Balkan Heritages

Negotiating History and Culture

Maria Couroucli, Tchavdar Marinov, Maria Couroucli, Tchavdar Marinov

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781134800827
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia del XX secolo

This volume deals with the relation between heritage, history and politics in the Balkans. Contributions examine diverse ways in which material and immaterial heritage has been articulated, negotiated and manipulated since the nineteenth century. The major question addressed here is how modern Balkan nations have voiced claims about their past by establishing 'proof' of a long historical presence on their territories in order to legitimise national political narratives. Focusing on claims constructed in relation to tangible evidence of past presence, especially architecture and townscape, the contributors reveal the rich relations between material and immaterial conceptions of heritage. This comparative take on Balkan public uses of the past also reveals many common trends in social and political practices, ideas and fixations embedded in public and collective memories. Balkan Heritages revisits some general truths about the Balkans as a region and a category, in scholarship and in politics. Contributions to the volume adopt a transnational and trans-disciplinary perspective of Balkan identities and heritage(s), viewed here as symbolic resources deployed by diverse local actors with special emphasis on scholars and political leaders.

Part I
Modern Nationalism and its Roots in Urban Space

Chapter 1
Ethnonyms in the Pre-National Era: What's in a Name?

Raymond Detrez

Historians, like most people, use language as a means of communication. However, language, as we know, is a rather defective and even deceptive tool. Words are burdened with connotations and semantic implications of which, often, neither the sender nor the recipient is fully aware and which can unintentionally distort the message. Ethnonyms in historiographical accounts offer a good illustration of the misleading nature of especially this kind of term. The use of the same ethnonym to indicate the existence of a particular group of people throughout the ages implies a continuity that is highly questionable and in fact often remains limited to that very ethnonym, while the genetic, social, cultural, linguistic and other features of the group which constitute its identity are susceptible to constant change. Moreover, even more problematic is labelling a community that existed centuries ago with an ethnonym that is the name of a currently existing ethnic or national community: this unintentionally suggests a continuity of mental make-up, of perceptions of themselves and of others, a continuity of a ‘group identity’ that is supposed to be transmitted from generation to generation along with the ethnonym. However, even if we are aware that, for instance, the Bulgarian khan Asparuh (seventh century), the Byzantine emperor Basil II (976–1025), and the Albanian leader Skanderbeg (1443–68) had different perceptions of ‘Bulgarianness’, ‘Greekness’ and ‘Albanianness’ from those of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Bulgarians, Greeks and Albanians (who are socialised in ethnic nation states that rely on education, media, culture and suchlike to instil feelings of loyalty to the state and solidarity with co-nationals) the question remains: how exactly did people living in pre-modern states, who were not interested in such nation-building and did not possess the necessary tools to realise it, experience their ethnic belonging?

This chapter aims not to answer this question but rather to elaborate on its complexity. It is based on two case studies related to Bulgarian ethnic self-identification in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in two Ottoman cities, Ohrid and Plovdiv.¹ Both cities, like all Balkan cities, had ethnically and religiously mixed populations. The overwhelming majority of Orthodox Christians were Greeks and Bulgarians, all speaking Greek and calling themselves Greeks, but there were also Albanians, Vlachs and others. In both cities, Graecisation was due to the presence of a Graecophone clergy, Ohrid having been until 1767 the seat of an autocephalous archbishopric,² and Plovdiv being the seat of an important metropolitanate, dependent on the patriarchate of Constantinople. In addition, both cities had sizeable populations of Graecophone commercial petty bourgeoisie: due to Ohrid’s flourishing fur trade and Plovdiv’s even more flourishing cloak trade. This multi-ethnic urban establishment used Greek as a lingua franca for commercial reasons. As Greek was considered an indispensable tool for upward social mobility, the Bulgarian population was not particularly interested in Bulgarian education and often preferred schooling in Greek. Finally, the use of Greek also marked the social distinction between the urban elite and the inhabitants of the surrounding villages. As such, Greek exerted a great attraction for those aspiring to join that elite.

Before considering the case studies below, the meaning of the term ‘ethnonym’ in the Balkans of the time requires explanation. Ethnonyms generally referred to ethnic groups but could also be used to denote religious groups: ‘Greek’ or ‘Romaean’ as synonyms for Orthodox Christian,³ ‘Turk’ as a synonym for Muslim, and ‘Frank’ or ‘Frenk’ as a synomym for (Western European) Catholic. In addition, ethnonyms also frequently referred to social and vocational groups. ‘Greeks’ could be traders or city-dwellers, while poor Slavic-speaking peasants were called ‘Bulgarians’. (In Ottoman Turkish, the word Türk also connoted ‘simple peasant’ [see Davison 1988: 3].) Similarly, Vlah could refer, not only to an ethnic Vlach, but also to a person of any ethnic origin practising transhumance (Entsiklopediya Bălgariya 1978: vol. 1, 700; Vermeulen 1984: 237). Not only ethnic Albanians but all armed men (soldiers, guardians, bodyguards) could be called Arnauts (Albanians) (Todorov 1973: 9, 17).⁴ Being ‘Greek’ was often a religious and social, rather than ethnic, distinction. However, even in that sense the term ‘Greek’ was never disconnected from the notion of Orthodox Christian, since only an Orthodox Christian could be a ‘Greek’ in the sense of a city-dweller or trader. Muslim, Jewish, Armenian and Catholic traders and city-dwellers were never called ‘Greeks’; Orthodox Christian Albanians, Bulgarians, Gagauzes (who spoke Turkish) and Vlachs (who spoke a Balkan Romance language) could all be ‘Greeks’ without any problem.

The double and even triple meanings of Balkan ethnonyms suggest that purely ethnic identities did not exist here: ethnic identities appear to coincide with religious, class, status and vocational identities. Moreover, these polysemantic ethnonyms suggest that ethnic affiliation was not considered sufficiently important to require disambiguation. A closer look at the cases of Ohrid and Plovdiv confirms these assumptions and reveals additional elements.

Ohrid

Just as Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire usually described themselves as ‘Christians’ (or ‘Greeks’ or ‘Romaeans’ in the case of Orthodox Christians) so too did the Bulgarian and Greek or Graecised citizens of Ohrid. In the Chronicle of Ohrid, which recounts events between 1801 and 1843, the population of Ohrid is referred to as ‘Romaean’ or ‘Christian’ six times, while the ethnonym ‘Bulgarian’ is used only once (Lape 1951: 21, 26, 31, 32, 33: cited in Lory 2009: 206).⁵ Until the late twentieth century, elderly people in Macedonia are reported to have identified themselves as Rim or Rimi in the sense of Orthodox Christian (Duklevska Schubert 2013: 72–3). Obviously, religious self-identification in all these cases prevailed over ethnic distinctions.

This does not mean, of course, that the ethnonym ‘Bulgarian’ was never used, nor that there were no ‘real’ (ethnic) Greeks in Ohrid. kuzman Shapkarev repeatedly points out that all citizens of Ohrid, even if they spoke Greek, called themselves ‘Bulgarians’ (Shapkarev 1984: 46; 1895: 276–7). This confirms again that speaking Greek was not an index of ethnicity. It remains puzzling, however, how one could display a Bulgarian ethnic consciousness and yet in daily life speak a language other than Bulgarian, apparently also with other Bulgarians. In any event, according to Grigor Părlichev’s autobiography, in the mid-nineteenth century ohrid was ‘thoroughly Hellenised’ (săvsem pogărcheniy) (Părlichev 1970: 283). Yurdan Ivanov points out that ‘every Bulgarian who somehow knew how to read and write was proud to call himself a Greek and to behave like a Greek’ (1892: cited in Shapkarev 1895: 278).

The chief feature of Graecisation was the use of Greek as an Umgangsprache: a language of everyday communication in public. Just as in other Balkan cities, the multi-ethnic upper class in Ohrid spoke Greek as a lingua franca for commercial or professional reasons. Greek was also the language of interethnic intellectual communication. The best illustration of Ohrid’s involvement in a supra-ethnic Orthodox Christian cultural life is the eighteenth-century printing house in Moschopolis (now Voskopojë in Albania) whose proprietor worked for the Holy Naum Monastery near Ohrid and depended directly on the local archbishopric (see Peyfuss 1989). The author of the Bulgarian contribution to the famous Greek–Bulgarian–Vlach–Albanian dictionary, compiled by Daniil, the director of the Moschopolis’s new Academy, was a priest from Ohrid (Snegarov 1924: 55–6).

In ohrid too, speaking Greek marked the social distinction between the multi-ethnic social elite and the equally multi-ethnic (Bulgarian, Vlach, Albanian) villagers who lived outside the town or had migrated to Ohrid’s suburbs. Ivanov’s expression ‘behaving like a Greek’ referred to the petty bourgeois Western Enlightenment lifestyle called alafranga (‘in the French style’) of the urban elite, and actually had no ethnic implications. It is true that alafranga culture used Greek as a language of intellectual communication, but it relied on Enlightenment universalism and not on Greek ethnic identity which was associated with peasant ignorance and backwardness. Părlichev in his autobiography sarcastically labelled the Ohrid upper class ‘the aristocracy’ (aristokratsiyata) (1970: 261). The Ohrid neighbourhood of Mesokastro, populated by Bulgarian immigrants from the surrounding villages, was considered to be ‘wild’ and ‘rural’ (divata i selskata mahala Mesokastro) (Sprostranov 1896:622).

Since the people referred to as ‘Greeks’ might be Bulgarian (or Vlach or Albanian) orthodox Christians who had learned some Greek at school, the level of their ability in that language is open to question. According to Sprostranov, even those Bulgarians in Ohrid who claimed to be ‘pure-blooded’ Greeks ‘did not understand Greek, except for the words kyr [sir] and kyria [madam], kalimera [good day] and kalispera [good evening]’ (Sprostranov 1896: 621; see Snegarov 1928: 122). At school, katharevousa (literary Greek) was taught, which was then used (more or less accurately) for all kinds of purposes, but spoken Greek in Ohrid was probably a contaminated form of romeika (demotic Greek) which educated Greeks might not even consider to be real Greek (ellinika). The Russian traveller Viktor Grigorovich, who spent some time in Ohrid in the 1860s, commented that ‘Bulgarians know either Turkish or Greek, and this particularity makes it difficult to conclude after one conversation what their natural language is. … Especially in Macedonia, when you meet a Bulgarian, he bothers little about his choice of words and sometimes speaks a language which is a mixture of the three’ (1877: 163).

In order to better understand language in Ohrid, it is instructive to look at the use of Greek and Bulgarian in worship and education. Church services were generally celebrated in Greek, but there are many indications of the patriarchal clergy’s tolerance of the use of Slavonic. In the 1840s entire masses were sometimes celebrated in Church Slavonic on the basis of liturgical books imported from Russia (Snegarov 1928: 57–8). The Bulgarian Church Slavonic tradition, however, had fallen into disuse, and the Slavonic idiom used during the masses was mainly the local ohrid dialect. The sermons were often preached in that idiom (written down in Greek script). Because there were no longer any liturgical books in Church Slavonic in Ohrid, apart from the Russian ones, the Gospel was sometimes translated from the Greek copy in the church into the Ohrid dialect (Shapkarev 1895: 276–7).

According to Shapkarev, by the end of the eighteenth century nobody was capable of reading the Slavonic books in the library of the Holy Kliment Church (1895: 276–7). Grigorovich could not find anyone in Ohrid who was familiar with the Cyrillic script (1877: 102). The records of church committees and guilds, as well as trade agreements and similar official documents, were all written in Greek. Whenever the local Slavonic dialect of Ohrid was written, Greek characters were used. The Cyrillic script was considered to originate from Serbia and was called ‘Serbian’ (Părlichev 1970: 371; Skopakov 1911: 425).

Records from Ohrid schools provide additional evidence. The language of instruction was Greek in all ‘central schools’: the old primary school in the Varosh, the Hellenic-Greek school (for whole-class teaching⁶) founded at the beginning of the nineteenth century, and the new school for mutual education (according to the Bell–Lancaster system) built in 1841 (Shapkarev 1895: 279). Teachers did occasionally use the native language of their pupils, the Ohrid dialect, but only to teach Greek more easily and rapidly. Not all the teachers were Greek. Records name Albanian, Bulgarian, Karakachan⁷ and Vlach teachers who zealously taught Greek from 1800 to 1840 at the Hellenic-Greek school in Ohrid (Snegarov 1928: 59–60, 65; Shapkarev 1895: 272–3).

Vlach seasonal workers financed and built a new school in the Lower Vlach neighbourhood (Dolna Vlashka mahala) in 1843, and another in Upper Vlach (Gorna Vlashka mahala) in 1848–9 (Snegarov 1927: 2, 25). However, these schools were not Vlach schools. They too used Greek as the language of instruction, or at least as the language the pupils were supposed to master. Moreover, the school had Bulgarian pupils and teachers. Shapkarev studied at the Lower Vlach school for five years and his uncle, Yanaki Strezov, taught there (Snegarov 1927: 69–70; 1928: 67–8). In 1848 Bishop Dionysios closed the school and turned the building into a church (Shapkarev 1984: 53). Since the school was in fact spreading the Greek language, Dionysios’s decision cannot have been inspired by Greek nationalist considerations, as the Graecising effect of a church was much more limited than that of a school. Briefly, the Vlach schools were actually Greek schools with pupils and teachers of various ethnic origins, just as the Hellenic-Greek central schools were.

In the 1840s attempts were made to ‘Bulgarise’ the central schools, but insurmountable resistance was reportedly offered by the pro-Greek forces in the city (Vanchev 1982: 34–5). It is also probable that the proponents of Bulgarian education received too little support. In 1852 the inhabitants of the neighbourhoods of Mesokastro, Kasım Bey and Skenderbey opened what was, as an inscription in Bulgarian indicates, intended to be a Bulgarian school, but it was ultimately transformed into a Greek school (Ivanov 1986: 359–60). By contrast, the short-lived school for mutual education founded by the Bulgarians Yanaki Strezov and k uzman Shapkarev in 1854 was a Greek school from the start, with Greek as the language of instruction (Snegarov 1928: 68).

The history of the Bulgarian school founded in Mesokastro in 1858 by father and son Mustrev, saddle-makers who had learned some Church Slavonic in the monastery of Saint John the Baptist near Debar, is also revealing. The language of instruction was the Ohrid Slavonic dialect, but the language to be learned by the pupils was in all probability Church Slavonic (Shapkarev 1895: 283). The Mesokastro school lost most of its pupils and eventually had to close after the Hellenic-Greek central school started offering courses in Bulgarian, taught by Shapkarev (to whom we owe this version of the fate of the Mesokastro school) (Snegarov 1928: 70–71; Shapkarev 1895: 284–6). However, other sources report th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Note on Transliteration
• Preface
• Introduction
• PART I MODERN NATIONALISM AND ITS ROOTS IN URBAN SPACE
• PART II THE INVENTION OF NATIONAL ARCHITECTURE AND URBAN HERITAGE
• PART III DESTRUCTION OF HERITAGE AND MEMORIES OF WAR
• PART IV THE OTTOMAN LEGACY AND THE RE-ARTICULATION OF ISLAM IN THE BALKANS
• Conclusion Escape from the Future: Anthropological Practice and Everyday Life
• Index