OCR
Acknowledgements This volume is an outcome of a conference held in Sofia in 2015. We are deeply conceived that the success of the conference was built on the commitment of many people and institutions. We would like to express our particular gratitude to the conference organizers—Evgenia Troeva, Petko Hristov, Anelia Kassabova, Violeta Periklieva, Dessislava Pileva, Ivaylo Markov, and Emil Antonov—thanks to whom the conference was both a fruitful scientific exploration and a rich social experience. Special thanks to Ivaylo Markov for creating and managing the conference website. Working with you all has been an outstanding pleasure. We owe our special thanks also to the institutions that supported the event: the Bulgarian Ministry of Education, the Polish Institute in Sofia, the Embassy of Austria in Sofia, and the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with the Ethnographic Museum of Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, which hosted the conference, and the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology of Polish Academy of Sciences. Last but not least we would like to thank all of the conference participants and the contributors to this volume. It is owing only to you that the conference and volume preparation have been bountiful, if sometimes challenging, experiences. We are especially grateful to the institutions that in various ways contributed to the publishing of this volume. We owe our thanks, again, to the Bulgarian Ministry of Education and to the National Programme of Developing Humanistics of the Polish Ministry of Higher Education and Science (Grant No. 12H 120069 81) for financing this publication. Finally, we owe our thanks to the institutions who generously allowed us to publish visual data to which they own the copyrights: the Museum of Independence (Muzeum Niepodlegtosci) in Warsaw, Filmoteka Narodowa, the Polska Press Sp. z 0.0., and the Bulgarian National Film Archive. In the project on the visual representations of the Other from the very beginning the following institutions have been involved: the Institute of Ethnology, the Czech Academy of Sciences; the Research Centre for Humanities, Hungarian Academy of Sciences; the Institute of Ethnology, Slovak Academy of Sciences; the Institute of Archaeology and Ethnology, Polish Academy of Sciences. We are very grateful for their contributions to the entire project. Regarding this particular conference and volume, however, we are especially thankful to our friends from the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with Ethnographic Museum at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Only thanks to you was the whole event such a success.