Archive for the ‘bulgaria’ Category
The Banat is one of the regions of Europe known as contact zones, where peoples of different ethnicity, religion and language co-existed, and to an extent still co-exist – sometimes harmoniously, sometimes uneasily, as is the case the world over.
Imagined as a Venn diagram, the Banat is perhaps a natural intersection for the Serbs to the west (who had pushed north to escape the Ottomans) and the Romanians to the east. However, there is also an artificial historical factor, caused by the ruling Habsburgs’ intervention and planned settlement of the land in the 18th century and more natural immigration of Imperial subjects in the 19th century. The majority of these were German speakers – they became known as Swabians, although Swabia was only one of various German regions from which they came. In addition to the Germans, the Banat received, among others, Bulgarian, Croat, Czech, French, Hungarian, Italian, Slovak, Spanish, Swiss and Ukrainian settlers – mostly but not exclusively Catholics (there were also Protestants of different persuasions, among them again many German settlers). And further broadening the mix of peoples in the area were Jewish merchants and professionals, Austrian civil servants, and Gypsy (locally Tsigani or Ţigani) settlements.
Resources and professional genealogical research services for those with German Banater ancestry are well-established. In the wake of WW2, rightly or wrongly, the Germans in Yugoslavia and Romania became persona non grata. The descendants of the Banat Germans now live in Germany, in Canada, in USA and elsewhere and, like all displaced and diaspora peoples, show a keen interest in their roots (roots which, of course, pass through the rich black soil of the Banat and extend beyond it to Baden and Lorraine, Westfalen and Württemberg).
However, Bluebird Research, as well as undertaking German genealogy in Serbia and Romania, can assist with your genealogical research in the Banat whatever the nationality or religion of your ancestors. We work in both Romania and Serbia; we are just as interested in the cultural and social history of the Hungarians and the Slovaks of the Banat; we have a special interest in the Jewish communities, now mostly lost; and in the Serbian Orthodox families, many of which can trace their histories back to “continental” Serbia (for instance to Šumadija), or to Herzegovina, or to Montenegro.
If you have ancestors from the Banat, and would like professional assistance with your family history research, please get in touch with us for a free assessment and estimate of costs. Research is affordable and success rates are generally high.
This week the family history website Find My Past has published the central index to the register of merchant seamen on British vessels. The original record series was created by the then Registrar General of Shipping and Seaman (part of the Board of Trade). It is now held on microfiche at The National Archives in Kew, England and can be seen under shelf references BT348, BT349 and BT350.
The resource takes the shape of record cards which form a central index to seamen registered to serve on British-registered vessels within the period from approximately 1918 to 1941.
What makes the Central Index Register cards interesting from an Eastern European genealogical research perspective is that many of those employed in the British merchant navy were engaged at overseas ports. For example, there are large numbers of records relating to Estonian, Greek and Latvian sailors. Additionally, there are smaller but still significant quantities of seamen from Cyprus, Lithuania, Poland, Romania, Russia, Ukraine and the former Yugoslavia, and even some from landlocked Czechoslovakia and Hungary. Some of these men may have settled and even become naturalised in Britain but presumably a majority remained citizens or subjects of their country of birth.
The front and back of each index card have been scanned and an online index published so that the records of individual merchant marines can be searched for and located. Two, three or more cards of different dates exist for some individuals.
The cards evolved a little over time, from CR1 to CR2 to CR10 types, and the details recorded changed too. However, the basic format remains the same, as does the core detail of name, year and place of birth, rating, Discharge A Number, ship name and/or official registered number, and date. Some cards give physical descriptions, while others sport a black and white passport-style photograph and signature.
The data is handwritten onto the printed index cards. The handwriting is not always legible and may be faint or contain abbreviations. The place of birth information on the cards will reflect the date at which they were created and the spellings current at that time, sometimes anglicised or misspelt. For example, the Estonian islands of Hiiumaa and Saaremaa often appear as Dagö and Ösel respectively (typically minus their diacritics), being their old Swedish names, and similarly the Saaremaa capital Kuressaare is often given as Arensburg.
This online collection is not a complete record of those sailing on British merchant vessels between the Wars. The majority of cards dating from 1913 to 1921 are known to have been destroyed in 1969. Moreover, a fourth record series at The National Archives (shelf reference BT364) is not being published, on account of data protection and personal privacy concerns. The series BT364 also covers the period 1921 to 1941 and was extracted from the materials that now comprise BT348 to BT350 inclusive. It remains possible that this series, which has also been scanned and indexed, may be released too in due course.
A final note: while some of the individuals contained within these records will have seen service additionally in the Royal Navy at some date, it must be emphasised that the majority would have served only on British merchant vessels and were not in the armed forces.
During the twilight years of the Ottoman Empire, Macedonia – the vilayets of Kosovo, Monastir and Salonika – was a region experiencing great tension and flux. There was only a finite quantity of cultivable land, creating unemployment and under-employment and a movement of the landless to the towns. At the same time there was growing social unrest. Competing nationalist movements sought the allegiance of the population. Violence flared up, especially after Ilinden in 1903, and villages were razed and their inhabitants killed or made homeless.
Against this background, emigration became an increasingly attractive option. This was particularly so as the rural population of Macedonia already had a well-established tradition of seasonal migration: migrant workers, usually younger men, worked elsewhere within the Ottoman Empire, usually over the summer, and then returned to their home villages each year. Therefore, emigration to America was seen as a logical extension of a customary practice.
The numbers of emigrants taking the American option rose in the 1900s as push-factors in Macedonia increased. From modest beginnings – for example, 1,529 in 1903 – the number of emigrants to USA rose rapidly, peaking at 20,769 in 1907 and then, after a temporary drop caused by official attempts to stem the flow, increasing again to 18,405 in 1910. USA received a total of 108,323 immigrants from Turkey-in-Europe over the period from 1903 to 1912. Most of these headed to work in mines and factories in places such as St Louis.
However, the term “immigrants” is slightly misleading. Many of the Macedonians heading to the US regarded themselves as temporary migrants, working and saving for maybe three years in America and then returning home to Macedonia. Moreover, many of the immigrants counted in the official figures given above were repeat migrants. In other words, they travelled to USA, returned to Macedonia, and then returned for a second spell in USA. Of course, a significant number of Macedonians did not return to Europe at all, or returned to Europe but them emigrated permanently to settle in US, or had intended to return home but never did due to the outbreak of WW1.
This explains why it is not unusual for an American family historian with Macedonian roots to find their ancestor on incoming passenger lists arriving at East Coast ports on two or more occasions.
Examining the passenger lists, the family historian will also notice that, as likely as not, the immigrant ancestor did not sail from a port such as Piraeus or Salonika (Thessalonika) close to home. International shipping firms such as the British Cunard Line opened branches in Florina, Koritsa (Korçë), Monastir (Bitola), Resen and other towns, which in turn operated through a network of local agents (often money-lenders providing tickets on credit), selling a passage from ports such as Southampton in England, Le Havre in France, Antwerp in Belgium, and Hamburg and Bremerhaven in Germany. The migrants usually reached these departure ports by rail, crossing the continent, often in groups of relatives and friends from the same or neighbouring villages. Just as a majority of the traditional seasonal migrants were young men, so the typical Macedonian immigrant in USA was a single man in his twenties or thirties, with a rural background; very few travelled with wives and fewer still with children. Perhaps three quarters or more of the immigrants from Ottoman Macedonia were Slavic (that is to say, Macedonian or Bulgarian: national affiliations were not necessarily fully formed at that date), the remainder being ethnic Albanians, Greeks, Jews, Vlachs and others.
For the English-speaking family historian with roots in an Eastern European country, reading English-language travelogues from the past is one way to develop a better understanding of the old country. True, travelogues view a country from a single perspective only, that of the privileged outsider who, on his or her travels, is unlikely to see or experience the country as a native does. Nevertheless, I believe there is much to be gained from historical travel writing and particular from reading a number of books so as to seek a more rounded composite picture of how a place seemed.
Unfortunately, with some exceptions, more recent travel writers rarely seem to be successful in capturing a country. They may be too self-regarding, or unconsciously supercilious, or concerned to avoid seriousness, so that they fall into the category of the ephemeral and lightweight.
There is only a modest literature in English on the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, so I approached Christopher Deliso’s “Hidden Macedonia: The Mystic Lakes of Ohrid and Prespa” (Haus, 2007) with some excitement. Deliso is an American living in Skopje, married to a Macedonian; his travelogue covers his clockwise trip around the lakes of Prespa and Ohrid, through Greece, Albania and of course Macedonia itself.
It is probably accurate to say that I was disappointed by the book but, also, that I understood it and found it interesting despite itself. There are facets of the book which are not pleasing: the casual jibes at poor Albanians and their recent history, seemingly in the hope of raising an easy laugh; the over-intrusive self of the author; the way the book loses momentum midway and starts to peter out in an uncertainty as to its purpose and its audience. The author is described as having read Byzantine Studies at Oxford; it is right that a writer wears his or her learning lightly, but little learning makes it through to this book, which is a shame.
But still, the book catches something of the truth of the place. I can say this with confidence, even without having visited Macedonia. I have travelled in neighbouring Serbia and Bulgaria and I have seen equivalents of some of the things Deliso describes. More than anything else I think I can sense and respect Deliso’s feeling for Macedonia. There is something compelling about the Balkans, something very attractive; and something not at all what you would think if you relied solely on the media’s perennial accounts of the region (a subject superbly dismantled by Maria Todorova in “Imagining the Balkans”), in fact, quite the opposite. It is the humanity of the people and their way of life. To which one should add the roughness and variety of the natural settings of the Balkans, and the beauty of the Orthodox monasteries and churches, and mosques, in that setting. Finally, of course, countries such as Macedonia have yet to be smothered by the blandness of corporate capitalism and the homogenising spirit of the European Union. For the next 10 or 25 years, they will preserve that particularity which makes them fascinating to someone like Deliso or, for example, Alan Grant, whose Balkanology website better illustrates the compelling draw of the region than anything I could write. I am conscious that, if you are from Western Europe, part of this power is the otherness of the Balkans and that this exoticising of the Balkans is something Todorova also addresses in her work; but it also seems to me that the otherness is real and that recognising and valuing it is a valid experience for a person born and raised somewhere in Australia, Britain or North America.
So read Deliso’s book if you can, accept its limitations, and, if you have roots in this particular corner of the Balkans, try to get out there to see it for yourself.
A family historian in the English-speaking world searching speculatively for the marriage of an ancestor on an unknown date does not usually consider seasonality; that is, they have no preconceptions as to whether a wedding would or would not have taken place at any particular time of year. Furthermore, one rarely comes across any especially noticeable peaks or troughs in the frequency of marriages across the calendar year. Couples get married all year round, perhaps in the post-WW2 world showing a preference for summer weddings.
In contrast, in most rural societies across Eastern Europe before WW2 and certainly before WW1 when traditional ways of life were still very much intact, there was marked seasonality of marriage. This is reflected in the pages of any volume of a parish marriage register.
One of the two chief factors was the agricultural year. Throughout the growing season and especially during the harvest, farmers, smallholders and peasants were joined in the fields and in the processing of harvested crops by just about every available hand – villagers of both sexes and all ages would be involved and frequently laboured both long days and by moonlight. During this period, there was generally no time for marriage.
The second factor was the religious calendar. In particular, fasting created marriage seasonality. Especially in Eastern Orthodox communities, marriage was an occasion of extended feasting and therefore incompatible with the fasts, during which meat, dairy produce, rich oils and so on were eschewed. There are various individual feast days during the Orthodox calendar, upon which it would be unthinkable for a wedding to be celebrated. But more to the point there were two fasts of great length.
The first fast was the great or holy fast of the seven weeks of Lent. For instance, in the Serbian Orthodox calendar, traditionally the Church celebrated no marriages between Bele Poklade (a moveable feast, “white Shrovetide”, the last Sunday before Lent) and Đurđevdan (St George’s Day, 6th May).
The second fast took place over the 40 days leading up to Christmas. Again, for the Serbian Orthodox calendar, this is the Božićni Post period from 28th November up to Božić, the Orthodox Christmas itself, on 7th January.
Marriages therefore tended to cluster between these two extended feasts. Factoring in the principal months of agricultural activity, this produced a spate of weddings from mid-January to early March, and again from October to late November.
Of course, for other Orthodox societies, the harvest might move a few weeks according to latitude, altitude, climate and other factors. Similarly, fasting at Lent might well take place over fewer weeks. However, the pattern itself remains largely true and produces the same seasonal peaks in marriage.
The Ottomans conceptualised the population of their empire as three basic communities: the Muslims, the non-Muslim inhabitants and the foreigners (or Franks). In turn, the non-Muslims were divided by religion into the millets.
This view of the population informed the arrangements made to measure and monitor the people. Only Muslims could serve in the army. Their Christian and Jewish neighbours instead had to pay a kind of poll tax called the cizye or jizye, later replaced by the bedelât-ı askeriye, literally a tax in lieu of military service. The early 19th century Ottoman censuses were designed primarily to capture the necessary information to enable the state to conscript Muslim men into the army and to levy taxes upon the non-Muslims. Over the course of the century, the Ottomans endeavoured periodically to improve the accuracy and comprehensiveness of their data, so as to boost army and reserve sizes and to maximise tax revenues.
Only males were counted in the census before reforms in 1878, as only males were liable to military service and taxation.
The Ottoman censuses were not defined regular (for instance, decennial) events taking place over a single night or weekend, unlike most of those in places like Britain and America. Rather, they tended to extend over two years and frequently longer. In due course, the census and civil registration functions merged into a single continuous ongoing recording of the population – the basis of this can be said to have been largely achieved by the mid- or late 1880s. This system was also joined up with the military, so that the army had a continuous feed of information for conscripting men into active service, the reserve and the local militia.
From the late 1850s, the census was also used to produce the equivalent of ID cards. The earliest of these was the vergi nüfus tezkeresi or population tax certificate issued to males, which recorded the holder’s obligations to the state, such as their tax liability.
From about 1878, this was replaced by nüfus tezkeresi or population certificate. This served for ID and had to be used in all interactions with the state and for travel purposes. The information on this population certificate was an extract from the sicil-ı nüfus, or nüfus defter, being the actual population registers created and maintained by the state. Muslims and non-Muslims were enumerated in separate registers. The registers included women for the first time. The register included name, age, place of birth, marital condition, religion, occupation, address and military status. Nickname and, in case of adult males, style of beard or moustache were also recorded for purposes of identification. Along side the population registers, a system of notifying and registering births, marriages, divorces, deaths and change of address was also implemented.
Between 1878 and 1885, the new system was gradually rolled out across much of the Empire. Provinces in Turkey-in-Europe which were not immediately covered included the vilayets of Kosovo, Monastir and Shkodër, plus Bosnia, Bulgaria, Crete, Cyprus, Hercegovina and the autonomous Eastern Rumelia. However, the Aegean, Constantinople, Danube, Edirne, Janina and Salonica provinces were covered, plus Ionia and all of western and central Asia Minor.
Finally, new regulations came into force between 1900 and 1902 that mandated the requirement to carry and present one’s population certificate. In due course, this was documenting so much information about the bearer that it became an ID booklet rather than card, known as the nüfus hüviyet cüzdanı or simply nüfus cüzdanı and still used in Turkey today.
Of course, an increasing numbers of Ottoman-born subjects of empire acquired, for protection or advantage, European passports. For instance, the Greek state was happy to assign Greek citizenship to all Greeks living beyond its borders who applied.
The Aromanians are one of the most fascinating of the various transnational minority groups in the Balkans. In the context of the region known as Macedonia and now subdivided between the nation states of Bulgaria, the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia and Greece, this people tends to be called the Vlachs or Koutsovlachs but they are known by, and call themselves by, a number of different names, many geographically determined.
One reason for this is the nature of their traditional way of life, which was transhumance. Transhumant shepherds would migrate seasonally between summer and winter grazing lands, often significant distances apart, following the same droving routes between highland and lowland each year. They paid little regard to political boundaries, unless forced, and therefore the geographical space they occupied was greater than their numerical population might suggest (even though it is thought that there could well have been 500,000 Aromanians across the Balkans on the eve of the First World War).
Individual branches of Aromanians tended to be known by the names of the mountain ranges where they grazed their flocks in summer. For example, on the territory of modern Greece, those Aromanians frequenting the pastures of the Gramos mountain range in summer were known as the Gramostani and those on the Pindus Mountains as the Pindusteani.
By no means all Aromanians in this region practised transhumance. Many in fact were merchants and, indeed, part of the local elite in towns and larger villages, for example in what is now Florina prefecture in northern Greece abutting the border with the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. The whole geographical region of Macedonia was ethnically mixed and polyglot and therefore the Aromanians, whether shepherds or merchants, were likely to speak one or more of the local Slavic vernaculars and/or Greek and Turkish as well as Aromanian. Certainly, the urban Aromanians were Greek-speaking and of the Orthodox religion and increasingly identified themselves with the Greek nation state, although those who did not – and there were not a few of these – emigrated to Romania (particularly to Dobruja) and beyond to Australia and North America.
Despite the processes of assimilation, there are still 20,000 or more Aromanians in Greece, with typical Vlach villages including Nymfaio (known as Nevesca in Aromanian) in Florina prefecture and Perivoli and Pisoderi in Grevena prefecture.
Researching Aromanian family history is likely to be challenging, at least beyond 1913 (when Epirus and Macedonia were incorporated into Greece). Many families were mobile across what are now international frontiers and many adjusted their surnames to suit the prevailing winds of politics (for instance, commonly changing the suffix at the end of their name from -ović to -ov to -ovski). However, with these caveats, Bluebird Research would be delighted to assist you with genealogical research into Vlach ancestors in northern Greece. Please contact us for a free assessment.
The NW region of Bulgaria is recognised by the European Union as the poorest part of the EU, with a GDP of only about 25% of the EU average. The region corresponds approximately to the Montana oblast which was in existence from 1987 to 1999, but which both before and since then was divided into the three okrugs (pre-1987) and oblasts (post-1999) of Vidin, Montana and Vratsa. Life here has suffered what the Bulgarian journalist Diana Ivanova calls “a collective breakdown”: firstly, of the traditional village way of life under collectivisation, and, secondly, of the communist structures following their collapse in 1989.
NW Bulgaria presents a very attractive face to most Western visitors, although it receives but few: the landscape is beautiful, often mountainous and forested, the flora and fauna is diverse and rich, and of course the human settlements have that picturesque quality that is often inherent in places noticeably sidestepped by modernity. But for the inhabitants prospects often appear bleak: there is a subsistence-level life in the villages and few employment opportunities. The region is experiencing depopulation. The young head for the capital Sofia or for one of the other large towns in Bulgaria, or are drawn overseas to work in Germany or elsewhere within the EU. Another key phenomenon in the depopulation is the exodus of mature women to Greece, Spain and especially Italy, where they work as carers and auxiliaries in nursing homes and hospitals. In Italy, these women care workers are known as badante. They may spend several years abroad, away from their families, saving or remitting money home to dependents in the villages.
Sofia’s National Art Gallery is currently showing a tremendous temporary exhibition called “Traumas and Miracles: Portraits from North-Western Bulgaria”, combining monochrome photographs of people and places by Babak Salari, an Iranian photographer, and accompanying text by Diana Ivanova. The exhibition focuses on a cluster of nine villages: Chelyustitsa, Dolna and Gorna Bela Rechka, Dolno and Gorno Ozirovo, Druzhevo, Lyutadjik, Milanovo and Zanozhene.
For more information, visit the “Traumas and Miracles” Facebook page , the Town of Badante Women documentary film website and the Goat Milk festival website.
In Bulgaria, as in other Central and Eastern European countries, it is the custom to publicly announce and remember deaths by memorials affixed to certain recognised sites within a neighbourhood, for instance, pinned on boards or wall surfaces on particular street corners with frequent passing foot traffic, or near bus stops, or outside the parish church. It is common to see passers by pausing and cyclists dismounting to read the notices; they serve a similar purpose to obituaries published in newspapers and doubtless are read and discussed keenly by some local gossips.
In Bulgaria, these black-bordered notices typically feature a reproduction of a black and white or colour photograph of the deceased, their full name (usually but not invariably complete with patronymic), vital dates and details of those mourning their loss. Sometimes a nickname is given too.
As well as those notices posted immediately after death, in memoriam notices are often placed at, for example, 40 days, and at three and seven years after death. A deceased person may be remembered at 10 or 25 years too if, for example, they died prematurely, or are survived for many years by their widow or widower.
There is something very touching about this public display of mourning and the levelling of an air force pilot, a TV anchorman, a teenaged motorcycle accident victim, a building caretaker and a nonagenarian widow appearing side-by-side on the same board, equally to be regarded or ignored by the living.
Gumoshtnik is little more than a hamlet today, being occupied by only around 165 people, but it was formerly a significantly larger settlement, reportedly boasting a population of approximately 1,000 at the time of Bulgaria’s liberation from the Turks in 1878. Two principal causes lay behind the population decline – the recent depopulation of the countryside common to much of mid- to late Communist and post-Communist era Bulgaria, and the earlier transatlantic emigration. It is the latter that places Gumoshtnik on the map today.
Eight men from the village were on the Titanic when it picked up passengers from Cherbourg on 10th April 1912, after leaving Southampton on its maiden and only voyage. All eight perished. However, just as in the blockbuster film, not everyone who had purchased tickets to America actually boarded. While Leonardo Di Caprio won a ticket in a card game and so took another’s place at the last minute, so Stefan Kliinovski and at least one and possibly two other villagers (Matyu Gankov and Petko Gloushkov) from Gumoshtnik apparently drank too many brandies in Paris the night before and failed to make the boat at Cherbourg.
There is a memorial to the victims in Gumoshtnik’s St Nikolai Letni churchyard. The eight who died, all of whom were potters, booked together into 3rd class for New York and bound for Chicago IL, were:
Peyo Kolev, 36 Marin Markov, 35 Lazar Minkov, 21 Stoycho Minkov, 28 Penko Naidenov, 22 Nedyalko Petrov, 19 Iliya Stoychev, 18 Lalyo Yonkov, 23
Their names often appear differently spelt in original documents and the subsequent articles and commentaries on the sinking of the Titanic, due both to errors and to the alternative systems used when transliterating from the Bulgarian language’s Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet.
It was surprising to find, while travelling in Bulgaria, a village in the NW of the country named after a British soldier. The custom in Bulgaria, as in Serbia and some other countries using the Cyrillic alphabet, is to spell a foreign proper name phonetically and then to transliterate it, letter by letter, back into Latin characters for translation purposes (for instance, on maps, streets signs and so on). In this case, Major William Frank Thompson’s surname became Tompsan or Tompsen when so treated. Similarly, William Gladstone – popular in Bulgaria due to his outspoken denunciation of the Bulgarian Horrors, committed by the Turks, in 1876 – can become Ujljam Gladston on a Sofia street map.
Major Thompson, brother of EP Thompson (the author of the classic The Making of the English Working Class), was a young special operations officer, with communist sympathies, liaising between the British army and the Bulgarian partisans in 1944 when Bulgaria was still a royalist dictatorship uneasily allied to Nazi Germany. He and other commandos came unstuck when, having crossed the river Iskar hoping to meet up with a larger band of partisans, he was betrayed, ambushed, wounded and captured at Batulia. He was interrogated and executed by firing squad in June 1944 at Litakovo, near Botevgrad, to the NE of the capital Sofia.
After the War, the Partisans among the new Communist leadership in Bulgaria honoured Thompson by creating out of the six small settlements of Babul, Lipata, Livage, Malak Babul, Tsarevi Stragi and Zavoya the new community of Tompsan. The village is easily reached by slow train from Sofia, being one of the halts on the regional line north up the scenic Iskar Gorge towards Mezdra. There is a memorial to Major Thompson at the railway station.
EP Thompson subsequently researched and wrote a book called Beyond the Frontier: The Politics of a Failed Mission after studying his brother’s wartime fate and the official British, Bulgarian and Soviet responses to it.
If during the days of the Ottoman Empire the churches of the subject Christian peoples could not ring bells to call parishioners to prayer (see this blog), then how did the faithful know when to attend? In the days before pocket watches and public clocks, should we imagine a specially employed person rounding them up, or the pious telling the time by the position of the sun or being blessed with an innate homing instinct that would draw them to the church on time?
One traveller, the physician Adam Neale, writing circa 1805 à propos of Iaşi or Jassy, the capital of the principality of Moldavia, comments in passing:
“During the daytime, the clatter of the wooden mallets beating the tablets at the doors of the Greek churches, calling the people to prayers, the use of bells being prohibited in the Turkish provinces, produces a most disagreeable effect.”
(Travels Through Some Parts of Germany, Poland, Moldavia and Turkey, Longman & Co, 1818)
In this context, the “Greek churches” are the Eastern Orthodox churches of the Romanian and Russian inhabitants of Iaşi.
The “tablet” is the semantron, also variously known as talanton, klepalo (in Bulgarian and Serbian) or toacă (in Romanian). It can still be found, especially in monasteries, and is still used, even when bells are available, perhaps out of habit and tradition, perhaps out of continued assertion of Orthodox freedom of worship long after the centuries of Turkish rule.
Towards the close of the nineteenth century, Bosnia and Hercegovina were theoretically Ottoman territories administered by the Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy, which effectively annexed and occupied them in 1878.
A contemporary traveller wrote of the region as follows:
“The population consists of Mohammedan Beys, being Servians [Serbians] who adopted Islam to acquire or preserve a privileged position, and a Christian peasantry, almost exclusively Orthodox in Bosnia, but partly Catholic in the Herzegovina. Sometimes a family divided itself between Christianity and Islam so as to have friends on the right side whatever happened. In such case the members of the family recognise each other as relatives but generally use different names for the two branches conveying the same meaning in Slavonic [Serbo-Croat] and Turkish respectively – e.g. Raikovich and Jenetich (Rai and Jennet meaning “paradise”), Sokolich and Shahinagich (Sokol and Shahin both meaning “falcon”).”
(Odysseus, Turkey in Europe, Edward Arnold, 1900)
He then added in a footnote:
“It is often curious to observe the genesis of family names among the Southern Slavs. Most of them are very recent. Thus in one case the grandfather kept a tavern and was known by the Turks simply as Sharabji, “the wine man”. The son thought that the rising fortunes of the house required a family name and by adding a Slavonic affix to the Turkish designation became Sharabjieff or Šarabdžiev. The grandson who lived in days when Turkish words were considered barbaric and unpatriotic substituted for Sharabji the Bulgarian equivalent Vinar and became Vinarov. In many parts of Bulgaria a man and his wife still use different family names.”
Of course, these observations were made by an English-speaking Western traveller trying to understand the alien local societies and cultures with only the most limited language, reading and experience available to him. Nevertheless, it is always good to be reminded that family history research in South-Eastern Europe has such complexities, both so as to manage one’s own expectations and to remain alert to the need to be agile in one’s thinking when approaching research problems.
“I was talking to a wealthy peasant who came in from a neighbouring village to Monastir market. He spoke Greek well, but hardly like a native. “Is your village Greek”, I asked him, “or Bulgarian?” “Well”, he replied, “it is Bulgarian now, but four years ago it was Greek”. The answer seemed to him entirely natural and commonplace. “How”, I asked in some bewilderment, “did that miracle come about?” Why”, said he, “we are all poor men, but we want to have our own school and a priest who will look after us properly. We used to have a Greek teacher… but we had no priest of our own. We shared a priest with several other villages, but he was very unpunctual and remiss. We went to the Greek Bishop to complain, but he refused to do anything for us. The Bulgarians heard of this and they came and made us an offer. They said they would give us a priest who would live in the village and a teacher to whom we need pay nothing. Well, sir, ours is a poor village, and so of course we became Bulgarian”.”
from HN Brailsford, Macedonia: Its Races and their Future, Methuen & Co, 1906
Monastir, or Manastir, is today known as Bitola and is the second city of the Republic of Macedonia. It is situated in the far south of the country; Albania is not far off and Greece closer still.
When Brailsford was writing, in 1905, Macedonia was not a state but an ill-defined region of ailing Turkey-in-Europe increasingly contested by different national movements. It is true that some of its peoples, such as the Albanians in the west and the Greeks in parts of the south, possessed clear national affiliations but for many others personal identity was properly a matter of religion, to which all else was secondary. The people had been accustomed to being defined by faith community (millet) by the Ottomans for as long as the collective memory could recall. Since the Bulgarians, the Greeks and the Serbs, all of whom had an eye on at least part of Macedonia, were all Orthodox, this meant that the majority population of Macedonia found itself on a kind of three-way spectrum along which they could slide, or be slid, as the case may be, as illustrated by Brailsford’s anecdote. The longer-term result of this was that the emerging separate Macedonian identity developed in contradistinction to those surrounding nation states.
For the family historian with antecedents from Macedonia, the advice is to tread with great care and to be prepared for a difficult way ahead. It is vital to know the exact place of origin of the family in order to conduct any meaningful genealogical research. Knowing the family religion is important, too, nationality or ethnicity perhaps less so. Many villages would have just the one church, and/or just the one mosque, and in that respect it might matter little whether the villagers thought of themselves as Bulgarian, Greek, Macedonian, Serb or Vlach (Aromanian or Wallachian) on the one hand, or as Albanian, Bosnian, Pomack or Turkish on the other. Note also that some Albanians in Macedonia were Roman Catholic and, indeed, Orthodox; and that the Gypsies, who tended to live in discrete communities on the outskirts of towns and villages, were usually Muslim but occasionally Orthodox.
Macedonia was contested politically and militarily for too long, with significant and bloody revolts at the end of the 19th century and the start of the 20th, long before the two Balkan Wars of 1912/13 and the destruction of the Great War. Brailsford worked in the vilâyet of Manastir on behalf of an NGO called the British Relief Fund during the winter of 1903/04, following the 1903 uprising and its savage Turkish suppression and reprisals. In that vilâyet alone, he calculated that 119 villages were wholly or partly burned and over 8,400 homes destroyed, displacing at least 60,000 civilian non-combatants. Some families went back to re-build their villages once peace returned but others re-settled elsewhere or went abroad; the subsequent upheavals and conflicts after 1903 created a pattern of repeated displacement and migration and the impact of this, too, must not be under-estimated when attempting family history research in Macedonia.
At the time of Rebecca West’s visit to Macedonia in 1936/37, recounted in Black Lamb and Grey Falcon, she reckoned that “not one in a million Englishmen has been to Ochrid” and it is not likely that that ratio has changed since. It was surprising to see, therefore, in the 30th January 2010 Travel section of the Guardian newspaper, a two-page spread devoted to Ohrid: the consciousness of British travel journalists, or perhaps their commissioning editors’, seldom alights on Macedonia or, for that matter, its neighbours Albania and Serbia. However, I then saw the name Kapka Kassabova in the by-line. Kapka is a Bulgarian writer who writes in English and now resides in Scotland; her Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria is highly recommended for anyone interested in everyday life in communist era Bulgaria.
Kapka’s grandmother was from Ohrid and identified herself as Bulgarian. However, follow history one or two or three generations further back and the matter might not have been so clear for her. Macedonia needs to be understood primarily as a large and never well-defined region; today, it is divided between the Former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia, Bulgaria and Greece. Its population has always been mixed; hence the Italians’ use of macedonia for a colourful fruit salad. Until the mid 19th century, many inhabitants of Macedonia were more likely to think of themselves in terms of their religion (say, as a Muslim, as a Catholic, or as an Eastern Orthodox Christian) or simply as Macedonians without this connoting race or ethnicity. However, by the late 19th century, Macedonia was the site of emerging and competing nationalisms laying claim to different and often identical sections of the population. Regional identification became less tenable and the growth of national movements encouraged and sometimes compelled individuals and communities to affiliate with one national group or another. Certainly, this seems to have been true of the Albanians, the Greeks and the Slavs, whether Serb, Bulgarian or indeed Macedonian. Outside these contested peoples remained others such as the Gypsies and the Aromanians.
The Guardian piece is illustrated with a half-page photograph of the view across the lake from above the Orthodox Church of Sveti Jovan Kaneo. Rebecca West wrote of the “old town of Ochrid on its hill [that it] is stuck as thickly with churches as a pomander with cloves, and there are several churches in the new town that lies flat on the lake shore”. In fact, the town had so many churches and chapels – allegedly an improbable 365, one for each day of the year – that it was known as the Slavic Jerusalem.
Of its population, West comments that “nothing is… more unsettling than… its numbers of immensely aged people. They must be old, though probably not as old as they say, but still very old, because one finds them living in the same house with five generations of their descendants”. She also remarks that the people – by that date living in Yugoslavia – “preferred harmony to disharmony, and were capable of sacrificing their immediate impulses to this preference”. Such people were less likely to be drawn into the schisms hewn in communities by nationalist politics, more likely to focus on the pleasures and necessities of day-to-day life and getting on with their neighbours whatever their ethnicity or faith. Claudio Magris’s Danube relates the story of a certain Mr Omerić which, he suggests, sums up “the Macedonian question”:
“Omerić, who was so called under the Jugoslav monarchy, became Omerov during the Bulgarian occupation in the Second World War and then Omerski for the Republic of Macedonia, which is part of the Jugoslav federation. His original name, Omer, was Turkish”.
In July 2003, while staying in Timişoara in Romania, I visited the village of Vinga on the main road north to the city of Arad. The most noticeable feature of Vinga is its imposing Roman Catholic church dedicated to Sfânta Treime (the Holy Trinity). The church was built in 1892. What is unusual, beyond its scale in relation to the size of the village, is the fact that it was founded not by Hungarians or Romanians but by Bulgarians. And, of course, that these Bulgarians were not Orthodox but of the small Catholic minority.
The Roman Catholic Banat Bulgarians, such as those in Vinga, arrived and settled in the Banat region of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the C18th. They had originated in the Chiprovtsi district in Bulgaria from whence they arrived in Vinga, via the Oltenia region of Romania, in 1741, escaping the Ottoman Empire and taking advantage of the privileges offered by the Habsburgs to colonists in the Banat.
After World War One and the partition of defeated Hungary at the 1920 Treaty of Trianon, the Banat was divided between Serbia and Romania, and Banat Bulgarians found themselves of either side of the new border. Some still remain in villages such as Ivanovo and Konak (both in Serbia) and Breştea and Dudeştii Vechi (in Romania), but many have moved to cities such as Arad and Timişoara, removed to Bulgaria, or emigrated to Hungary and USA.
The Bulgarian population of Vinga has dwindled. According to the 1880 Austrian census, there were 3,543 Bulgarians out of a total village population of 4,796 (74%). At the time of the Romanian census of 2002, this had fallen to 512 out of a population of 6,388 (8%) and the Bulgarians are now outnumbered not merely by Romanians but also by Hungarians and Roma.
As well as Romanians and Serbs, there are Croats, Germans, Hungarians, Slovaks and Ukrainians, among others, on both sides of the current Serbian-Romanian border and the Banat remains a fascinating ethnically mixed supranational region.