ECMI Infochannel

Across Europe, extractive projects linked to mining, energy production, and the green transition continue to reshape landscapes inhabited by minority and Indigenous communities. In regions such as Lusatia in eastern Germany and Serbia’s Timok Valley, mining expansion has contributed to displacement, environmental pollution, and the gradual fragmentation of historically rooted minority communities. Yet the cultural implications of these transformations remain largely overlooked. Focusing on Sorbian- and Vlach-speaking communities affected by lignite and copper extraction respectively, this contribution examines how environmental change can destabilize cultural continuity and forms of belonging in contexts where minority languages, memory, and everyday practices remain closely tied to particular landscapes. To capture the affective dimension of these processes, it introduces the concept of ethno-solastalgia: a form of collective distress emerging when environmental degradation becomes entangled with the erosion of minority cultures and vulnerable languages in Europe’s extractive peripheries.

After decades of strict movement restrictions, socioeconomic and political isolation, widespread male migration has profoundly transformed the lifestyles of the Pomak minority in North-Eastern Greece. Drawing on fieldwork in Pomak villages in Western Thrace, this blog post examines how seasonal male absence triggers notable shifts in minority gender relations and has introduced a new culture of modern consumerism funded by remittances. It argues that despite the excitement of newfound financial freedom, Pomak women are struggling with loneliness, growing jealousies within their communities, and persisting marginalisation in Greek society. Their present-day anxieties have resulted in an unexpected phenomenon: some older Pomak women are nostalgic for the times when they were living under militarised surveillance.