Hi everyone!

My friend Anguelina is working on a film about LGBT+ parenthood in Bulgaria and their experiences as a nonbinary parent in our country.

Please consider donating as the success of this project is incredibly important for our community. PayPal [email protected]

Here’s more about the film in their own words:

“MATHER, written and directed by me, Anguelina Ranguelova, is the first film project in Bulgaria that focuses on the topic of LGBTQI+ parenting.

The short film MATHER is about a gender-fluid person who tries to start a family of their own. The story is based on my personal experience in conceiving and giving birth to my baby.

In Bulgaria the homophobia is still very strong and LGBTQI+ people face a big aggression and lack of acceptance from the society and from their families.

My aim is to raise public awareness and facilitate social dialogue about the human right to have children regardless the sexual orientation and gender.

We have filmed one third of the script. We are hoping to shoot the rest this fall and release by the end of the year. We are now raising funds for shooting the rest of the scenes, editing and releasing the video and we need your help.

HERE IS HOW YOU CAN HELP:

- Make a one-time or monthly donation to our fundraising campaign. You can send donations via PayPal to [email protected] or, If you prefer another donation method, just write me to the same e-mail

- Share this video with your friends.

NB! If you are in Bulgaria, please do not share this video on publicly so we are not stopped by homophobic reactions while our work is still in progress

-If you are in contact with LGBTQI+ organizations that could be interested to support the film, please, put us in contact

-If you would like to receive news of our progress, or have any questions or comments, please contact me:

[email protected]

THANK YOU!”

P.S. Yes, I have their permission to post this publicly here :)

If you’re Bulgarian please only share this on here or share with your friends privately. The project will be released publicly once it’s complete.

whenever tankies call the Baltics in general or Estonians in particular (I don't think tankies are aware they're talking about two very different ethnic groups btw) "the whitest people ever", to dismiss any talk of anti-Eastern European sentiment, the first thing I immediately think about is the 1911 Encyclopedia Britannica article describing Estonians (who in 7 years would declare their independence) as these weird underfed not white people who have been so hard to civilize and who can't give up that strange language of theirs and sing all the time:

x

19th century Estonian artist Johann Köler and his distinct lack of beard

[Image: a black-and-white photo of a man with his arms crossed, looking to the side. He has a beard and mustache. End ID.]

http://www.bihorcouture.com

hey friends, if you care about cultural appropriation and the damage it causes, please check out this awesome project!

in 2017 dior copied the design of a traditional romanian coat from the county of bihor and sold it for 30,000 euro, giving no credit to the local artisans. in response, romanian fashion magazine beau monde helped the community create their own brand, bihor couture, which sells the original coat, handmade to order, for 500 euro a piece. they also sell other traditional clothing and jewelry for much more accessible prices (5-45 euro). they’ve been hugely successful so far, and currently have enough pre-orders to cover 4.5 years of work, with 100% of the profits returning to the community. 

it’s surprisingly common for big name fashion designers like dior, gaultier, tom ford and altuzarra to copy traditional romanian clothing and sell it for ridiculous prices, with minimal original input, while giving nothing back to the community where these designs originated. it’s completely unfair that a big name designer can just steal so much hard work and misuse it to make huge profits. 

please support bihor couture, if not by ordering one of their products, then by spreading the news around. it’s really awesome to see a small community fight back against cultural appropriation so successfully. i hope they carry on for a long time!

This is so wonderful to see!

THE LADY AT THE END I LOVE HER

Dude, they do that with the shit you fond in target too, its awful

Yep. And TBH those things you find in Target are intrinsically tied to those haute couture runways.

Lemme find the Devil Wears Prada clip;

The gist of it is those things you see at Target are elements of those haute couture runway looks, filtered down until they end up on a rack in Target, and people who have no idea that the embroidered peasant blouse they think is cute is in fact inspired by traditional Slavic dress then buy it with no context of where it came from or the tradition and meaning behind it.

And of course THOSE clothes are made by criminally underpaid poor garment workers in mass quantities, and are generally of poor quality. Wheras, in the case of this fantastic company, the actual artisans of the culture that gave rise to this style are making the real stuff, handmade garments that are more expensive, sure, but that money goes directly to the people that Dior ripped off in the first place!

And while they might be backed up with orders for four years…which is wonderful!… there’s nothing stopping you from, perhaps, seeing one of those amazing embroidered tops, and then using this amazing world wide web to search out a artisan in Poland or Romania who makes them the traditional way and paying them a little more for a real quality garment that will last you years.

it's really funny how the red scare really never went away, it just aligned with current paranoia in politics.

a lot of people look back on the red scare and say "it's ridiculous all these people got accused of being communists for basically nothing" when today social media sites crack down on accounts from iran, russia, china, or venezuela for criticizing US domestic and foreign policy--this has also ironically lead to censorship of human rights activists as pointed out by iranian journalists, but I guess it doesn't matter because ~evil commie psyops~. here is a post I made on the iran censorship as a result of US government and social media influence (along with other cases of influence) if anyone's interested.

oh, and all this fearmongering about "enemy" countries influencing US politics on social media occurs when the US government has an entire agency dedicated to spreading propaganda on social media in other countries.

really gets the noggin joggin!

Translation: How do western european perverts imagine Slavic girls to be like: Me and the womenfolk of Moravia:

This is now officially a Slavic humor blog

[The first picture is of Rapunzel from Wreck It Ralph 2, looking a lot like she did in her own movie: long blonde hair, green eyes and stick thin. The second picture is of Fiona her mother and other princesses from Shrek 3. They look taller with wider arms and a lot more instances of darker hair and eyes.]

This page has in-depth information about Belarusian traditional costume and regional variations!

a lot of you responded how youve never heard of srebrenica before. the best thing you could do, is educate yourselves on it, and spread the word. im trying my best to do it. the 8000+ innocent bosniak muslims, and their grieving families, deserve no less from me or anyone else.

today is july 11th, 2018. 23 years ago, a genocide was commited in Europe, the biggest one since the holocaust, in which the serbs raped and killed countless women and children, murdered over 8000 men ranging from a 2 day old baby to a 95 yr old man. they burried their limbs in separate and far away hidden mass graves, to make it harder for their families to identify and properly bury them.

its been 23 years, and on every july 11th since 1995., a couple hundred more victims get to have their burial. some families are lucky enough to find two limbs of their loved ones. most get to bury only a leg or an arm of their father, brother, uncle, grandpa. thousands are still waiting even for that.

its been 23 years, and the Serbs still deny commiting these horrid crimes, despite the 1 hour and 11 minutes of unedited footage their soldiers filmed in Srebrenica that is avalible even on youtube.

its been 23 years, and the world is still blind to the horrors that played out in the heart of Europe on the brink of 21st century.

its been 23 years, how many more do have to pass before everyone educates themselves on it?

July 11th, 1995. Remember this date. Be ashamed, as I am, of what was allowed to happen not that long ago.

Spread the word. Srebrenica and its horrors must not be ignored nor forgotten. God knows, the victims and their families deserve that much of us.

It is 2019. This year 33 victims (or their remains) will be buried.

WHAT'S HAPPENING IN BELARUS 🇧🇾

Belarus is a small post-soviet country in eastern europe, closely ro Russia. It doesn't have a lot of resources as oil or gas. Belarus' population, of the whole country, is about 9 million people. It is nowhere near Russia, USA or China in terms of global influence and power, BUT!!! It does not mean that a lot of injustice is not happening here. Right now. Today.

I know tumblr is not the best place for a political discourse. This app/site is very-very USA-centric and let's be honest "western" world, especially on the other side of the Atlantic ocean, rarely really knows what's happening in eastern europe nor does it care.

Belarus has the same president for the last 25 years and Alexander Lukashenko won again, over 80% of votes, BUT!! the this year's election was rigged. As always. As not only in Belarus, but also in Russia. And people didnt agree with it at all and the protests all over the country were started. There was no violence from the protesters. There were no pogroms, no property damage, no fights to provoke the police. But the police attacks the protesters, they use tear gas and explosives to disorient people. Several people were injured. They buils brricades to protect themselves from the police brutality.

I don't know what to say, but please, don't be indifferent!! Share the information, spread the word!! I know that for a lot of people on the other side of the Atlantics and and western europe people who live in Russia and other post-soviet countries seem like savages who thrive under totalitarism and choose to be ignorant and undemocraric, but it is not true!! PEOPLE IN BELARUS ARE EXPRESSING THEIR RIGHTS AND OPINIONS AND DEMAND ANSWERS AND CLEAR DEMOCRATIC ELECTIONS NOW! #ЖывеБеларусь 🇧🇾

Bad idea: Covering communist bloc in to make it look like a brick building. 

Okay idea: Painting minimalist patterns on communist bloc 

Good idea: Painting communist bloc pearly white

Good idea: Painting communist bloc soothing gentile pastel colors 

Good idea: Painting giant mural on communist bloc

Fantastic idea!!!: Remodeling communist bloc to look like Parisian Architecture, then painting it pearly white. (disclaimer: Idk if this is it because I could not find photos, but I know I have seen buildings like this)

Terrible Idea!!!!: covering communist bloc in metallic panels to make it look like a modern building.

Terrible Idea!!!!: Painting communist bloc with colors so bright and saturated they burn your eyes .

Worst idea ever: painting the communist building solid highlighter green

http://www.bihorcouture.com

hey friends, if you care about cultural appropriation and the damage it causes, please check out this awesome project!

in 2017 dior copied the design of a traditional romanian coat from the county of bihor and sold it for 30,000 euro, giving no credit to the local artisans. in response, romanian fashion magazine beau monde helped the community create their own brand, bihor couture, which sells the original coat, handmade to order, for 500 euro a piece. they also sell other traditional clothing and jewelry for much more accessible prices (5-45 euro). they’ve been hugely successful so far, and currently have enough pre-orders to cover 4.5 years of work, with 100% of the profits returning to the community. 

it’s surprisingly common for big name fashion designers like dior, gaultier, tom ford and altuzarra to copy traditional romanian clothing and sell it for ridiculous prices, with minimal original input, while giving nothing back to the community where these designs originated. it’s completely unfair that a big name designer can just steal so much hard work and misuse it to make huge profits. 

please support bihor couture, if not by ordering one of their products, then by spreading the news around. it’s really awesome to see a small community fight back against cultural appropriation so successfully. i hope they carry on for a long time!

at some point when i’m less out of it i’m gonna make a longer post about how eastern european farm workers are mysteriously omitted from talks about essential workers during the pandemic despite propping up western europe’s food industry literally at the cost of their lives. like i wanna be super crystal clear here: if you’ve eaten fresh produce or meat products in, or imported from, germany, uk, the netherlands, italy or spain this year (maybe thinking you’re doing your part in supporting the economy by buying locally even) - eastern europeans have gotten sick and died so you could do that. yet somehow, for some reason, they are not essential workers.

‘but this kind of thing doesn’t make it to the news! how could i have known about it?’ fine. ok. here’s what 15 minutes of googling will get you:

if you didn’t know before, you know now. and if you can be outraged at injustices and abuse happening on another continent you can be outraged at injustices and abuse happening the next town over that make it possible for you to get your reasonably priced five-a-day. not just this year, in the middle of a pandemic, but for well over a decade.

No, and Evangelical Christianity is a very new thing to Romani people. 

Romani people usually outwardly refer to themselves as either Muslim, Orthodox, or Catholic, but many of our communities retain traditional beliefs that are rooted in Hinduism. Most communities that have, over time, become fully Christian are either E. Orthodox or Catholic, and most of them have found their own ways to merge traditional spiritual traditions with modern Christian ones. 

Evangelical Christians don’t want that. They want us to believe exactly what they believe, which means abandoning traditional belief systems that we have fought to preserve for the 800 years since we left South Asia.  

They have only begun targeting Romani communities fairly recently. I have zero problem with Romani people who are Christians, or those who have chosen Christianity because they were free to make that choice on their own. However, these missionaries know they can get their foot in the door in European Romani communities because we not only lack any institutional power to stop them, but many European Romani people lack proper education. 

And, even if they had been doing this longer, it doesn’t make it okay. They are purposefully targeting really impoverished and poorly educated communities in places like Hungary and Slovakia in order to eradicate our traditional belief systems. It is cultural genocide, and that is not an overstatement by any means. 

Edit: They are also one of the leading operating agencies of international adoption facilities in E. Europe that adopt out Romani kids to White Evangelical families in the US and UK. But, that’s not the bad part.. many of the Romani children who pass through these adoption agencies were illegally taken from their parents, as in the parental rights of their biological families were terminated in some really shady ways. Some Romani kids have been outright kidnapped and sold to Evangelical adoption agencies. This is actually a huge problem in places like Russia, Bulgaria, Slovakia, and Hungary. 

If I believed in a devil, these people are it. They are the fucking devil. 

There was this heartbreaking documentary I saw about how evangelicals are basically destroying Romanian roma music. Like, all of our musicians are converting and then not playing traditional music because it’s “sinful”. These people are destroying our culture and there is absolutely no reason to play devil’s advocate here. This is cultural genocide.

Evangelical missionaries are literally the worst people on the face of the earth. 

I was reading over studies done in E. Europe related to Romani women’s rights, and some of the commentary given by Roma from Evangelical communities was basically along the lines of, “they promised to help us”, yet these communities remain some of the most impoverished, have some of the lowest literacy rates, and have some of the highest rates of child marriage in all of Europe. 

They are literally discouraging the best aspects of our culture [our music, dance, spirituality, pacifism], while simultaneously encouraging the worst [bigotry, misogyny, anti-LGBTQ beliefs, etc..] Some are also discouraging use of Romanes and encouraging English. 

And, when you look at the communities they go to, they aren’t targeting communities with higher literacy rates, or those of us who have community institutions. They aren’t going into places like Shutke, or Istanbul, they aren’t going after Kalaidzhi Roma, or Lovara, or Gabor.. they are systematically targeting poor, rural communities like the Bayash, Ludari, and Kashtale, as well as impoverished communities in rural Slovakia and Hungary. 

What makes it more insidious is the fact that while they mostly work out of the US, they very rarely work with Roma from the US to go into these communities. They work with White Europeans from existing Evangelical communities in order to get to their target Romani audience. Some of the people they have been on record working with are police and social workers, which.. hmm.. might really come in handy when they set up their adoption agency, right?

There are Romani kids adopted out into the US through these Evangelical agencies who, when they go back to look into information about their birth parents, they are given information about people that don’t even exist. The house that their country’s social services claimed to have removed them from.. doesn’t exist. And, we’ve all read some of the horrific stories of abuse that have occurred with interracial adoptions by White Evangelical families in the US. 

They are a modern day reincarnation of Maria Theresa, stripping us bit by bit of our culture, language, and taking away our children.. but at least Maria Theresa didn’t pretend to be some holy crusader who liked us. 

This a modern day genocide; a cultural genocide, as we keep repeating over and over again. No matter what way you look at it or how you try to paint these people as having good “intentions”.. it is just another attempt to eradicate us by means of eradicating our culture. It is another attempt to tame the wild Gypsy through forced assimilation. 

The truth is that Western people calling themselves communists, particularly having been explained the implications of the word for the nations that experienced the regime, look like they care more about shocking their grandmother at a family dinner than social improvement.

With all due respect for being a curse upon your own family.

Much the same can be said about the unfortunately widespread use of the Soviet emblem.

@upyrica can you recommend any good books or sources (in English, sorry) so that I can learn more about what it was like?

I could not help you with that request, I am afraid. From my perspective that information is national, local, and family history and culture, which has rather prevented me thus far from delving into reviewing English-language books on the subject.

 On a relatively light-hearted note, I could recommend Stilyagi  for  a taste - which is based on a book, the availability of which in English is a mystery to me, alas. The ever-recommended The Master and Margarita can be read with its context in mind, too - the flat from which people disappear, the fate of the Master, the overpopulation, the general sense of unease are rather true to life. 

Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago also comes to mind as the obvious classic.

Heck, Gorky Park depicts a lot of that unease and drudgery, and it’s a whodunit.

Yes yes yes, I got attacked so much when I asked do they know what communism, the hammer and the sickle mean when they kept using in their memes. It looks like everyone loves to call themselves communists now but have no idea what soviet regime was and how much damage and death it has caused

I am half-Polish.

One of my great-grandparents survived Nazi camp where they experimented on him, only to be again jailed after war during Stalinism for continuing resistance action. He survived only due to sheer luck really - he was about to be executed when some major action came up and his oppressors left him in jail instead. His two brothers were less lucky - they were sent to gulag and never came back. We tried to trace them to establish what happened to them but all documentation has been destroyed - my great grandpa died aged 98 not knowing what exactly happened to his only brothers and I know this thought harrowed him his entire life.

Also, I still remember thousands of stories that were told to me by my grandparents and even my dad of their recollections about life in communist Poland. People tried to live normally and many simply adjusted, but it was still a horrible system aimed to oppress its citizens.

That’s why it always annoys me so hard when people who have no understanding of history cultivate and even applaud political systems that are filled with blood.

And of course people who do it never actually had to go through the pain of such regimes or have no members of family who did.

Capitalism is far from good. It does a lot of damage too. But communism, although it had quite innocent and understandable foundations (especially at the time when Marx lived), is rightly the kind of doctrine that is banned in Poland (along with fascism). Because this country went through it, unlike my fellow Brits or Americans.

Don’t get me wrong, I love it when people design medieval fantasy clothing based on western European fashions, because they were awesome (did somebody say chaperon?) but there was lot of great design in eastern Europe and the Byzantine Empire too.

I’m pretty sure the second picture is actually 16th century Hungarian dress, but I’ll let it in because it looks cool.

“Hi, I’m Europe, and I fucking love dragging the bottoms of my lovely outfits through the inch-high pools of human waste everywhere”

Not quite! Different clothes for different classes and situations, ya know? This is mostly rich people fashion, and I can bet you it was mostly meant to be worn indoors (believe it or not, medieval people cared about hygiene and didn’t exactly wade through turds in their own homes).

I don’t have any sources for Eastern Europe in particular, but I have some examples from Livre de la chasse for what people would wear hunting:

Almost everybody has their skirts knee high or higher. Those chaps on horseback are noblemen living in a time when long houppelandes were in fashion*, but outside they obviously had to wear something else. No hemlines dragging in the dirt or getting caught in the brush. These elaborate outer garments were much harder to wash than the linen underwear you’d have on underneath, so people really tried to not get their fancy clothes all grubby.

*I’m pretty sure these illustrations are from the early 15th century English edition.

Also, people generally wore pattens outdoors, which were wooden overshoes that were slightly elevated, so that your feet, and the bottom of your clothes, wouldn’t be in direct contact with the ground. They looked something like this:

Because yeah, people did understand basic hygiene, even in Europe, and didn’t want to get dirt and shit everywhere. I mean, come on.

can we stop only blaming british people for colonialism and how they don’t take any responsibility today? because hi, spain massacred the entire center and south america. france? destroyed entire civilizations and ruled the worldwide slave market. european countries literally sat down and divided africa to themselves. y'all don’t get blame free just because it’s more trendy to be after british people on tumblr.

As long as there have been power hungry people around, there has been land grabbing and colonisation. And that dates back forever. Genghis Khan killed enough people in the Mongol Empire (the largest continuous land empire in history according to wikipedia) to reduce the temperature of the planet. The argument for what is British is dotted with how no one is truly British because Britain is made up of how many times its been invaded - vikings, romans, anglo saxons, normans. The World Wars were about colonisation and Germany looking to expand its power. And even today most wars have at least an element of trying to control land that isn’t someones to control - such as Russia and Ukraine. So yeah, like those maps show, Britain found out it was good at going to other lands and stomping all over them, sticking their flag up and saying this is mine - but they were far from the only ones and probably if they hadn’t someone else would have and we’d still be sitting here discussing colonialism just pointing the finger at someone else.

And don’t forget the Ottomans either. They stretched from the Middle Ages to WWI (holy shit) and some of their colonial possessions were in Eastern Europe. The residual anger is still pretty strong in parts of Bulgaria for instance.