Dear Professors and Colleagues,

We warmly invite you to support the XXII Dies historiae scientific conference, to be held on March 19th and 20th, 2025, at the Faculty of Croatian Studies. This annual conference is traditionally organized by the Student History Society "Ivan Lučić – Lucius", and this year's theme is: "Peasant Feeds Both Worm and Emperor – The History of the Village".

As Henri Mendras highlighted, the village is a world unto itself in terms of cultural, economic, and spiritual autarky. Although the village economy was sufficient for its own needs, it was also an essential factor in feeding the nobility or city, as can particularly be seen in the old proverb, "peasant feeds both worm and emperor". In this sense, the village is of utmost importance to "external structures", and the decline of villages certainly had far-reaching economic, demographic, and social consequences, best observed in the example of Slavonia during the Ottoman conquests.

The village has specific understandings of space and time. Throughout history, villages were organized around spatially and resourcefully advantageous areas, and time was perceived according to natural time (sunrise and sunset). Moreover, the concept of leisure time did not exist for peasants; they always had work duties such as fieldwork, livestock duties, or other obligations to the feudal lord. At the same time, it shaped the cultural landscape of the area through the way it interacted with the environment, though forms of space could also determine suitable economic activities, customs, or village infrastructure.

Peasant societies come with a traditional value system, according to which they cherish their customs woven into their community identity, especially evident in the old saying, "better for the village to perish, than for customs to be lost". Their identity has certainly changed and shaped over time through adaptation to economic and political circumstances. Special cases were those in which legitimate power structures penetrated a small community with its customary law, and the village developed various strategies and tactics to cope with these. Such village-specific mechanisms like neighborly "charity" (mutual neighborly help) or experiences like "collective suffering" were factors in creating a high degree of social cohesion and solidarity. Often, imposed legal frameworks were codifications of customary law, such as the most famous example for this region – Verböczy's Tripartitum.

Peasant society is primarily a society of mutual acquaintance, where everyone knows everyone. According to this social relationship, in which patterns of behavior and roles are predetermined, self-regulation of individual behavior becomes a necessity of the moment, ultimately leading to the question "what will the neighbor say?" at the deviation from the norm. A characteristic feature of such a community was its closedness towards the external system (but not isolation), i.e., towards something "foreign". In this sense, a dichotomy of "us" and "them" is established as a fundamental basis for determining the value system, customs, and profile of the village community, for alongside established tradition, the construct of "the other" is necessary to determine patterns. This polarity arises precisely from the perception of "oneself", that is, the imaginary that is socialized. To know "the other", a certain contradiction appears – every stranger in the village is approached hospitably, while the perception towards other villages, cultures, or structures remains cold, derogatory, and reserved.

From numerous examples in history, it can be seen how the village faced many challenges during periods of adaptation to the current economic system. The most significant examples were after the abolition of feudalism, and later during the entry of peasant economies into capitalist relations. In the era of globalization, the village began to incorporate urban elements, drastically changing the socioeconomic structure, and it ceased to be autarkic. Postmodernity includes all individuals in society as part of the consumer composition, which particularly applies to the current trend of rural decline. Peasant society, as producers, move away from their production by migrating to the city, where they become one of the consumers. Thus, the theme is of exceptional current importance given the high degree of ruralization in the Republic of Croatia and around the world.

Therefore, the aim of the scientific conference is to present through historical, anthropological, sociological, demographic, and other analyses the various aspects of villages, rural life, and peasant society.