Memories of a Personal Meeting. Ivan Shishmanov on a Visit to the Bishop Josip Juraj Štrossmayer

Antoaneta Balcheva

Institute of Balkan Studies with Centre of Tracology

https://doi.org/10.53656/his2025-5-3-spo

Abstract. The study attempts to shed light on an insufficiently studied moment in the personal biography of Ivan Shishmanov, related to his visit in 1898 to Bishop Josip Juraj Štrossmayer in Dzhakovo. The aim of the present text is to conceptualize the meeting of the eminent Bulgarian scholar with the bishop as a dynamic process of receptive communication, of getting to know one’s own through the foreign, accompanied by a careful analysis of the circumstances that determined the individual stages in the development of national self-consciousness and national self-determination from the end of the 19th century. In this aspect, the travelogue “Bishop Josip  Štrossmayer. Memories of a Personal Meeting” is viewed as a vision of the specific tasks and pragmatic strategies for implementation by our cultural elites, based on the accumulated time experience and the hermeneutics of our historical destiny, in which the author’s reflections on the era and events surrounding the personality and work of the Dzhakovo bishop are woven. At the same time, the story of the journey can also be perceived as a kind of panopticon, in which pictures of the real and imaginary past, present and future, the ideological pathos of the narrator and the aspiration for psychological penetration into the human microcosm alternate. The process of reflexive determination of identity gives rise to the act of comparing interiority, memory and time. Ivan Shishmanov unfolds the image of Josip Juraj Štrossmayer focusing on the phenomenology of memory and the temporality that evokes it. The composition of the text is conventionally divided into three parts, each of which leads to the final understanding of the personality of the bishop of  Džakovo a posteriori based on the historical context, the different levels of acquired human and social experience and psychological attitudes. Far from naive, romantic notions, Ivan Shishmanov outlines a detailed biographical portrait of the enlightener, philosopher, theologian, politician, writer, patron and benefactor, equally significant for the destinies of his own people and for the history of all humanity.

Keywords: Ivan Shishmanov, Josip Juraj Štrossmayer, reception, own, foreign, cultural memory, folk psychology, phenomenology of memory

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