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The paper discusses the character of the translations of saints? relics in the late medieval central Balkans, as they increasingly gained prominence as an encouragement to the veneration of saints. The fact that translations grew much more frequent provides the opportunity to analyse the motivations behind this practice, the ways in which relics were acquired, the types of translation processions and their symbolic significance. The relic translations in the central Balkans in the period under study fitted the Christian translation pattern in every respect and stood halfway between history and cult and, frequently, between politics and cult.

The paper offers a critical survey of vulnerable and endangered languages and linguistic varieties in Serbia presented in three international inventories: UNESCO?s Atlas of the World?s Languages in Danger, Ethnologue and The Catalogue of Endangered Languages. As the inventories differ widely in terms of assessing the exact level of language endangerment and vulnerability, and lack to provide empirical support for their assessment, the paper provides thorough information from official local sources, relevant studies and the authors? own field research, when available, on the language categorized as endangered (Aromanian, Banat Bulgarian, Judezmo, Vojvodina Rusyn, Romani), but also presents additional linguistic varieties which have not been registered yet by any of the mentioned inventories (Megleno-Romanian, Bayash Romanian and Vlach Romanian).

The intra-party conflict in Yugoslavia in 1966 resulted in a fundamental shift in the attitude of the Yugoslav leadership toward the Albanian national minority, which was also reflected in the country?s foreign policy orientation. The normalization of relations with Albania was set as one of the objectives of Yugoslav foreign policy. Yugoslavia stopped responding to the anti-Yugoslav statements of Albanian officials and launched a series of cooperation initiatives with Albania. The Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija was assigned a special role in the normalization of relations with Tirana and, with the consent of Belgrade, an exchange of publications, visits of cultural-artistic associations and contacts between the cultural institutions of Kosovo and Metohija and Albania ensued. This policy resulted in the establishment of direct cultural, economic and political ties between the governments of Albania and the Autonomous Province of Kosovo and Metohija, into which the Yugoslav political leadership no longer had any insight.

The paper looks at two sets of data provided by Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus? De administranndo imperio, one concerning information about Belgrade in the context of Serbian settlement in the Byzantine Empire under Heraclius, the other Belgrade itself.

This paper seeks to examine the outlook of the Serbian Minister in London, Mateja Mata Bošković, during the first half of the Great War on the South Slav (Yugoslav) question - a unification of all the Serbs, Croats and Slovenes in a single state, which was Serbia’s war aim. He found himself in close contact with the members of the Yugoslav Committee, an organisation of the irredentist Yugoslav émigrés from Austria-Hungary in which two Croat politicians, Frano Supilo and Ante Trumbić, were leading figures. In stark contrast to other Serbian diplomats, Bošković was not enthusiastic about Yugoslav unification. He suspected the Croat émigrés, especially Supilo, of pursuing exclusive Croat interests under the ruse of the Yugoslav programme. His dealings with them were made more difficult on account of the siding of a group of British “friends of Serbia”, the most prominent of which were Robert William Seton-Watson and Henry Wickham Steed, with the Croat émigrés. Though not opposed in principle to an integral Yugoslav unification, Bošković preferred staunch defence of Serbian Macedonia from Bulgarian ambitions and the acquisition of Serb-populated provinces in southern Hungary, while in the west he seems to have been content with the annexation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, part of Slavonia and an outlet to the Adriatic Sea in Dalmatia. Finally, the reception of and reaction to Bošković’s reports on the part of the Serbian Prime Minister, Nikola Pašić, clearly shows that the latter was determined to persist in his Yugoslav policy, despite the Treaty of London which assigned large parts of the Slovene and Croat lands to Italy and made the creation of Yugoslavia an unlikely proposition. In other words, Pašić did not vacillate between the “small” and the “large programme”, between Yugoslavia and Greater Serbia, as it has been often alleged in historiography and public discourse. [177011: History of political ideas and institutions in the Balkans in the 19th and 20th centuries]