Orthodox Michaelmas, which isn't at all on the calendar, but rather assimilated from the Austrians and then kept up as a proper feast to warn of the impending autumn. Apparently, the city turns on its heating plant today, though apparently that's just a coincidence, as there's a mathematical formula based on the temperatures. I recall reading a contemporary Russian novel not too many years ago about a writer who returns to his Siberian hometown in an increasingly hallucinatory visit; I thought it was a brilliant plot device to have the entire town heated by the city's steam network, not realizing that it was actually how things were done. In the context of collectivization, the built infrastructure is different -- Russia has electrified its long-distance train lines, largely because the state owned the whole mechanism at the time. In contrast, there was an immense debate in the US at the end of the 19th c. about the wisdom of constructing public drinking water fountains in small towns, as it would attract the wrong sorts of people. (While of course, the fountains and bridges in Ivo Andric are of a very different world.)
There are differences in the infrastructure, certainly. But the spirit is the litmus. The Sublime Porte ruled with a gentle and providential hand in the distant provinces, likely primarily because they were distant. And of course, they would show up to capture the sons of the families for their warrior castes -- a 19th c. British military history that I found at the foundation library here a few years ago talks about the legendary size of the warriors here, as seen through the eyes of the south, with women fighting while holding their children, etc.
And bridges and mosques helped to win the hearts and minds. Interestingly, the religious foundations that are at the heart of the eleemosynary institutions that still endure here are distinctly transnational, and held to be valid until judgment day. Apparently, that's an issue in a city to the south at present, but not enough to cloud a modern title. Just enough to create a private sense of righteous entitlement. The immense bureaucratic effort to unwind all of the wartime property swaps here is interesting, since virtually none of the people who reclaimed their houses crossed the lines and lived in the old place -- they simply sold it off or rented it. But the odd thing is that both ends of the swaps were unwound, so you had immense transaction costs, with no real seisin for either party at the end of the day. Might be an interesting law and economics inquiry.
Amusingly, Orthodox Michaelmas has a local association with mice -- if the mice haven't found their winter quarters by today, they won't survive the winter. So tradition holds that foodstuffs must be kept sealed on this day, and no agitation in the closets and pantries that might attract their interest. Agamben has an interesting thought about mice and prosperity -- it's one thing for a house to have wealth, but in a genuinely prosperous house, the mice thrive as well. Apparently, local ethnographers also link the mice to spirits of the dead -- small forms flitting in the corner, scratching on the walls, just barely audible.
(Sort of puts Mickey et al. in a different light.)