with references to bees

Re:Lithuanian is riddled with references to bees by wruza on Tuesday March 20, 2018 @07:08AM (#16627469)

Probably any less-than-english represented group felt that way after reading articles about themselves. A single, very local traditional nuance can be grown into something fundamental or strong enough about the entire group, equipped with vague “facts”. Not that it harms much or is rude, or even wrong, cause we often don’t know our history. But I always have mixed feelings reading something like that about my group[s].

“There is an ethnic nationalist movement among Kazan Tatars that stresses descent from the Bulgars and is known as Bulgarism – there have been graffiti on the walls in the streets of Kazan with phrases such as "Bulgaria is alive" (Булгария жива)” – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tatars

Born in Kazan, I never seen or heard of such movement, acts or news. Yeah, 118 people of 0.5M (blind guess) defined themselves as bulgars in 1989. But no one except themselves was aware of this “nationalist movement” since then. And no one tries to understand the real meaning of that graffiti, because our teenagers are often into something strange or schizophrenic-flavoured in their street paintings. But I bet this will hit headlines at the day when some erudite politician will see a good profit from it. And people will “oh no, national extremists among tatars!”

I wonder how much of a history was written that way.

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Re:Lithuanian is riddled with references to bees by Mediterraneo10 on Tuesday March 20, 2018 @08:15AM (#16627824)

The debate over how much Volga Tatars should be seen as descendants of the Volga Bulgars and how much they should be seen as descendants of the Golden Horde, is something that will come up loudly at any academic conference on ethnography or linguistics in Tatarstan. Virtually everyone agrees that the modern Tatar people are mostly descendents of the Volga Bulgars (or Udmurts) who lived there before 1236, they just switched fron speaking Volga Bulgarian (or Udmurt) to Kipchak. But Tatar intellectuals can get oddly insistent about which aspect of Tatars' history should be emphasized more.

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