About Studia Academica Sumenensia

Studia Academica Sumenensia

Studia Academica Šumenensia - also rendered Studia Academica Sumenensia, and shortened by its editors to SAŠ - is an open-access annual scholarly journal of history and archaeology published by the Department of History and Archaeology of the Faculty of Humanities at Konstantin Preslavsky University of Shumen, in Bulgaria, through Shumen University Press. Its first volume appeared in 2014, devoted to the empire and the barbarians in south-eastern Europe in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages. It publishes original research on all aspects of the history and archaeology of the Balkans and south-eastern Europe, from prehistory to modern times, with particular strength in archaeology, prehistory, numismatics, epigraphy, anthropology, classics and history, and it especially welcomes interdisciplinary studies.

For JournalsWorld readers, the key facts are these. The journal's print ISSN, printed in its volumes, is 2367-5446, and the second ISSN stored on this record is 2603-5138. It appears once a year. Its volumes are organised around large regional themes, each gathered by named editors: volume 1 (2014) on the empire and barbarians, edited by Stoyan Vitlyanov and Ivo Topalilov; volume 2 (2015) on Christianity in south-eastern Europe, edited by Biser Georgiev, Rumen Vatashki and Ivo Topalilov; and volume 8 (2021) on the northern Balkans between East and West in the sixth to fifteenth centuries, edited by Ivo Topalilov and Svetlana Nedelcheva. From its first introduction, the journal declared that it would be published entirely in international languages - English, German, French, Italian, Russian and Spanish - so that scholars across the region could argue in one shared forum.

Quick Facts

Origins: A New Annual for a Whole Region

The journal's founding introduction, written by Stoyan Vitlyanov and Ivo Topalilov for volume 1 in 2014, is unusually explicit about purpose, and it is the best guide to what SAŠ is. This is, they wrote, the first volume of a new annual periodical that the Department of History and Archaeology of the University of Shumen has started. Its main purpose is to allow the many topics of the history and archaeology of the Balkans and south-eastern Europe - topics that are, they noted frankly, quite often highly controversial - to be discussed by the broader scholarly community of the region. For that reason the periodical focuses on topics of general interest throughout the region, invites scholars from various countries to contribute, and employs an interdisciplinary approach, welcoming historians, archaeologists, classicists and epigraphists alike.

Two founding decisions shaped everything that followed. The first is the language decision: the journal would be published entirely in international languages - English, German, French, Italian, Russian and Spanish - rather than in Bulgarian alone. A regional journal in a single national language can talk to itself; this one was built to be read in Bucharest, Belgrade, Athens, Vienna and Istanbul as readily as in Shumen and Sofia. The second decision is the thematic volume. Instead of gathering unrelated articles, each volume takes a large question of regional history and builds an issue around it, so that the volume itself becomes an argument about what the field should discuss next. Volume 1's question - how empire and barbarians made each other in the Danube lands between late antiquity and the early Middle Ages - set the pattern.

The Volumes and Their Themes

Volume 1 (2014), The Empire and Barbarians in South-Eastern Europe in Late Antiquity and Early Middle Ages, edited by Vitlyanov and Topalilov, shows the formula at work. Its papers cover four themes across the Danube region south of ancient Pannonia, on the traffic of influence in both directions between the Empire and the peoples beyond and within its frontiers. Georgi Atanasov wrote on Flavius Aetius, the great late Roman statesman born in the region, and his portrait on a consular diptych from Monza; other papers treated Germanic finds at Sucidava-Celei in the sixth century, the beginnings of Vandal settlement in the Danube area, barbarian presence in the province of Moesia Secunda, late antique bronze buckles with Christian inscriptions from north-east Bulgaria, Thrace and Philippopolis in the later sixth century, and the effect of barbarian raids on low-Danube production traditions, closing with social structures in late antique and early medieval Dalmatia and an account of the establishment of the Bulgarian state. Empire, frontier, material culture and state formation are all present in one volume, which is precisely the interdisciplinary mixture the founders promised.

Volume 2 (2015) turned to Christianity in south-eastern Europe in its civilisational and political perspective, edited by Biser Georgiev, Rumen Vatashki and Ivo Topalilov, with Svetlana Nedelcheva as language editor. Its range runs from readings of Bulgarian national historiography through church-and-state questions across the region - Russia and the Coburgs between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, the religious factor in Austro-Hungarian policy toward Bulgaria during the wars of 1912-1918, an attempt to found a Christian Democratic party in Bulgaria at the end of the First World War, the Bulgarian Orthodox Exarchate and abolitionism, church care for orphans in nineteenth-century Ukraine, and Serbian Orthodox relations with Constantinople and the Bulgarian Exarchate between the wars. The volume demonstrates that the journal's phrase modern times in its scope statement is meant seriously: the Balkans of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries belong in its pages beside the Balkans of the Roman frontier.

Later volumes kept the pattern. Volume 7 (2020) carried, among other work, Dan Dana's study of the earliest personifications of Thrace in Roman art, on the allegories of the Bessi at Aphrodisias and Valentia - classical archaeology and art history of exactly the kind the scope promises. Volume 8 (2021), edited by Ivo Topalilov and Svetlana Nedelcheva, took as its theme the northern Balkans between East and West in the sixth to fifteenth centuries, opened with a memorial to Professor Ivan Jordanov (1949-2021), and gathered papers on the Byzantine frontier in Dobruja, an Alan catacomb grave in Romania, and the craft district of an early medieval fortified settlement at Hărșova, among others. Its editorial board lists scholars from institutions across Europe and beyond - academies and universities in Serbia, Poland, Greece, France, Austria, Switzerland, Turkey and the United States alongside Bulgarian colleagues - which is the international community the founders set out to convene, visible on the journal's own front matter.

Scope and Subjects

The journal's scope, as stated in its CEEOL listing, is original, high-quality research on all aspects of the history and archaeology of the Balkans and south-eastern Europe. It encompasses studies from prehistory to modern times, especially in archaeology, prehistory, numismatics, epigraphy, anthropology, classics and history, and interdisciplinary studies are especially welcome. Read against the volumes, each term earns its place. Numismatics and epigraphy appear because the region's history is written from coins and inscriptions as much as from chronicles; anthropology appears because burial and settlement evidence demands it; classics appears because the Balkans were, in antiquity, both a Greek and Roman world and the home of Thracian, Illyrian, Dacian and other peoples whom classical sources describe from outside; and modern history appears because the region's Ottoman, national and twentieth-century pasts are inseparable from its archaeology, as the Shumen district's own Ottoman registers and garrison history, studied by the journal's contributors, remind its readers.

The geographic frame is as deliberate as the disciplinary one. South-eastern Europe is a region whose past is claimed by many national historiographies, sometimes competitively, and the founders' remark that its topics are quite often highly controversial is a quiet mission statement. A Shumen-based annual that publishes Romanian, Serbian, Polish, Greek, Turkish and Bulgarian scholars side by side, in shared international languages, on shared themes, is infrastructure for a regional conversation that no single national journal could host. That is the journal's real distinctiveness, and prospective authors should write toward it: papers that speak across a modern border, or that a reader in a neighbouring country would find necessary, are the papers this journal exists to print.

Metrics, Indexing and Verification Notes

This journal's bibliometric footprint is small, and this profile reports it honestly rather than inflating it. OpenAlex did not return a source record for either of the journal's ISSNs when its ISSN endpoint was checked for this profile - both lookups returned no record - so OpenAlex-based metrics for Studia Academica Šumenensia are written here as could not be verified, and no citation totals are claimed. The earlier JournalsWorld record for this post carried an h-index of 1 from its own underlying source, which is consistent with a small, young, regional annual whose papers are cited slowly within a specialist community; readers should not mistake that small footprint for a judgement on the quality of individual volumes, whose contents are listed in detail above from the volumes themselves.

The journal is described in its CEEOL listing as an open-access scholarly journal with a frequency of one issue per year, published in Bulgaria, and its volumes circulate as full texts through academic sharing platforms and the university's own channels, which is how the contents of volumes 1, 2 and 8 could be verified for this profile. A Directory of Open Access Journals claim is not made here: the DOAJ search API returned errors throughout the checking session for this batch, so a listing could not be verified one way or the other, and an interim failure of that kind is not evidence about the journal. Article processing charges likewise could not be verified from a fetched source and are described as not publicly disclosed in the material checked; authors should ask the editorial office directly.

How to Submit

The journal is produced by the Department of History and Archaeology of the Faculty of Humanities at Konstantin Preslavsky University of Shumen and published by Shumen University Press. Because each volume is built around a theme and gathered by named volume editors, the practical route for authors is to work with the volume's editors and timetable: watch for the department's and the journal's announcements of forthcoming themes, prepare a paper that addresses the announced theme or the journal's standing scope, and write it in one of the journal's international languages. Papers should be genuinely interdisciplinary where the material allows - an excavation report that draws the historical conclusion, a historical study that rests on coins, inscriptions or field evidence - because that mixture is the journal's stated preference.

Before submitting, authors should confirm the current requirements with the editorial office: length, illustration and referencing conventions, the language-editing arrangements the journal has used since its early volumes, and the theme and deadline of the volume in preparation. Those operational details are not published in the sources fetched for this profile, and inventing them would help no one; the department and Shumen University Press are the authoritative sources. What can be said from the journal's own record is that foreign authorship is not an exception but the design: from volume 1 onward, its tables of contents are international, and its board is international, so a well-aimed paper from outside Bulgaria is exactly what the journal was founded to receive.

Who Should Read It

Studia Academica Šumenensia is for historians and archaeologists of the Balkans and south-eastern Europe at every period from prehistory to the twentieth century; for specialists in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, for whom its first and eighth volumes are directly on point; for numismatists and epigraphists working on the Danube and Black Sea lands; for Byzantinists, Ottomanists and modern Balkan historians who want a regional rather than a national frame; and for students who need to see how a contested regional past can be discussed by the region itself, in common languages, to shared scholarly standards.

Reading the Journal as a Regional Conversation

It is worth pausing on how the journal's design answers a real problem in its field. The early medieval Balkans are documented by a thin scatter of chronicles, inscriptions, coins and excavated settlements, and almost every important conclusion - when a fortification was built, which group a burial assemblage belonged to, how a frontier actually worked - is argued from evidence that sits in a different modern country from the scholar arguing it. National journals tend to gather the evidence of one country and the scholars of one academy. A themed annual edited in Shumen, printed in languages its neighbours read, and filled with papers that habitually cross the Danube and the modern borders drawn along it, gathers the evidence and the arguers together. Volume 8's contents make the point concretely: a Romanian Alan grave, a Romanian early medieval craft district and a Bulgarian-led synthesis of the Byzantine frontier in Dobruja belong to one historical system, and the journal treats them as one conversation.

The same holds at the modern end of its range. Volume 2's church-and-state papers move between Bulgaria, Serbia, Ukraine, Austria-Hungary and Russia because the religious politics of the nineteenth-century Balkans were themselves transnational: exarchates, patriarchates, empires and new national churches acted on one another, and a purely national account would miss the action. By holding ancient, medieval and modern work inside one regional frame, the journal quietly argues that south-eastern Europe is a single field of study with a long memory, and that its historians and archaeologists have more to say to each other than to any outside audience. That argument, made by practice rather than by manifesto, is the strongest reason to take this small annual seriously.

Production values follow the same seriousness. Volumes print their editors, language editors and international board members by name; they carry the university press imprint and the journal's ISSN on their front matter; later volumes record the faculty research projects whose funding supported publication, as volume 8 records its Shumen faculty project support. These are the ordinary marks of a properly constituted university journal, and they are all verifiable in the volumes themselves, which is why this profile has drawn its facts from the volumes and the journal's own listings rather than from secondary summaries.

Similar Journals

Neighbouring titles include Studies in Ancient Art and Civilization, the Jagiellonian University annual in Kraków, whose ancient-world and Black Sea interests overlap the classical end of this journal's scope; Dacia, the Romanian journal of archaeology and ancient history; and the Annual of Konstantin Preslavsky University's own Faculty of Humanities, a sister Shumen publication covering philology, history, archaeology, theology and media studies, from which Studia Academica Šumenensia should not be confused - the Annual is a broad faculty journal, while SAŠ is the department's themed international annual for history and archaeology of the Balkans and south-eastern Europe specifically.

Frequently Asked Questions

What does the title mean? Studia Academica Šumenensia is Latin for academic studies of Shumen - the university city in north-eastern Bulgaria where the journal is published. Its editors shorten it to SAŠ.

What are its ISSNs? Its printed volumes carry ISSN 2367-5446, and the second ISSN stored on this JournalsWorld record is 2603-5138.

When did it start? Volume 1 appeared in 2014, on the empire and barbarians in south-eastern Europe in late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, edited by Stoyan Vitlyanov and Ivo Topalilov.

How often does it appear, and is it open access? Annually, one issue per year; its CEEOL listing describes it as an open-access scholarly journal.

In which languages does it publish? Its founders declared it would appear entirely in international languages: English, German, French, Italian, Russian and Spanish.

What subjects does it cover? All aspects of the history and archaeology of the Balkans and south-eastern Europe, from prehistory to modern times, especially archaeology, prehistory, numismatics, epigraphy, anthropology, classics and history, with interdisciplinary work especially welcome.

Are its citation metrics published here? OpenAlex returned no source for its ISSNs at checking time, so its OpenAlex metrics are recorded as could not be verified; the older record on this site carried an h-index of 1 from its own source.