integration’. In January 2006 the Andrew Mellon Foundation, in conjunction
with the Institute for Advanced Studies at New Europe College, sponsored a
workshop entitled ‘Repositioning of a Discipline: Religious Studies East and
West’, which dealt with regional cooperation in repositioning religious studies
between Eastern and Western Europe. Similar Mellon regional initiatives took
place in 2006 in Budapest, dealing with sociology, and Sofia, dealing with
anthropology.
Throughout the region organizational activity is proceeding at a remarkable
rate. For example, Dubrovnik, Croatia, now hosts a prolific international centre
of PurÇn...ic studies (Brockington and Schreiner 1999). The triennal Dubrovnik
International Conference in the Sanskrit Epics and PurÇn
...
as (DICSEP), founded
in 1997 by Mislav Jezic (b. 1952), professor at the University of Zagreb, has
involved internationally noted scholars such as John Brockington and Peter
Schreiner, as well as scholars from twelve Eastern European countries. In 2004
Bethlenfalvy Géza (b. 1936) started a Budapest-based collection of ‘Treasures
of Mongolian Culture and Tibeto-Mongolian Buddhism’, a joint project of the
State Central Library of Mongolia and the Research Group for Altaic Studies
of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences.
These initiatives support a wide range of energetic work, of which I can
only give a small sampling here. In Prague, noted historians of South Asian
religions, such as Jaroslav Vacek, Jan Dvorˇák, Hana Preinhaelterová, Martin
Prochazka, Du‰an Zbavitel, and Kamil V. Zvelebil, produced an original
survey of Indian literatures (1996) and an edited volume on trends in
Indian studies, including religious studies, with the contribution of Western
but also Bulgarian, Polish, and Hungarian scholars. Radoslav Katicic,
who founded Indological studies at the University of Zagreb, has written
a history of Sanskrit, Pali and Prakrit literatures. Other active Croatian scholars
include Klara Gönc-Moacanin, Milka Jauk-Pinhak, Cedomil Veljacic, Rada
Ivekovic (who now teaches in Paris), and Zdravka Matisic (Brockington and
Schreiner 1999; Dejenne 2002: 277–278). One of the best known Estonian
scholars is Linnart Mäll (b. 1938), head of the Center for Oriental Studies at
the University of Tartu, who publishes mainly in the field of Buddhist/
Mahåyåna studies. In Russia, Igor Mikhailovich Diakonov (1915–1999) wrote
many controversial contributions on the original home of the speakers of Indo-
European (cf. Polomé [ed.] 1984). Tatiana Elizarenkova, at the Institute of
Oriental Studies of the Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, and
Margareta I. Vorobyova-Desyatovskaia are well-known scholars of Vedic and
Buddhist studies, respectively, the latter working mainly on hitherto unedited
texts. The Romanian scholar Rodica Pop, a specialist in Mongolian religions,
has, together with Marie-Dominique Even, completed Paul Pelliot’s French
translation of the thirteenth-century Histoire secrète des Mongols(Even and
Pop 1994). Finally, the Bulgarian-born Yuri Stoyanov (b. 1961) has continued
the scholarship of Obolensky and Culianu, working mainly on medieval Islam
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1
2
3111
4 5 6 7 8 9
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35
6
7
8
9
40111
42222
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411
EASTERN EUROPE
67
