title: Oral history

text: Oral histories are also used in many communities to document the experiences of survivors of tragedies. Following the Holocaust, there has emerged a rich tradition of oral history, particularly of Jewish survivors. The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum has an extensive archive of over 70,000 oral history interviews. There are also several organizations dedicated specifically to collecting and preserving oral histories of survivors. Oral history as a discipline has fairly low barriers to entry, so it is an act in which laypeople can readily participate. In his book Doing Oral History, Donald Ritchie wrote that "oral history has room for both the academic and the layperson. With reasonable training... anyone can conduct a useable oral history." This is especially meaningful in cases like the Holocaust, where survivors may be less comfortable telling their story to a journalist than they would be to a historian or family member.


title: Oral history

text: In the United States, there are several organizations dedicated to doing oral history which are not affiliated with universities or specific locations. StoryCorps is one of the most well-known of these: following the model of the Federal Writers’ Project created as part of the Works Progress Administration, StoryCorps’ mission is to record the stories of Americans from all walks of life. On contrast to the scholarly tradition of oral history, StoryCorps subjects are interviewed by people they know. There are a number of StoryCorps initiatives that have targeted specific populations or problems, following in the tradition of using oral history as a method to amplify voices that might otherwise be marginalized.


title: Oral history

text: The development of digital databases with their text-search tools is one of the important aspects to the technology-based oral historiography. These made it easier to collect and disseminate oral history since access to millions of documents on national and international levels can be instantaneous.


title: Oral history

text: Since the early 1970s, oral history in Britain has grown from being a method in folklore studies (see for example the work of the School of Scottish Studies in the 1950s) to becoming a key component in community histories. Oral history continues to be an important means by which non-academics can actively participate in the compilation and study of history. However, practitioners across a wide range of academic disciplines have also developed the method into a way of recording, understanding, and archiving narrated memories. Influences have included women's history and labour history.


title: Oral history

text: In Britain, the Oral History Society has played a key role in facilitating and developing the use of oral history.


title: Oral history

text: A more complete account of the history of oral history in Britain and Northern Ireland can be found at "Making Oral History" on the Institute of Historical Research's website.


title: Oral history

text: The Bureau of Military History conducted over 1700 interviews with veterans of the First World War and Irish revolutionary period in Ireland. The documentation was released for research in 2003.


title: Oral history

text: During 1998 and 1999, 40 BBC local radio stations recorded personal oral histories from a broad cross-section of the population for "The Century Speaks" series. The result was 640 half-hour radio documentaries, broadcast in the final weeks of the millennium, and one of the largest single oral history collections in Europe, the Millennium Memory Bank (MMB). The interview based recordings are held by the British Library Sound Archive in the oral history collection.


title: Oral history

text: In one of the largest memory project anywhere, The BBC in 2003-6 invited its audiences to send in recollections of the homefront in the Second World War. It put 47,000 of the recollections online, along with 15,000 photographs.


title: Oral history

text: Alessandro Portelli is an Italian oral historian. He is known for his work which compared workers' experiences in Harlan County, Kentucky and Terni, Italy. Other oral historians have drawn on Portelli's analysis of memory, identity, and the construction of history.


title: Oral history

text: , since the government-run historiography in modern Belarus almost fully excludes repression during the epoch when Belarus was part of the Soviet Union, only private initiatives cover the oral memories of the Belarusians. Citizens' groups in Belarus use the methods of oral history and record narrative interviews on video; the Virtual Museum of Soviet Repression in Belarus presents a full virtual museum with intense use of oral history.


title: Oral history

text: Czech oral history began to develop beginning in the 1980s with a focus on social movements and political activism. The practice of oral history and any attempts to document stories prior to this is fairly unknown. The practice of oral history began to take shape in the 1990s. In 2000, The Oral History Center (COH) at the Institute of Contemporary History, Academy of Sciences, Czech Republic (AV ČR) was established with the aim of "systematically support the development of oral history methodology and its application in historical research".


title: Oral history

text: In 2001, Post Bellum, a nonprofit organization, was established to "documents the memories of witnesses of the important historical phenomenons of the 20th century" within the Czech Republic and surrounding European countries. Post Bellum works in partnership with Czech Radio and Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes. Their oral history project "Memory of Nation" was created in 2008 and interviews are archived online for user access. As of January 2015, the project has more than 2100 published witness accounts in several languages, with more than 24,000 pictures.


title: Oral history

text: Other projects, including articles and books have been funded by the Czech Science Foundation (AV ČR) including:


title: Oral history

text: These publications aim to demonstrate that oral history contributes to the understanding of human lives and history itself, such as the motives behind the dissidents' activities, the formation of opposition groups, communication between dissidents and state representatives and the emergence of ex-communist elites and their decision-making processes.


title: Oral history

text: Oral history centers in the Czech Republic emphasize educational activities (seminars, lectures, conferences), archiving and maintaining interview collections, and providing consultations to those interested in the method.


title: Oral history

text: Because of repression in Francoist Spain (1939–75), the development of oral history in Spain was quite limited until the 1970s. It became well-developed in the early 1980s, and often had a focus on the Civil War years (1936–39), especially regarding the ones who lost the war and whose stories had been suppressed. At the University of Barcelona, Professor Mercedes Vilanova was a leading scholar, who combined oral history with her interest in quantification and social history. Barcelona scholars sought to integrate oral sources with traditional written sources to create mainstream, not ghettoized, historical interpretations. They sought to give a public voice to neglected groups, such as women, illiterates, political leftists, and ethnic minorities. In 1887, at Universidade De Santiago de Compostela, Marc Wouters and Isaura Varela started an oral history project focused on the Spanish Civil War, exile, and migration. The project explored victims of the war and the Francoist Dictatorship and includes 2100 interviews and 800 hours of audio.


title: Oral history

text: Oral history began with a focus on national leaders in the United States, but has expanded to include groups representing the entire population. In Britain, the influence of 'history from below' and interviewing people who had been 'hidden from history' was more influential. However, in both countries elite oral history has emerged as an important strand. Scientists, for example, have been covered in numerous oral history projects. Doel (2003) discusses the use of oral interviews by scholars as primary sources, He lists major oral history projects in the history of science begun after 1950. Oral histories, he concludes, can augment the biographies of scientists and help spotlight how their social origins influenced their research. Doel acknowledges the common concerns historians have regarding the validity of oral history accounts. He identifies studies that used oral histories successfully to provide critical and unique insight into otherwise obscure subjects, such as the role scientists played in shaping US policy after World War II. Interviews furthermore can provide road maps for researching archives, and can even serve as a fail-safe resource when written documents have been lost or destroyed. Roger D. Launius (2003) shows the huge size and complexity of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) oral history program since 1959. NASA systematically documented its operations through oral histories. They can help to explore broader issues regarding the evolution of a major federal agency. The collection consists primarily of oral histories conducted by scholars working on books about the agency. Since 1996, however, the collection has also included oral histories of senior NASA administrators and officials, astronauts, and project managers, part of a broader project to document the lives of key agency individuals. Launius emphasizes efforts to include such less-well-known groups within the agency as the Astrobiology Program, and to collect the oral histories of women in NASA.


title: Oral history

text: Contemporary oral history involves recording or transcribing eyewitness accounts of historical events. Some anthropologists started collecting recordings (at first especially of Native American folklore) on phonograph cylinders in the late 19th century. In the 1930s, the Federal Writers' Project—part of the Works Progress Administration (WPA)—sent out interviewers to collect accounts from various groups, including surviving witnesses of the Civil War, slavery, and other major historical events. The Library of Congress also began recording traditional American music and folklore onto acetate discs. With the development of audio tape recordings after World War II, the task of oral historians became easier.


title: Oral history

text: In 1946, David P. Boder, a professor of psychology at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, traveled to Europe to record long interviews with "displaced persons"—most of them Holocaust survivors. Using the first device capable of capturing hours of audio—the wire recorder—Boder came back with the first recorded Holocaust testimonials and in all likelihood the first recorded oral histories of significant length.


title: Oral history

text: Many state and local historical societies have oral history programs. Sinclair Kopp (2002) reported on the Oregon Historical Society's program. It began in 1976 with the hiring of Charles Digregorio, who had studied at Columbia with Nevins. Thousands of sound recordings, reel-to-reel tapes, transcriptions, and radio broadcasts have made it one of the largest collections of oral history on the Pacific Coast. In addition to political figures and prominent businessmen, the Oregon Historical Society has done interviews with minorities, women, farmers, and other ordinary citizens, who have contributed extraordinary stories reflecting the state's cultural and social heritage. Hill (2004) encourages oral history projects in high school courses. She demonstrates a lesson plan that encourages the study of local community history through interviews. By studying grassroots activism and the lived experiences of its participants, her high school students came to appreciate how African Americans worked to end Jim Crow laws in the 1950s.


title: Oral history

text: Mark D. Naison (2005) describes the Bronx African American History Project (BAAHP), an oral community history project developed by the Bronx County Historical Society. Its goal was to document the histories of black working- and middle-class residents of the South Bronx neighborhood of Morrisania in New York City since the 1940s.


title: Oral history

text: The Middle East often requires oral history methods of research, mainly because of the relative lack in written and archival history and its emphasis on oral records and traditions. Furthermore, because of its population transfers, refugees and émigrés become suitable objects for oral history research.


title: Oral history

text: Katharina Lange studied the tribal histories of Syria. The oral histories in this area could not be transposed into tangible, written form due to their positionalities, which Lange describes as “taking sides”. The positionality of oral history could lead to conflict and tension. The tribal histories are typically narrated by men. While histories are also told by women, they are not accepted locally as “real history”. Oral histories often detail the lives and feats of ancestors.


title: Oral history

text: Genealogy is a prominent subject in the area. According to Lange, the oral historians often tell their own personalized genealogies to demonstrate their credibility, both in their social standing and their expertise in the field.


title: Oral history

text: From 2003 to 2004, Professors Marianne Kamp and Russell Zanca researched agricultural collectivization in Uzbekistan in part by using oral history methodology to fill in gaps in information missing from the Central State Archive of Uzbekistan. The goal of the project was to learn more about life in the 1920s and 1930s to study the impact of the Soviet Union's conquest. 20 interviews each were conducted in the Fergana valley, Tashkent, Bukhara, Khorezm, and Kashkadarya regions. Their interviews uncovered stories of famine and death that had not been widely known outside of local memory in the region.


title: Oral history

text: The rise of oral history is a new trend in historical studies in China that began in the late twentieth century. Some oral historians, stress the collection of eyewitness accounts of the words and deeds of important historical figures and what really happened during those important historical events, which is similar to common practice in the west, while the others focus more on important people and event, asking important figures to describe the decision making and details of important historical events. In December 2004, the Chinese Association of Oral History Studies was established. The establishment of this institution is thought to signal that the field of oral history studies in China has finally moved into a new phase of organized development.


title: Oral history

text: While oral tradition is an integral part of ancient Southeast Asian history, oral history is a relatively recent development. Since the 1960s, oral history has been accorded increasing attention both on institutional as well as individual levels, representing “history from above” and “history from below”.


title: Oral history

text: In Oral History and Public Memories, Blackburn writes about oral history as a tool that was used “by political elites and state-run institutions to contribute to the goal of national building” in postcolonial Southeast Asian countries. Blackburn draws most of his examples of oral history as a vehicle for “history from above” from Malaysia and Singapore.


title: Oral history

text: In terms of “history from below”, various oral history initiatives are being undertaken in Cambodia in an effort to record lived experiences from the rule of the Khmer Rouge regime while survivors are still living. These initiative take advantage of crowdsourced history to uncover the silences imposed on the oppressed.


title: Oral history

text: Two prominent and ongoing oral history projects out of South Asia stem from time periods of ethnic violence that were decades apart: 1947 and 1984.


title: Oral history

text: The 1947 Partition Archive was founded in 2010 by Guneeta Singe Bhalla, a physicist in Berkeley, California, who began conducting and recording interviews "to collect and preserve the stories of those who lived through this tumultuous time, to make sure this great human tragedy isn't forgotten".


title: Oral history

text: The Sikh Diaspora Project was founded in 2014 by Brajesh Samarth, senior lecturer in Hindi-Urdu at Emory University in Atlanta, when he was a lecturer at Stanford University in California. The project focuses on interviews with members of the Sikh diaspora in the U.S. and Canada, including the many who migrated after the 1984 massacre of Sikhs in India.


title: Oral history

text: Hazel de Berg began recording Australian writers, artists, musicians and others in the Arts community in 1957. She conducted nearly 1300 interviews. Together with the National Library of Australia, she was a pioneer in the field in Australia, working together for twenty-seven years.


title: Oral history

text: In December 1997, in response to the first recommendation of the "Bringing Them Home: Report of the National Inquiry into the Separation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Children from Their Families" report, the Australian Government announced funding for the National Library to develop and manage an oral history project. The Bringing Them Home Oral History Project (1998–2002) collected and preserved the stories of Indigenous Australians and others involved in or affected by the child removals resulting in the Stolen Generations. Other contributors included missionaries, police and government administrators.


title: Oral history

text: There are now many organisations and projects all over Australia involved in recording oral histories from Australians of all ethnicities and in all walks of life. Oral History Victoria support an annual Oral history award as part of the Victorian Community History Awards held annually to recognise the contributions made by Victorians in the preservation of the state's history, published during the previous year.


title: Oral history

text: In 1948, Allan Nevins, a Columbia University historian, established the Columbia Oral History Research Office, now known as the Columbia Center for Oral History Research, with a mission of recording, transcribing, and preserving oral history interviews. The Regional Oral History Office was founded in 1954 as a division of the University of California, Berkeley's Bancroft Library. In 1967, American oral historians founded the Oral History Association, and British oral historians founded the Oral History Society in 1969. In 1981, Mansel G. Blackford, a business historian at Ohio State University, argued that oral history was a useful tool to write the history of corporate mergers. More recently, Harvard Business School launched the Creating Emerging Markets project, which "explores the evolution of business leadership in Africa, Asia, and Latin America throughout recent decades" through oral history. "At its core are interviews, many on video, by the School’s faculty with leaders or former leaders of firms and NGOs who have had a major impact on their societies and enterprises across three continents." There are now numerous national organizations and an International Oral History Association, which hold workshops and conferences and publish newsletters and journals devoted to oral history theory and practices. Specialized collections of oral history sometimes have archives of widespread global interest; an example is the Lewis Walpole Library in Farmington, Connecticut, a department of the University Library of Yale.


title: Oral history

text: Historians, folklorists, anthropologists, human geographers, sociologists, journalists, linguists, and many others employ some form of interviewing in their research. Although multi-disciplinary, oral historians have promoted common ethics and standards of practice, most importantly the attaining of the "informed consent" of those being interviewed. Usually this is achieved through a deed of gift, which also establishes copyright ownership that is critical for publication and archival preservation.


title: Oral history

text: Oral historians generally prefer to ask open-ended questions and avoid leading questions that encourage people to say what they think the interviewer wants them to say. Some interviews are "life reviews", conducted with people at the end of their careers. Other interviews focus on a specific period or a specific event in people's lives, such as in the case of war veterans or survivors of a hurricane.


title: Oral history

text: Feldstein (2004) considers oral history to be akin to journalism, Both are committed to uncovering truths and compiling narratives about people, places, and events. Felstein says each could benefit from adopting techniques from the other. Journalism could benefit by emulating the exhaustive and nuanced research methodologies used by oral historians. The practice of oral historians could be enhanced by utilizing the more sophisticated interviewing techniques employed by journalists, in particular, the use of adversarial encounters as a tactic for obtaining information from a respondent.


title: Oral history

text: The first oral history archives focused on interviews with prominent politicians, diplomats, military officers, and business leaders. By the 1960s and '70s, influenced by the rise of new social history, interviewing began to be employed more often when historians investigated history from below. Whatever the field or focus of a project, oral historians attempt to record the memories of many different people when researching a given event. Interviewing a single person provides a single perspective. Individuals may misremember events or distort their account for personal reasons. By interviewing widely, oral historians seek points of agreement among many different sources, and also record the complexity of the issues. The nature of memory—both individual and community—is as much a part of the practice of oral history as are the stories collected.


title: Oral history

text: Archaeologists sometimes conduct oral history interviews to learn more about unknown artifacts. Oral interviews can provide narratives, social meaning, and contexts for objects. When describing the use of oral histories in archaeological work, Paul Mullins emphasizes the importance of using these interviews to replace “it-narratives”. It-narratives are the voices from objects themselves rather than people; according to Mullins, these lead to narratives that are often “sober, pessimistic, or even dystopian”.


title: Oral history

text: Oral history interviews were used to provide context and social meaning in the Overstone excavation project in Northumberland. Overstone consists of a row of four cottages. The excavation team, consisting of Jane Webster, Louise Tolson, Richard Carlton, and volunteers, found the discovered artifacts difficult to identify. The team first took the artifacts to an archaeology group, but the only person with knowledge about a found fragment recognized the fragment from a type of pot her mother had. This inspired the team to conduct group interviews volunteers who grew up in households using such objects. The team took their reference collection of artifacts to the interviews in order to trigger the memories of volunteers, revealing a “shared cultural identity”.


title: Oral history

text: In 1997, the Supreme Court of Canada, in the "Delgamuukw v. British Columbia" trial, ruled that, in the context of "Aboriginal title" claims, oral histories were just as important as written testimony.


title: Oral history

text: Writers who use oral history have often discussed its relationship to historical truth. Gilda O'Neill writes in "Lost Voices", an oral history of East End hop-pickers: "I began to worry. Were the women's, and my, memories true or were they just stories? I realised that I had no 'innocent' sources of evidence - facts. I had, instead, the stories and their tellers' reasons for remembering in their own particular ways.' Duncan Barrett, one of the co-authors of "The Sugar Girls" describes some of the perils of relying on oral history accounts: "On two occasions, it became clear that a subject was trying to mislead us about what happened – telling a self-deprecating story in one interview, and then presenting a different, and more flattering, version of events when we tried to follow it up. ... often our interviewees were keen to persuade us of a certain interpretation of the past, supporting broad, sweeping comments about historical change with specific stories from their lives." Alessandro Portelli argues that oral history is valuable nevertheless: "it tells us less about events as such than about their meaning [...] the unique and precious element which oral sources force upon the historian ... is the speaker's subjectivity."


title: Oral history

text: Regarding the accuracy of oral history, Jean-Loup Gassend concludes in the book "Autopsy of a Battle", "I found that each witness account can be broken down into two parts: 1) descriptions of events that the witness participated in directly, and 2) descriptions of events that the witness did not actually participate in, but that he heard about from other sources. The distinction between these two parts of a witness account is of the highest importance. I noted that concerning events that the witnesses participated in, the information provided was surprisingly reliable, as was confirmed by comparison with other sources. The imprecision or mistakes usually concerned numbers, ranks, and dates, the first two tending to become inflated with time. Concerning events that the witness had not participated in personally, the information was only as reliable as whatever the source of information had been (various rumors); that is to say, it was often very unreliable and I usually discarded such information."


title: Oral history

text: In 2006, American historian Caroline Elkins published "Imperial Reckoning: The Untold Story of Britain's Gulag in Kenya", detailing the Mau Mau Uprising against British rule and its suppression by the colonial government. The work received both praise and criticism over its usage of oral testimony from Kenyans. Three years later in 2009, a group of Kenyans who had been interned in concentration camps during the rebellion by the colonial authorities filed a lawsuit against the British government. The case, known as "Mutua and Five Others versus the Foreign and Commonwealth Office", was heard at the High Court of Justice in London with the Honourable Justice McCombe presiding. Oral testimony detailing abuses by colonial officials, recorded by Elkins in "Imperial Reckoning", was cited as evidence by the prosecution during the case, British lawyer Martyn Day and the Kenya Human Rights Commission. During the trial, over the course of discovery the FCO discovered some 300 boxes of previously undisclosed files that validated Elkins' claims in "Imperial Reckoning" and provided new evidence supporting the claimants' case. McCombe eventually ruled in the Kenyan claimants' favor, stressing the "substantial documentation supporting accusations of systematic abuses".


title: Oral history

text: When using oral history as a source material, several caveats exist. The person being interviewed may not accurately recall factual information such as names or dates, and they may exaggerate. To avoid this, interviewers can do thorough research prior to the interview and formulate questions for the purpose of clarification. There also exists a pre-conceived notion that oral history is less reliable than written records. Written source materials are different in the execution of information, and that they may have additional sources. Oral sources identify intangibles such as atmosphere, insights into character, and clarifications to points made briefly in print. Oral history can also indicate lifestyle, dialect and terminology, and customs that may no longer be prominent. Successful oral history enhances its written counterpart.


title: Oral history

text: In addition, older male speakers from rural communities who have spent their whole life there and who usually did not continue education past age 14 are proportionally overrepresented in some oral history material.


title: Oral history

text: Transcribing the data obtained is obviously beneficial and the intentions for future use of transcripts largely determine the way in which the interview will be transcribed. As oral history projects as a rule do not involve the employment of a professional transcriber, "aberrant" characteristics such as dialectal features and superfluous repetitions may be neutralized and eliminated so as to make transcripts more accessible to average readers who are not accustomed to such "aberrations"; that is to say, transcripts may be not completely reflective of the original, actual utterances of the interviewees.


title: Oral history

text: In Guatemalan literature, "I, Rigoberta Menchú" (1983), brings oral history into the written form through the "testimonio" genre. "I, Rigoberta Menchú" is compiled by Venezuelan anthropologist Burgos-Debray, based on a series of interviews she conducted with Menchú. The Menchú-controversy arose when historian David Stoll took issue with Menchú's claim that “this is a story of all poor Guatemalans”. In "Rigoberta Menchú and the Story of All Poor Guatemalans" (1999), Stoll argues that the details in Menchú's "testimonio" are inconsistent with his own fieldwork and interviews he conducted with other Mayas. According to Guatemalan novelist and critic Arturo Arias, this controversy highlights a tension in oral history. On one hand, it presents an opportunity to convert the subaltern subject into a “speaking subject”. On the other hand, it challenges the historical profession in certifying the “factuality of her mediated discourse” as “subaltern subjects are forced to [translate across epistemological and linguistic frameworks and] use the discourse of the colonizer to express their subjectivity”.


title: Princess Vittoria of Savoy

text: Vittoria Cristina Adelaide Chiara Maria di Savoia (born 28 December 2003) is a member of the House of Savoy. She is first-born child of Emanuele Filiberto, Prince of Venice and Piedmont and Clotilde Courau.


title: Princess Vittoria of Savoy

text: Princess Vittoria was born on 28 December 2003 in Geneva, Switzerland. She has one younger sister, Princess Luisa of Savoy. Her father Emanuele Filiberto, Prince of Venice and Piedmont is the heir apparent to the Italian throne and her mother Clotilde Courau is a French actress. Her younger sister Princess Luisa was born in 2006. She is the granddaughter of Vittorio Emanuele, Prince of Naples, the current head of the House of Savoy, and his wife Marina Doria. Her great-grandfather, King Umberto II was the last King of Italy before the monarchy was abolished in a 1946 referendum. Her great-grandmother was Marie-José of Belgium, the last Queen of Italy.


title: Princess Vittoria of Savoy

text: She was christened on 30 May 2004 by Monseigneur Giovanni Cheli at the Basilica of San Francesco d'Assisi in Assisi. Her godparents were Ottavio Mazzola and Roberta Fabbri. The baby wore the christening gown that had been worn by her great-great-grandfather King Vittorio Emanuele III at his christening on 31 May 1869. Among the guests were Prince Albert, Hereditary Prince of Monaco, Princess Maria Beatrice of Savoy, Prince Serge of Serbia and Princess Mafalda of Hesse, granddaughter of Princess Mafalda of Savoy. The parents selected Assisi in light of its symbolism of peace.


title: Princess Vittoria of Savoy

text: Princess Vittoria's grandfather, Vittorio Emanuele, Prince of Naples changed the rules of succession which previously only allowed males to be the heir to the throne. Under the rule changes, Princess Vittoria, as the first born child of her father will one day succeed him as the Head of the House of Savoy and heir to the now-defunct throne. Her parents had never produced a male heir. Despite being the heir to the Italian throne, she lives in Paris in neighboring France. The current line of succession within the House of Savoy is disputed by Prince Aimone, Duke of Apulia.


title: Dunluce Castle

text: Dunluce Castle (; ) is a now-ruined medieval castle in Northern Ireland, the seat of Clan MacDonnell. It is located on the edge of a basalt outcropping in County Antrim (between Portballintrae and Portrush), and is accessible via a bridge connecting it to the mainland. The castle is surrounded by extremely steep drops on either side, which may have been an important factor to the early Christians and Vikings who were drawn to this place where an early Irish fort once stood.


title: Dunluce Castle

text: is a monument in state care sited in the townland of Dunluce, in Coleraine Borough Council area, at grid ref: C9048 4137. The earthworks, adjacent to Dunluce Castle, are a scheduled historic monument, at grid ref: area of C905 412.


title: Dunluce Castle

text: It is first documented in the hands of the McQuillan family in 1513. The earliest features of the castle are two large drum towers about in diameter on the eastern side, both relics of a stronghold built here by the McQuillans after they became lords of the Route.


title: Dunluce Castle

text: The McQuillans were the Lords of Route from the late 13th century until they were displaced by the MacDonnell after losing two major battles against them during the mid- and late-16th century.


title: Dunluce Castle

text: Later Dunluce Castle became the home of the chief of the Clan MacDonnell of Antrim and the Clan MacDonald of Dunnyveg from Scotland. Chief John Mor MacDonald was the second son of "Good" John of Islay, Lord of the Isles, 6th chief of Clan Donald in Scotland. John Mor MacDonald l was born through John of Islay's second marriage to Princess Margaret Stewart, daughter of King Robert II of Scotland. In 1584, on the death of James MacDonald the 6th chief of the Clan MacDonald of Antrim and Dunnyveg, the Antrim Glens were seized by Sorley Boy MacDonnell, one of his younger brothers. Sorley Boy took the castle, keeping it for himself and improving it in the Scottish style. Sorley Boy swore allegiance to Queen Elizabeth I and his son Randal was made 1st Earl of Antrim by King James I.


title: Dunluce Castle

text: Four years later, the "Girona", a galleass from the Spanish Armada, was wrecked in a storm on the rocks nearby. The cannons from the ship were installed in the gatehouses and the rest of the cargo sold, the funds being used to restore the castle. MacDonnell's granddaughter Rose was born in the castle in 1613.


title: Dunluce Castle

text: A local legend states that at one point, part of the kitchen next to the cliff face collapsed into the sea, after which the wife of the owner refused to live in the castle any longer. According to a legend, when the kitchen fell into the sea, only a kitchen boy survived, as he was sitting in the corner of the kitchen which did not collapse. However, the kitchen is still intact and next to the manor house. You can still see the oven, fireplace and entry ways into it. It wasn't until some time in the 18th century that the north wall of the residence building collapsed into the sea. The east, west and south walls still stand.


title: Dunluce Castle

text: Dunluce Castle served as the seat of the Earl of Antrim until the impoverishment of the MacDonnells in 1690, following the Battle of the Boyne. Since that time, the castle has deteriorated and parts were scavenged to serve as materials for nearby buildings.


title: Dunluce Castle

text: In 2011, major archaeological excavations found significant remains of the "lost town of Dunluce", which was razed to the ground in the Irish uprising of 1641.


title: Dunluce Castle

text: Lying adjacent to Dunluce Castle, the town was built around 1608 by Randall MacDonnell, the first Earl of Antrim, and pre-dates the official Plantation of Ulster. It may have contained the most revolutionary housing in Europe when it was built in the early 17th century, including indoor toilets which had only started to be introduced around Europe at the time, and a complex street network based on a grid system. 95% of the town is still to be discovered.


title: Dunluce Castle

text: The Belfast-Londonderry railway line run by Northern Ireland Railways connects to Coleraine and along the branch line to Portrush. Local Ulsterbus provide connections to the railway stations. There is a scenic walk from Portrush alongside Dunluce Castle and Giant's Causeway and Bushmills Railway in Bushmills.


title: Patsey

text: Patsey (ca. 1830–after 1863) was an African-American enslaved woman. Solomon Northup wrote about her in his book "Twelve Years a Slave", which is the source for most of the information known about her. There have been two adaptations of the book in film, Solomon Northup's Odyssey in 1984 and the better known 12 Years a Slave, in 2013. In the latter Patsey was portrayed by Lupita Nyong'o, who won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her performance.


title: Patsey

text: Patsey's mother was said to have been from Guinea, enslaved and taken to Cuba. She was then sold to a family named Buford in the Southern United States. Patsey is believed to have been born around 1830, in South Carolina.


title: Patsey

text: In 1843, when she was 13, she was sold to Edwin Epps in Louisiana. According to Northup, Edwin Epps had "repulsive and coarse" manners and did not have a sense "of kindness or of justice." When drunk, he would lash out at enslaved people with a whip, enjoying the sound of their screams.


title: Patsey

text: Epps leased the Bayou Huffpower plantation from Joseph B. Robert, his wife's uncle. In 1845, Epps moved Patsey and other enslaved people to his 300-acre plantation near Bunkie in Avoyelles Parish, Louisiana. Solomon Northup and Patsey became friends on the Epps plantation. Known as the "queen of the fields", Patsey was often praised by her owner for her ability to pick large amounts of cotton, up to 500 pounds a day. Northup said that she was unlike the other slaves and had a spirit that was unwavering in its strength. She had been "a joyous creature, a laughing, light-hearted girl" who fervently dreamed of freedom.


title: Patsey

text: While an underage teen, she began to be raped by Epps. He whipped Patsey if she resisted his sexual demands, which left "scars of thousand stripes" on her back. His wife was jealous of her and "nothing delighted the mistress so much as to see her suffer," according to Northup. She physically abused Patsey and demanded that Epps sell Patsey, which he would not do. Mary tried to bribe other workers and slaves to kill Patsey and dump her body in the swamps, but no one would. Even though Patsey was a highly productive slave and a favorite of Epps, she endured abuse by a "licentious master and a jealous mistress".


title: Patsey

text: On one occasion, she had gone to a neighboring plantation for a bar of soap. When Epps found out she had left his plantation, he had four stakes hammered into the ground and ordered her hands and feet to be tied to them, she was stripped naked and Northup was then ordered to whip her. Epps then took the whip himself until she was "literally flayed" from over 50 lashes. Salt water was then poured over her wounds. She nearly died. Northup and Patsey were severely traumatized due to all the abuse that she endured. After this brutal whipping, she lost her light-hearted manner, the sparkle in her eyes, and the ease of her laughter. She often wished that she would die.


title: Patsey

text: Northup knew Patsey for almost a decade. As he was about to leave the Epps plantation in 1853, he said that:


title: Patsey

text: Northup then boarded a carriage to freedom and he never saw her again. In 1854, his book "Twelve Years a Slave" was published. Almost ten years after, during the American Civil War, the 110th New York Infantry Regiment came to the plantation. They met Bob, one of the enslaved men mentioned in Northup's book, which several of the soldiers had read. Patsey left the plantation in May 1863 with the Union soldiers. Her life and fate thereafter is unknown.


title: Patsey

text: The 2013 film "12 Years a Slave" was nominated for nine Academy Awards and won the Academy Award for Best Picture. With renewed interest from the film, historians continue to research in hopes of pinpointing more specifically what happened to her.


title: Mark Renton

text: Mark Renton is a fictional character who appears as the protagonist in the novels "Trainspotting" (1993) and "Porno" (2002) written by Irvine Welsh. He also appears in the 1996 film adaption of "Trainspotting" and its sequel "T2 Trainspotting" (2017), in both of which he is portrayed by Ewan McGregor.


title: Mark Renton

text: In the late 1980s, Mark Renton is an unemployed heroin addict living in the Leith district of Edinburgh. He attempts to quit heroin, but finds it too difficult and resorts to buying opium suppositories from shady dealer Mikey Forrester. Later, at a party with his friends Simon "Sick Boy" Williamson, Francis Begbie, Danny "Spud" Murphy, Stevie and Tommy, Dawn, the infant daughter of Simon and a woman named Lesley, dies in her crib, devastating Sick Boy and inspiring him to get clean from heroin. After witnessing Dawn's death, Renton resumes heroin use.


title: Mark Renton

text: After continuing to collect unemployment pay, Renton later meets with Tommy, who is now depressed due to being dumped by his girlfriend. He asks Renton to supply him with heroin to help him cope. Spud and Renton are arrested for stealing. Danny is sent to prison, but Renton avoids jail time due to attending rehab. He hints that the underlying cause of his addiction was from the death of his catatonic brother Davie. Soon after, Renton's other brother Billy is killed from a bombing attack by the Provisional Irish Republican Army. Renton relapses into heroin once more and moves to London, where he has an encounter with a homosexual Italian man named Gi. He later goes back to Edinburgh for the funeral of Matty, a fellow addict.


title: Mark Renton

text: After witnessing so much death related to heroin, he decides to get clean again while in London, but returns to Edinburgh again to visit his former dealer Johnny Swan, who recently had his leg amputated from heroin abuse, and Tommy, who is dying of AIDS. He meets once again with Spud, Begbie and Sick Boy, as well as another friend "Second Prize", and the five sell a large amount of heroin to a dealer for £16,000. After celebrating in a pub, Renton decides to steal the money from his friends and walk away to a new life, leaving a small share for Spud.


title: Mark Renton

text: Several years later, Renton is a now nightclub owner in Amsterdam and has not used heroin in years. One night, Renton sees Carl Ewart, a DJ from Edinburgh (a character from Welsh's novel "Glue"), who recognises him. Later, Sick Boy learns from some of Carl's friends that Renton now lives in Amsterdam, and the two agree to meet in Zurich, but Renton instead flees to San Francisco. Renton visits his hometown of Leith one more time, but he is seen by Begbie, who is still angry over Renton stealing their money years earlier. He runs across the road in an attempt to attack Renton, but Begbie is hit by a car.


title: Mark Renton

text: Renton takes Begbie to hospital and flees Edinburgh for the last time with £60,000 which he stole from Sick Boy, and two of his friends Nikki and Diane. Sick Boy visits Begbie in the hospital as the two plot to find and kill Renton and take back their stolen money.


title: Mark Renton

text: In the film, Mark Renton is a 26-year-old, unemployed man who lives with his parents in Edinburgh, engaging in heroin use with Sick Boy (Jonny Lee Miller), Spud (Ewen Bremner) and their dealer Swanney "Mother Superior" (Peter Mullan). Begbie (Robert Carlyle) and Tommy (Kevin McKidd) urge Renton to cease heroin use and get clean, which Renton unsuccessfully tries to do with the use of opium suppositories. One night at a club, he meets a girl called Diane (Kelly Macdonald), who he later has sex with at her house. He learns the next morning that she is below the age of consent. She threatens to report him to the police if he does not continue the relationship.


title: Mark Renton

text: Tommy begins using heroin after being dumped by girlfriend, and Renton begins to relapse into heroin use after the death of Dawn. Renton, Spud and Sick Boy are caught shoplifting and Renton is sent to rehab while Spud is sent to prison and Sick Boy narrowly escapes. He becomes depressed due to having no meaning to his life and quickly relapses, but nearly dies from an overdose in Swanney's home. He withdraws from heroin cold turkey and later visits Tommy, who has been infected with AIDS. He later relocates to London on Diane's advice and gets a job as real estate agent. Soon after, he is tracked down by Begbie, who is a fugitive back home after stealing from a jewellery store, and Sick Boy, now a pimp and drug dealer.


title: Mark Renton

text: They return home to attend the funeral of Tommy, who has died of toxoplasmosis. They reunite with the recently released Spud, and the four buy £4,000 worth of heroin from Mikey Forrester, which they resell to a well-connected dealer in London for £16,000. They celebrate at a pub, but Renton feels disillusioned by his friends after Sick Boy admits that he would steal the money and Begbie violently attacks an innocent man after his suit is stained by beer. Renton asks Spud if he would be willing to steal the money for themselves, but Spud fears the consequences.


title: Mark Renton

text: While getting some rest at a hotel room, Renton decides to take the money and leave. He leaves £4,000 in a safety deposit box for Spud to collect. Begbie violently destroys the hotel room after learning Renton has betrayed them, which gets him arrested by the police. Meanwhile, Renton walks away to start a new life.


title: Mark Renton

text: 20 years later, Renton is now 46 and lives in Amsterdam with his wife. Filed for divorce and suffering from a midlife crisis, he returns to Edinburgh. He visits Spud and saves him from a suicide attempt. Spud tells him where to find Sick Boy and sees him at his pub. Sick Boy beats up Renton, still bitter about the betrayal. He gives Sick Boy a large sum of money, but Sick Boy complains to his girlfriend Veronika that he is not satisfied and will string Renton along in an elaborate plan to gain his revenge.


title: Mark Renton

text: Meanwhile, Begbie escapes prison. Renton and Sick Boy begin development of a brothel in the upper floor of Sick Boy's pub, and Renton begins an affair with Veronika. Spud also joins in on the scheme. Although, Sick Boy is initially still furious with Renton for stealing the money, they later reconcile and resume their friendship. Renton later encounters Begbie at a club, and narrowly escapes a stabbing attempt from Begbie. The plot thickens as Begbie visits Spud and Veronika, stealing Veronika's phone and telling Renton and Sick Boy to come to the pub. Spud arrives too late to tell the duo of Begbie's plan, and Sick Boy is knocked out by Begbie after defending Renton. Renton and Begbie fight on the top floor of the pub, which leaves Renton hanging by his neck from electrical wiring. Begbie tries to hang Renton, but he is knocked out by Spud with a toilet bowl.


title: Mark Renton

text: They leave Begbie outside a prison. Renton and Sick Boy resume their friendship, while Veronika returns to Bulgaria and Spud reconciles with his family. Renton returns to his father's home and they embrace, with Renton going back to his childhood bedroom and dancing to remix of "Lust for Life".


title: Mark Renton

text: Film producer Andrew Macdonald read "Trainspotting" on a plane in December 1993 and thought it would make a good basis for a film. Ewan McGregor was cast as Renton, while Ewen Bremner, who played Renton in the novel's stage adaption, was cast as Spud. In preparation for the role, McGregor lost 2 stone (12.7 kilograms) and shaved his head. He also learned how to cook up heroin in order to better understand the character.


title: Mark Renton

text: McGregor's performance as Renton was well received, and it launched his career into much bigger roles. In his review for the "Los Angeles Times", Kenneth Turan wrote, "in McGregor ... the film has an actor whose magnetism monopolizes our attention no matter what". Screenonline praised Renton's "sarcastic narration" and noted the film's message of "choosing life". McGregor's sardonic performance was similarly praised by "Vice", and McGregor won several awards for his portrayal.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: The orbitofrontal cortex (OFC) is a prefrontal cortex region in the frontal lobes of the brain which is involved in the cognitive process of decision-making. In non-human primates it consists of the association cortex areas Brodmann area 11, 12 and 13; in humans it consists of Brodmann area 10, 11 and 47.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: The OFC is functionally related to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex. Therefore, the region is distinguished due to the distinct neural connections and the distinct functions it performs. It is defined as the part of the prefrontal cortex that receives projections from the medial dorsal nucleus of the thalamus, and is thought to represent emotion, taste, smell and reward in decision making. It gets its name from its position immediately above the orbits in which the eyes are located. Considerable individual variability has been found in the OFC of humans. A related area is found in rodents.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: The OFC is divided into multiple broad regions distinguished by cytoarchitecture, including brodmann area 47/12, brodmann area 11, brodmann area 14, brodmann area 13, and brodmann area 10. Four gyri are split by a complex of sulci that most frequently resembles a "H" or a "K" pattern. Extending along the rostro-caudal axis, two sulci, the lateral and orbital sulci, are usually connected by the transverse orbital sulcus, which extends along a medial-lateral axis. Most medially, the medial orbital gyrus is separated from the gyrus rectus by the olfactory sulcus. Anteriorly, both the gyrus rectus and the medial part of the medial orbital gyrus consist of area 11(m), and posteriorly, area 14. The posterior orbital gyrus consists mostly of area 13, and is bordered medially and laterally by the anterior limbs of the medial and lateral orbital sulci. Area 11 makes up a large part of the OFC involving both the lateral parts of the medial orbital gyrus as well as the anterior orbital gyrus. The lateral orbital gyrus consists mostly of area 47/12. Most of the OFC is granular, although the caudal parts of area 13 and area 14 are agranular. These caudal regions, which sometimes includes parts of the insular cortex, responds primarily to unprocessed sensory cues.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: The connectivity of the OFC varies somewhat along a rostral-caudal axis. The caudal OFC is more heavily interconnected with sensory regions, notably receiving direct input from the pyriform cortex. The caudal OFC is also the most heavily interconnected with the amygdala. Rostrally, the OFC receives fewer direct sensory projections, and is less connected with the amygdala, but it is interconnected with the lateral prefrontal cortex and parahippocampus. The connectivity of the OFC has also been conceptualized as being composed of two networks; an orbital network composed of most of the central parts of the OFC, including most of areas 47/12, 13, and 11; a medial network composed of the medial most and caudolateral regions of the OFC, as well as areas 24, 25 and 32 of the medial prefrontal cortex. The medial and orbital networks are sometimes referred to as the "visceromotor network" and the "sensory network", respectively.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: The OFC receives projections from multiple sensory modalities. The primary olfactory cortex, gustatory cortex, secondary somatosensory cortex, superior and inferior temporal gyrus(conveying visual information) all project to the OFC. Evidence for auditory inputs is weak, although some neurons respond to auditory stimuli, indicating an indirect projection may exist. The OFC also receives input from the medial dorsal nucleus, insular cortex, entorhinal cortex, perirhinal cortex, hypothalamus, and amygdala.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: The orbitofrontal cortex is reciprocally connected with the perirhinal and entorhinal cortices, the amygdala, the hypothalamus, and parts of the medial temporal lobe. In addition to these outputs, the OFC also projects to the striatum, including the nucleus accumbens, caudate nucleus, and ventral putamen, as well as regions of the midbrain including the periaqueductal grey, and ventral tegmental area. OFC inputs to the amygdala synapse on multiple targets, including two robust pathways to the basolateral amygdala and intercalated cells of the amygdala, as well as a weaker direct projection to the central nucleus of the amygdala.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: Multiple functions have been ascribed to the OFC including mediating context specific responding, encoding contingencies in a flexible manner, encoding value, encoding inferred value, inhibiting responses, learning changes in contingency, emotional appraisal, altering behavior through somatic markers, driving social behavior, and representing state spaces.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: While most of these theories explain certain aspects of electrophysiological observations and lesion related changes in behavior, they often fail to explain, or are contradicted by other findings. One proposal that explains the variety of OFC functions is that the OFC encodes state spaces, or the discrete configuration of internal and external characteristics associated with a situation and its contingencies For example, the proposal that the OFC encodes economic value may be a reflection of the OFC encoding task state value. The representation of task states could also explain the proposal that the OFC acts as a flexible map of contingencies, as a switch in task state would enable the encoding of new contingencies in one state, with the preservation of old contingencies in a separate state, enabling switching contingencies when the old task state becomes relevant again. The representation of task states is supported by electrophysiological evidence demonstrating that the OFC responds to a diverse array of task features, and is capable of rapidly remapping during contingency shifts. The representation of task states may influence behavior through multiple potential mechanisms. For example, the OFC is necessary for ventral tegmental area (VTA) neurons to produce a dopaminergic reward prediction error, and the OFC may encode expectations for computation of RPEs in the VTA.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: Specific functions have been ascribed to subregions of the OFC. The lateral OFC has been proposed to reflect potential choice value, enabling fictive(counterfactual) prediction errors to potentially mediate switching choices during reversal, extinction and devaluation. Optogenetic activation of the lOFC enhances goal directed over habitual behavior, possibly reflecting increased sensitivity to potential choices and therefore increased switching. The mOFC, on the other hand, has been proposed to reflect relative subjective value. In rodents, a similar function has been ascribed to the mOFC, encoding action value in a graded fashion, while the lOFC has been proposed to encode specific sensory features of outcomes. The lOFC has also been proposed to encode stimulus outcome associations, which are then compared by value in the mOFC. Meta analysis of neuroimaging studies in humans reveals that a medial-lateral valence gradient exists, with the medial OFC responding most often to reward, and the lateral OFC responding most often to punishment. A posterior-anterior abstractness gradient was also found, with the posterior OFC responding to more simple reward, and the anterior OFC responding more to abstract rewards. Similar results were reported in a meta analysis of studies on primary versus secondary rewards.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: The OFC and basolateral amygdala (BLA) are highly interconnected, and their connectivity is necessary for devaluation tasks. Damage to either the BLA or the OFC before, but only the OFC after devaluation impairs performance. While the BLA only responds to cues predicting salient outcomes in a graded fashion in accordance with value, the OFC responds to both value and the specific sensory attributes of cue-outcome associations. While OFC neurons that, early in learning, respond to outcome receipt normally transfer their response to the onset of cues that predict the outcome, damage to the BLA impairs this form of learning.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: The posterior orbitofrontal cortex (pOFC) is connected to the amygdala via multiple paths, that are capable of both upregulating and downregulating autonomic nervous system activity. Tentative evidence suggests that the neuromodulator dopamine plays a role in mediating the balance between the inhibitory and excitatory pathways, with a high dopamine state driving autonomic activity.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: It has been suggested that the medial OFC is involved in making stimulus-reward associations and with the reinforcement of behavior, while the lateral OFC is involved in stimulus-outcome associations and the evaluation and possibly reversal of behavior. Activity in the lateral OFC is found, for example, when subjects encode new expectations about punishment and social reprisal.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: The mid-anterior OFC has been found to consistently track subjective pleasure in neuroimaging studies. A hedonic hotspot has been discovered in the anterior OFC, which is capable of enhancing liking response to sucrose. The OFC is also capable of biasing the affective responses induced by α-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazolepropionic acid (AMPA) antagonism in the nucleus accumbens towards appetitive responses.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: The OFC is capable of modulating aggressive behavior via projections to interneurons in the amygdala that inhibit glutaminergic projections to the ventromedial hypothalamus.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: Neurons in the OFC respond both to primary reinforcers, as well as cues that predict rewards across multiple sensory domains. The evidence for responses to visual, gustatory, somatosensory, and olfactory stimuli is robust, but evidence for auditory responses are weaker. In a subset of OFC neurons, neural responses to rewards or reward cues are modulated by individual preference and by internal motivational states such as hunger. A fraction of neurons that respond to sensory cues predicting a reward are selective for reward, and exhibit reversal behavior when cue outcome relationships are swapped. Neurons in the OFC also exhibit responses to the absence of an expected reward, and punishment. Another population of neurons exhibits responses to novel stimuli and can “remember” familiar stimuli for up to a day.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: During cued reward or cued instrumental reward tasks, neurons in the OFC exhibit three general patterns of firing; firing in response to cues; firing before reward receipt; firing in response to reward receipt. In contrast to the medial prefrontal cortex and striatum, OFC neurons do not exhibit firing mediating by movement. Their reward-predictive responses are, however, shaped by attention: when shifting attention between two alternatives, the same OFC population will represent positively the value of a currently attended item, but negatively the value of the unattended item. The encoding of reward magnitude is also flexible, and takes into account the relative values of present rewards.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: The human OFC is among the least-understood regions of the human brain. It has been proposed that the OFC is involved in sensory integration, in representing the affective value of reinforcers, and in decision-making and expectation. In particular, the OFC seems to be important in signaling the expected rewards/punishments of an action given the particular details of a situation. In doing this, the brain is capable of comparing the expected reward/punishment with the actual delivery of reward/punishment, thus, making the OFC critical for adaptive learning. This is supported by research in humans, non-human primates, and rodents.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: The orbitofrontal cortex has been implicated in borderline personality disorder, schizophrenia, major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, addiction, post-traumatic stress disorder, Autism, and panic disorder. Although neuroimaging studies have provided evidence for dysfunction in a wide variety of psychiatric disorders, the enigmatic nature of the OFCs role in behavior complicates the understanding of its role in the pathophysiology of psychiatric disorders. The function of the OFC is not known, but its anatomical connections with the ventral striatum, amygdala, hypothalamus, hippocampus, and periaqueductal grey support a role in mediating reward and fear related behaviors.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: Meta analyses of neuroimaging studies in OCD report hyperactivity in areas generally considered to be part of the orbitofrontal segment of the cortico-basal ganglia-thalamo-cortical loop such as the caudate nucleus, thalamus and orbitofrontal cortex. OCD has been proposed to reflect a positive feedback loop due to mutual excitation of the OFC and subcortical structures. While the OFC is usually overactive during symptom provocation tasks, cognitive tasks usually elicit hypoactivity of the OFC; this may reflect a distinction between emotional and non emotional tasks, lateral and medial OFC, or simply just inconsistent methodologies.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: Animal models, and cell specific manipulations in relation to drug seeking behavior implicate dysfunction of the OFC in addiction. Substance use disorders are associated with a variety of deficits related to flexible goal directed behavior and decision making. These deficits overlap with symptoms related to OFC lesions, and are also associated with reduced orbitofrontal grey matter, resting state hypometabolism, and blunted OFC activity during tasks involving decision making or goal directed behavior. In contrast to resting state and decision related activity, cues associated with drugs evoke robust OFC activity that correlates with craving. Rodent studies also demonstrate that lOFC to BLA projections are necessary for cue induced reinstatement of self administration. These findings are all congruent with the role that the OFC plays in encoding the outcomes associated with certain stimuli. The progression towards compulsive substance abuse may reflect a shift between model based decision making, where an internal model of future outcomes guides decisions, to model free learning, where decisions are based on reinforcement history. Model based learning involves the OFC and is flexible and goal directed, while model free learning is more rigid; as shift to more model free behavior due to dysfunction in the OFC, like that produced by drugs of misuse, could underlie drug seeking habits.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: Conduct disorder is associated with both structural abnormalities, and functional abnormalities during affective tasks. Abnormalities in OFC structure, activity, and functional connectivity have all been observed in association with aggression.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: Neuroimaging studies have found abnormalities in the OFC in MDD and bipolar disorder. Consistent with the medial/reward and lateral/punishment gradient found in neuroimaging studies, some neuroimaging studies have observed elevated lateral OFC activity in depression, as well as reduced interconnectivity of the medial OFC, and enhanced interconnectivity in the lateral OFC. Hypoactivity of the lateral OFC has been frequently observed in bipolar disorder, in particular during manic episodes.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to image the human OFC is a challenge, because this brain region is in proximity to the air-filled sinuses. This means that artifact errors can occur in the signal processing, causing for example geometric distortions that are common when using echo-planar imaging (EPI) at higher magnetic field strengths. Extra care is therefore recommended for obtaining a good signal from the orbitofrontal cortex, and a number of strategies have been devised, such as automatic shimming at high static magnetic field strengths.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: In rodents, the OFC is entirely agranular or dysgranular. The OFC is divided into ventrolateral (VLO), lateral (LO), medial (MO) and dorsolateral (DLO) regions. Using highly specific techniques to manipulate circuitry, such as optogenetics, the OFC has been implicated in OCD like behaviors, and in the ability to use latent variables in decision making task.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: Destruction of the OFC through acquired brain injury typically leads to a pattern of disinhibited behaviour. Examples include swearing excessively, hypersexuality, poor social interaction, compulsive gambling, drug use (including alcohol and tobacco), and poor empathising ability. Disinhibited behaviour by patients with some forms of frontotemporal dementia is thought to be caused by degeneration of the OFC.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: When OFC connections are disrupted, a number of cognitive, behavioral, and emotional consequences may arise. Research supports that the main disorders associated with dysregulated OFC connectivity/circuitry center around decision-making, emotion regulation, impulsive control, and reward expectation. A recent multi-modal human neuroimaging study shows disrupted structural and functional connectivity of the OFC with the subcortical limbic structures (e.g., amygdala or hippocampus) and other frontal regions (e.g., dorsal prefrontal cortex or anterior cingulate cortex) correlates with abnormal OFC affect (e.g., fear) processing in clinically anxious adults.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: One clear extension of problems with decision-making is drug addiction/substance dependence, which can result from disruption of the striato-thalamo-orbitofrontal circuit. Attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) has also been implicated in dysfunction of neural reward circuitry controlling motivation, reward, and impulsivity, including OFC systems. Other disorders of executive functioning and impulse control may be affected by OFC circuitry dysregulation, such as obsessive–compulsive disorder and trichotillomania


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: Some dementias are also associated with OFC connectivity disruptions. The behavioral variant of frontotemporal dementia is associated with neural atrophy patterns of white and gray matter projection fibers involved with OFC connectivity. Finally, some research suggests that later stages of Alzheimer's Disease be impacted by altered connectivity of OFC systems.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: Orbitofrontal epilepsy is rare, but does occur. The presentation of OFC epilepsy is fairly diverse, although common characteristics include sleep related symptoms, automatisms, and hypermotor symptoms. One review reported that auras were generally not common or nonspecific, while another reported that OFC epilepsy was associated auras involving somatosensory phenomenon and fear.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: The visual discrimination test has two components. In the first component, "reversal learning", participants are presented with one of two pictures, A and B. They learn that they will be rewarded if they press a button when picture A is displayed, but punished if they press the button when picture B is displayed. Once this rule has been established, the rule swaps. In other words, now it is correct to press the button for picture B, not picture A. Most healthy participants pick up on this rule reversal almost immediately, but patients with OFC damage continue to respond to the original pattern of reinforcement, although they are now being punished for persevering with it. Rolls et al. noted that this pattern of behaviour is particularly unusual given that the patients reported that they understood the rule.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: The second component of the test is "extinction". Again, participants learn to press the button for picture A but not picture B. However this time, instead of the rules reversing, the rule changes altogether. Now the participant will be punished for pressing the button in response to "either" picture. The correct response is not to press the button at all, but people with OFC dysfunction find it difficult to resist the temptation to press the button despite being punished for it.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: A simulation of real life decision-making, the Iowa gambling task is widely used in cognition and emotion research. Participants are presented with four virtual decks of cards on a computer screen. They are told that each time they choose a card they stand to win some game money. They are told that the aim of the game is to win as much money as possible. Every so often, however, when they choose a card they will lose some money. The task is meant to be opaque, that is, participants are not meant to consciously work out the rule, and they are supposed to choose cards based on their "gut reaction." Two of the decks are "bad decks", which means that, over a long enough time, they will make a net loss; the other two decks are "good decks" and will make a net gain over time.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: Most healthy participants sample cards from each deck, and after about 40 or 50 selections are fairly good at sticking to the good decks. Patients with OFC dysfunction, however, continue to perseverate with the bad decks, sometimes even though they know that they are losing money overall. Concurrent measurement of galvanic skin response shows that healthy participants show a "stress" reaction to hovering over the bad decks after only 10 trials, long before conscious sensation that the decks are bad. By contrast, patients with OFC dysfunction never develop this physiological reaction to impending punishment. Bechara and his colleagues explain this in terms of the somatic marker hypothesis. The Iowa gambling task is currently being used by a number of research groups using fMRI to investigate which brain regions are activated by the task in healthy volunteers as well as clinical groups with conditions such as schizophrenia and obsessive compulsive disorder.


title: Orbitofrontal cortex

text: The faux pas test is a series of vignettes recounting a social occasion during which someone said something that should not have been said, or an awkward occurrence. The participant's task is to identify what was said that was awkward, why it was awkward, how people would have felt in reaction to the faux pas and to a factual control question. Although first designed for use in people on the autism spectrum, the test is also sensitive to patients with OFC dysfunction, who cannot judge when something socially awkward has happened despite appearing to understand the story perfectly well.


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: LGBT people in Hungary face legal and social challenges not experienced by non-LGBT residents. Homosexuality is legal in Hungary for both men and women. Discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and sex is banned in the country. However, households headed by same-sex couples are not eligible for all of the same legal rights available to heterosexual married couples. Registered partnership for same-sex couples was legalised in 2009, but same-sex marriage remains banned. The Hungarian government has passed legislation that restricts the civil rights of LGBT Hungarians – such as ending legal recognition of transgender Hungarians and banning LGBT content and displays for minors. This trend continues under the Fidesz government of Viktor Orbán. In June 2021, Hungary passed an anti-LGBT law on banning "homosexual and transexual propaganda" effective since July 1. The law has been condemned by seventeen EU countries so far. Also, in July 2021, the EU Commission has started legal action against Hungary and Poland for violations of fundamental rights of LGBTQI people: "Europe will never allow parts of our society to be stigmatized." Russia had similar laws implemented in 2013.


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: The first Hungarian Penal Code by Károly Csemegi (1878) punished homosexuality between men ("természet elleni fajtalanság" – "perversion against nature (nature's law)") with prison up to one year. Homosexual activity above the age of 20 was decriminalized in 1961, then above the age of 18 in 1978 by the new Penal Code. The age of consent, which is 14, has applied equally to heterosexual and homosexual activity since a Constitutional Court decision of 2002. Gay and bisexual people are not banned from military service.


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: Unregistered cohabitation has been recognised since 1996. It applies to any couple living together in an economic and sexual relationship (common-law marriage), including same-sex couples. No official registration is required. The law gives some specified rights and benefits to two persons living together. Unregistered cohabitation is defined in the Civil Code as "when two persons are living together outside of wedlock in an emotional and financial community in the same household, provided that neither of them is engaged in wedlock or partnership with another person, registered or otherwise, and that they are not related in direct line, and they are not siblings." Inheritance is possible only with testament, and widow-pension is available for couples cohabiting for more than 10 years.


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: On 17 December 2007, the Parliament adopted a registered partnership bill submitted by the Hungarian Socialist Party–Alliance of Free Democrats Government. The bill was found unconstitutional by the Constitutional Court because it duplicated the institution of marriage for opposite-sex couples. In February 2009, the Parliament approval a modified version of the bill. Since 1 July 2009, same-sex couples can enter into registered partnerships. The law gives the same rights to registered partners as to spouses except for adoption, assisted reproduction or taking a surname.


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: On 1 January 2012, a new constitution, enacted by the Parliament in 2011, came into effect, restricting marriage to opposite-sex couples and containing no guarantees of protection from discrimination on account of sexual orientation. However, discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation remains banned through interpretation of the general non-discrimination provision in the Constitution, as well as by the "Equal Treatment Act".


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: Although same-sex couples cannot adopt jointly, adoption by individuals is illegal regardless of sexual orientation or partnership status. Stepchild adoption is only available for married (different-sex) couples.


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: Access to IVF and donor insemination is available for single women regardless of sexual orientation, but not available for lesbians cohabiting or in a registered partnership with their same-sex partners.


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: In November 2017, the Hungarian Ombudsman found that the rejection of a lesbian couple's adoption application was "an infringement on the child's right to protection and care, and amounted to unlawful discrimination based on sexual orientation." As joint adoption for same-sex couples is not legal in Hungary, the couple decided that one of the partners would legally adopt the child. The couple was, however, very open about their relationship and were found suitable to adopt. During the following months, the couple took care of a 16-month-old girl, but child protection services later stopped the application procedure due to the couple's sexual orientation. This decision disrupted the life of the child, as she would not eat properly anymore and had to be taken to a child psychologist. The couple appealed to the Commissioner for Fundamental Rights (the Ombudsman responsible for the rights of children, nationalities in Hungary, vulnerable social groups and the interests of future generations), who found the child protection service's rejection of the couple unlawful and discriminatory. The Commissioner said that "a person wishing to adopt has no right to adopt a particular child, but s/he does have the right to equal treatment and equality before the law in the procedure." The Commissioner based their decision on the 2008 "E.B. v. France" case, in which the European Court of Human Rights ruled that one's sexual orientation should not be a factor in adoption cases.


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: In October 2020, while discussing a children's book published by an LGBT organisation on Magyar Rádió, the Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban stated that, despite Hungary being "tolerant and patient" towards LGBT people, "there is a red line that cannot be crossed" and that "gays are to leave our children alone".


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: In November 2020, the Fidesz government proposed a Constitutional amendment which would ban adoption by same-sex couples. Language in the amendment would ensure "education in accordance with the values based on Hungary's constitutional identity and Christian culture." The same amendment would also severely restrict the ability of single-parent families to adopt. On 16 December 2020 the amendment was passed by the National Assembly with 123 ayes, 45 nays and 5 abstentions.


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: In 2000, the Constitutional Court recognized that the constitutional ban on discrimination based on "other status" covers sexual orientation as well. The "Act on Public Health" has banned sexual orientation-related discrimination in health services since 1997 and gender identity-related discrimination since 2004. The "2003 Act on Equal Treatment and the Promotion of Equal Opportunities" (), which took effect in January 2004, forbids discrimination based on factors that include sexual orientation and gender identity in the fields of employment, education, housing, health, and access to goods and services. Article 8 of the Act states as follows:


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: Additionally, Hungarian law prohibits hate crimes and hate speeches on the basis of one's sexual orientation and gender identity.


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: In December 2017, a government decree was published, establishing for the first time a legal basis for gender transitions. After 1 January 2018, transgender people living in Hungary were theoretically able to change their legal gender. They required a diagnosis from a medical professional, but did not have to undergo hormone therapy, sterilization or sex reassignment surgery. The "Equal Treatment Act" specifically included "sexual identity" among the list of protected characteristics.


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: However, Transvanilla – an organization based in Budapest which campaigns on behalf of transgender rights – reports that the government has refused to honor applications of the legal gender change since 2018. In 2019, a joint case of 23 people was created and submitted to the European Court of Human Rights.


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: Following the coronavirus lockdown of 2020, Viktor Orbán was enabled to rule by decree following an emergency powers act. On 31 March, the Transgender Day of Visibility, a bill was submitted that replaced the Hungarian term "nem", meaning "sex," with "sex at birth", defined as "the biological sex determined by primary sexual characteristics and chromosomes". Parliament voted in favor of the bill on 19 May 2020, making it impossible for individuals to change their legal gender. The vote was 134 yes, 56 no, and 4 abstentions. Dunja Mijatović, commissioner for human rights in the Council of Europe, stated it "contravenes human rights standards and the case law of the European Court of Human Rights". President János Áder signed the bill into law on 28 May 2020.


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: In January 2021 the government ordered that a book published by the Labrisz Lesbian Association carries warnings saying it "[contains] behaviour inconsistent with traditional gender roles". According to a government spokesperson, "the book is sold as a fairytale... but it hides the fact that it depicts behaviour inconsistent with traditional gender roles." In response, the association announced that they would be filing suit.


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: Gay and bisexual men were allowed to donate blood following a 12-month deferral period. In 2020, this deferral period was scrapped, with individualised risk assessment introduced.


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: In 2012, Jobbik MP Ádám Mirkóczki introduced a constitutional amendment to the Parliament seeking to ban "the promotion of sexual deviations". The amendment would punish the "promotion of homosexuality or other disorders of sexual behaviour" with up to eight years in prison. LMBT Federation, a Hungarian LGBT advocacy group, protested against the amendment and called on Parliament to reject it. The Democratic Coalition also voiced their opposition and called it "mean and shameful". The amendment ultimately failed to pass.


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: In November 2016, the small Hungarian town of Ásotthalom passed a law banning "gay propaganda", Muslim call to prayer and Muslim clothing. Mayor László Toroczkai (Our Homeland) called on Christians locals to support a "holy war on Muslims and multiculturalism". In April 2017, after a lawsuit challenging the ban was filed, the Constitutional Court struck down the ban, ruling that it violated human rights law as it aimed to "limit directly the freedom of speech, conscience and religion".


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: In June 2018, the Hungarian State Opera House cancelled 15 "Billy Elliot" performances, after pro-government newspaper "Magyar Idők" claimed that the show could turn children gay. However other 29 Billy Elliot performances would be held as planned.


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: In November 2020, the town of Nagykáta adopted a resolution banning the dissemination and promotion of so-called "LGBT propaganda".


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: After making pro-LGBT statements, former footballer and television pundit János Hrutka was fired by pro-government sports television Spíler TV in March 2021. Subsequently, the government media ("Nemzeti Sport" and "FourFourTwo") began to revive his player contracts from the past twenty years, with the intention of expiration.


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: In June 2021, the government of Hungary introduced a law prohibiting the showing of "any content portraying or promoting sex reassignment or homosexuality" to minors. A Hungarian government spokesperson claimed the ban is intended on the contents which children "can misunderstand and which may have a detrimental effect on their development". According to one human rights group, "the new legislation proposed by Fidesz would seriously curb freedom of speech and children's rights... This move endangers [the] mental health of LGBTQI youngsters and prevents them getting access to information... and affirmative support". David Vig of Amnesty International stated that "these proposals, which have dark echoes of Russia's anti-gay 'propaganda law,' will further stigmatize LGBTI people, exposing them to greater discrimination in what is already a hostile environment."


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: The Hungarian parliament voted in favour of the bill by a vote of 157–1. The President of Hungary signed the bill into law on 23 June 2021 and went into legal effect 7 days later on July 1. The Russian Federation also has a similar law (Russian gay propaganda law) implemented since 2013. Seventeen EU member states (Belgium, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Ireland, Lithuania, Spain, Sweden, Latvia, Greece, Cyprus, Italy and Austria) and several LGBT and human rights organisations condemned the law and called it a breach of the Charter of Fundamental Rights of the European Union. The Prime Minister of the Netherlands suggested Hungary leave the EU altogether, while Poland has expressed support for the law


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: In July 2021, the EU launched an immediate lawsuit against the anti-LGBT propaganda law recently implemented within Hungary while a referendum has been announced. The European Commission blocked the payment of several billions Euro to Hungary because of this discriminatory law. The referendum took place on 3 April 2022, the same time as the 2022 Hungarian parliamentary election. The referendum became invalid, because it didn't meet the validity threshold of 50%.


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: In September 2021, it was reported that films and TV shows that depict and show either homosexuality and/or sex changes within Hungary - would have the same mandatory legal classification "age rating restrictions" as horror, nudity, sex, adult themes, drugs and/or violence.


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: Budapest Pride was the first such event in the former Eastern Bloc, and draws a steady, but a moderate number of LGBT people and their supporters. The LGBT festival lasts a week every summer with a film festival, a pride march and parties across the city. The festival was opened in the past by notable public figures including Gábor Demszky, then Mayor of Budapest, and Kinga Göncz, then Minister of Foreign Affairs.


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: In correlation with the prime ministership of Viktor Orbán, LGBT rights in Hungary have stalled. In March 2016, the Hungarian Government blocked a proposed European Union agreement to combat discrimination against LGBT people. In May 2017, Prime Minister Orbán welcomed the World Congress of Families, a designated hate group by the Southern Poverty Law Center, at the National Parliament. In 2018, Hungary and Poland blocked a joint statement by EU employment and social affairs ministers intended to promote gender equity in the digital era because of objections to a reference to LGBT people. However, Austria—then president of the Council of the European Union—adopted the text regardless, though with modifications. While the reference to LGBT people was retained, the text was classified as "presidential conclusions" which do not carry the legal weight of formal Council conclusions.


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: In recent years, more and more politicians have resorted to use openly homophobic rhetoric. In 2014, Jobbik displayed a sign reading "The Parliament Does Not Want Any Deviants" during Budapest Pride, and verbally abused attendees and defaced posters in support of LGBT rights. In November 2016, it protested the painting of a fence with rainbow colours in Pomáz, even though the colouring had no connections to LGBT rights.


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: The 2017 Budapest Pride parade attracted thousands of people, and received the support of many embassies, including from Australia, Canada, France, Germany, the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as neighbouring Slovakia and Slovenia, among others.


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: In January 2018, the European Court of Justice ruled that asylum seekers may not be subjected by authorities to psychological tests in order to determine their sexual orientation.


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: According to a Eurobarometer survey published in December 2006, only 18 percent of Hungarians surveyed supported same-sex marriage, and only 13 percent recognized a same-sex couple's right to adopt, compared to the EU-wide average of 44 percent and 33 percent, respectively. However, a poll conducted a year after in 2007 indicated that 30 percent of the Hungarian public supported same-sex marriage.


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: The Eurobarometer poll taken in 2015 suggested 39% of Hungarians supported same-sex marriage. A more recent poll by the Pew Research Center, published in May 2017, suggested that 27% of Hungarians were in favor of same-sex marriage, while 64% opposed it. Support was higher among non-religious people (34%) and 18–34 year olds (39%), in contrast to Catholics (25%) and people aged 35 and over (23%).


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: In May 2015, PlanetRomeo, an LGBT social network, published its first Gay Happiness Index (GHI). Gay men from over 120 countries were asked about how they feel about society's view on homosexuality, how they experience the way they are treated by other people and how satisfied are they with their lives. Hungary was ranked 49th with a GHI score of 47.


title: LGBT rights in Hungary

text: According to a 2017 poll carried out by ILGA, 64% of Hungarians agreed that gay, lesbian and bisexual people should enjoy the same rights as straight people, while 15% disagreed. Additionally, 69% agreed that they should be protected from workplace discrimination. 13% of Hungarians, however, said that people who are in same-sex relationships should be charged as criminals, while 64% disagreed. As for transgender people, 60% agreed that they should have the same rights, 64% believed they should be protected from employment discrimination and a plurality of 48% believed they should be allowed to change their legal gender.


title: Monastic community of Mount Athos

text: The monastic community of Mount Athos is an Eastern Orthodox community of monks in Greece, enjoying the status of an autonomous region holding the combined rights of a decentralized administration, a region and a municipality, with its territory encompassing the distal part of the Athos peninsula including Mount Athos, while the bordering proximal part of the peninsula belongs to the regular Aristotelis community in Central Macedonia.


title: Monastic community of Mount Athos

text: In modern Greek, the community is commonly referred to as () translating to 'Holy Mountain', while "Oros Athos" () is used to denote the physical mountain and "Hersonissos tou Atho" () in respect to peninsula.


title: Monastic community of Mount Athos

text: The community includes 20 monasteries and the settlements that depend on them. The monasteries house around 2,000 Eastern Orthodox monks from Greece and many other countries, including Eastern Orthodox countries such as Romania, Moldova, Georgia, Bulgaria, Montenegro, Serbia and Russia, who live an ascetic life at Athos, isolated from the rest of the world. The Athonite monasteries feature a rich collection of well-preserved artifacts, rare books, ancient documents, and artworks of immense historical value, and Mount Athos has been listed as a World Heritage Site since 1988.


title: Monastic community of Mount Athos

text: Although Mount Athos is legally part of the European Union like the rest of Greece, the Monastic community institutions have a special jurisdiction which was reaffirmed during the admission of Greece to the European Community (precursor to the EU). This empowers the monastic community's authorities to restrict the free movement of people and goods in its territory; in particular, only males are allowed to enter, while women and most female animals are banned from Mount Athos by religious tradition of the community which lives there.


title: Monastic community of Mount Athos

text: A territory of Greece, the monastic community enjoys autonomous self-government. The Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs manages relations between the monastic community and the Government of Greece.


title: Monastic community of Mount Athos

text: The territory of the monastic community is contiguous with Aristotelis, separated by a fence about in length. Karyes is the administrative center and the seat of the synod and of the Civil Administrator of Mount Athos with his staff of lay people in the service of the monastic community.


title: Monastic community of Mount Athos

text: The monasteries of the monastic community are stauropegic, i.e. they are exempt from the authority of the local bishop and only report to the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople.


title: Monastic community of Mount Athos

text: According to the constitution of Greece, the territory of the monastic community which is "[t]he Athos peninsula extending beyond Megali Vigla and constituting the region of Agio Oros" is, "following ancient privilege", "a self-governed part of the Greek State, whose sovereignty thereon shall remain intact". The constitution also states that "[a]ll persons leading a monastic life thereon acquire Greek citizenship without further formalities, upon admission as novices or monks." The constitution states "[h]eterodox or schismatic persons" are forbidden to stay on the territory. The community consists of 20 main monasteries which constitute the Holy Community. Karyes is home to a civil administrator as the representative of the Greek state. The governor is an executive appointee.


title: Monastic community of Mount Athos

text: The monastic community is under the direct jurisdiction of the Ecumenical Patriarch of Constantinople Bartholomew I.


title: Monastic community of Mount Athos

text: Civil authorities are represented by the civil administrator, appointed by the Greek Ministry of Foreign Affairs. He supervises the function of the institutions and the public order.


title: Monastic community of Mount Athos

text: Each of the 20 monasteries is administered by an archimandrite elected by the monks for life. The Convention of the brotherhood (Γεροντία) is the legislative body. Each of the other establishments (sketes, cells, huts, retreats, and hermitages) is a dependency of one of the 20 monasteries and is assigned to the monks by a document called "omologon" (ομόλογον).


title: Monastic community of Mount Athos

text: All persons leading a monastic life in the monastic community receive Greek citizenship upon admission as novices or monks. Laymen can visit the monastic community, but they need a special permit known as a "diamonitirion" ().


title: Monastic community of Mount Athos

text: In 17 of the monasteries, the monks are predominantly ethnic Greek. The Helandariou Monastery is Serbian and Montenegrin, the Zografou Monastery is Bulgarian and the Agiou Panteleimonos monastery is Russian.


title: Monastic community of Mount Athos

text: Most of the sketes are also predominantly ethnic Greek; however, two sketes are Romanian. They are the coenobitic "Skētē Timiou Prodromou" (under Megistis Lavras Monastery) and the idiorrhythmic "Skētē Agiou Dēmētriou tou Lakkou", also called "Lakkoskētē" (under to the Agiou Pavlou monastery). A third skete is Russian, "Skētē Bogoroditsa" (under the Agiou Panteleimonos monastery).


title: Monastic community of Mount Athos

text: The Greek language is commonly used in all the Greek monasteries, but in some monasteries there are other languages in use: in Agiou Panteleimonos, Russian (67 monks in 2011); in Hilandar Monastery, Serbian (58); in Zographou Monastery and Skiti Bogoroditsa, Bulgarian (32); and in Timiou Prodromou and Lakkoskiti, Romanian (64). Today, many of the Greek monks also speak foreign languages. Since there are monks from many nations in Athos, they naturally also speak their own native languages.


title: Monastic community of Mount Athos

text: The chroniclers Theophanes the Confessor (end of 8th century) and Georgios Kedrenos (11th century) wrote that the 726 eruption of the Thera volcano was visible from Mount Athos, indicating that it was inhabited at the time. The historian Genesios recorded that monks from Athos participated at the seventh Ecumenical Council of Nicaea of 787. Following the Battle of Thasos in 829, Athos was deserted for some time due to the destructive raids of the Cretan Saracens. Around 860, the famous monk Euthymios the Younger came to Athos.


title: Monastic community of Mount Athos

text: In 958, the monk Athanasios the Athonite () arrived on Mount Athos. In 962 he built the large central church of the Protaton in Karyes. In the next year, with the support of his friend Emperor Nicephorus Phocas, the monastery of Great Lavra was founded, still the largest and most prominent of the twenty monasteries existing today. It enjoyed the protection of the Byzantine emperors during the following centuries, and its wealth and possessions grew considerably. Alexios I Komnenos, who was the Byzantine Emperor from 1081 to 1118, gave Mount Athos complete autonomy from the Ecumenical Patriarch and the Bishop of Ierissos, and also exempted the monasteries from taxation. Furthermore, until 1312, the Protos of Karyes was directly appointed by the Byzantine Emperor.


title: Monastic community of Mount Athos

text: The first charter of Mount Athos, signed in 972 by Emperor John Tzimiskes, Athanasius the Athonite, and 46 "hegumenoi", is currently kept at the Protaton in Karyes. It is also known as the "Tragos" ('goat'), since it was written on goatskin parchment. The second charter or "typikon" of Mount Athos was written in September 1045 and signed by 180 "hegumenoi". Emperor Constantine IX Monomachos ratified the typikon with an imperial chrysobull in June 1046. This charter was also the first official document that referred to Mount Athos as the "Holy Mountain."


title: Monastic community of Mount Athos

text: From 985 to 1287, there was a Benedictine monastery on Mount Athos (between Magisti Lavra and Philotheou Karakallou) known as "Amalphion" after the people of Amalfi who founded it. The monastery was founded with support of John the Iberian, a Georgian and the founder of the Iviron Monastery, and is thought to have influenced Latin Christian monasticism and piety.