We warmly invite you to a lecture – combined with a short discussion – by Dr. Maciej Mętrak "The freshest news from two centuries ago: market songs in Central Europe". 📅 When? September 25 (Thursday) at 5:00 PM 📍 Where? At the Staszic Palace (Nowy Świat 72, Warsaw) in room 006 on the ground floor. ⏳ Duration: approx. 1.5 hours Description: During the lecture, we will delve into the world of market prints – the historical equivalent of today's tabloids and gossip websites. These publications, intended for a mass audience, were sold cheaply at fairs, religious festivals, and pilgrimages, and contained rhymed works informing about extraordinary and interesting events: love and crimes, miracles and disasters, politics, the latest fashions, and groundbreaking inventions. In various regional forms, this phenomenon was known throughout modern Europe, but among Slavic nations, it was particularly popular in the Czech lands. A high level of literacy allowed the development of reading among the common people as early as the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, and thousands of market leaflets have been preserved in many museums to this day. During the meeting, you will learn what market prints looked like and what they contained, how the songs included in them sounded, and whether they were truly a source of world news or rather a way to satisfy the expectations of audiences who, much like today, "liked best the songs they already knew." The presentation, illustrated with examples from the Czech Republic and Poland, is based on years of research into market songs, culminating in last year's publication of the book "A Map of the World from a Market Leaflet: Czech 19th-Century Market Creativity in an Ethnolinguistic Perspective" (PTL – Wrocław).
