The Balkan Route

Historical Transformations from Via Militaris to Autoput

Florian Riedler, Nenad Stefanov, Florian Riedler, Nenad Stefanov

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9783110617061
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

This volume approaches the topic of mobility in Southeast Europe by offering the first detailed historical study of the land route connecting Istanbul with Belgrade. After this route that diagonally crosses Southeast Europe had been established in Roman times, it was as important for the Byzantines as the Ottomans to rule their Balkan territories. In the nineteenth century, the road was upgraded to a railroad and, most recently, to a motorway. The contributions in this volume focus on the period from the Middle Ages to the present day. They explore the various transformations of the route as well as its transformative role for the cities and regions along its course. This not only concerns the political function of the route to project the power of the successive empires. Also the historical actors such as merchants, travelling diplomats, Turkish guest workers or Middle Eastern refugees together with the various social, economic and cultural effects of their mobility are in the focus of attention. The overall aim is to gain a deeper understanding of Southeast Europe by foregrounding historical continuities and disruptions from a long-term perspective and by bringing into dialogue different national and regional approaches.

Tsaribrod, a Dot on the Line: A Microhistorical Approach to Societal Change along the Route in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries

Nenad Stefanov

1 Introduction

The transformation of the Belgrade–Istanbul route in the second half of the nineteenth and into the twentieth centuries went hand in hand with a general change in Balkan societies. This can be understood as a profound societal change, in which former patterns of organization of power and control transformed slowly but steadily. Since the 1860s, both in the Ottoman imperial frame of the Tanzimat period as well as in the context of the new national states since the 1880s, the protagonists of the new states sought to modernize all aspects of societal life. The transformation of imperial space to national territory affected also this communication line. In this chapter, the central issue is the relation between this route as a line of communication and the new borders of the national states. I will present the example of Tsaribrod, an emerging border town approximately in the middle of the route between Istanbul and Budapest; I do this in order to focus particularly on the relationship of the local actors towards the transformation of the road and the emergence of a new obstacle, i. e., the Serbian-Bulgarian border.

The general contradiction between more or less unbounded communication and borders as new obstacles is the key issue characterizing the route in this epoch. This dichotomy can be illustrated by focusing on a particular region between Niš and Sofia, which some of the previous contributions have also analyzed. The focus on a concrete local context can provide insight into the relationship between new modes of domination and the changes in communication. The actors in this local context were, on the one hand, the officials from the new centers such as Sofia and Belgrade and, on the other hand, the local actors whose region changed from an imperial province to being on the periphery of a nation state. Their relationship reflects (in a condensed way) power-society relations—the border, what in accordance with Jürgen Osterhammel could be called the condensation of political rule (Verdichtung von Herrschaft): “Political boundaries are therefore concrete: physical reifications of the state, symbolic and material condensations of political rule (since the state is constantly tangible there on a day-to-day basis).”¹

The analysis will proceed in three steps. Firstly, we will look at lines of communication in a regional space within an imperial frame. Secondly, the chapter will examine the process of drawing borders as an interrelated process between the local, the regional (the establishment of new national states) and the global dimensions (the Congress of Berlin in 1878). Necessarily connected with this bordering process is the changing quality of the paths of communication. Our route changed considerably with the construction of the railway line from Central Europe to Istanbul, which had an effect on the local context. Thirdly, the tension of “bounded space”² and transgressing communication will then be analyzed in its different constellations in the second half of the twentieth century. Here, the chapter will focus on the new possibilities of mobility under the changed conditions of territoriality and loyalty in socialist Yugoslavia.

Why actually Tsaribrod? Of course, it is a coincidence that this small town of all places was meant to be the place where the border between the Serbian and the Bulgarian states would cross the “Stambulskoto džade” (Istanbul Road) as it was called in the local language. But in comparison to other border towns in the region, Tsaribrod is also peculiar: it is the only town which came into being as a border town and has stayed a border town for the rest of its existence until today. Only the towns on the Danube between Rumania and Bulgaria are exceptions to this, however they emerged as commercial centers and not as border cities. Since the nineteenth century, state-borders in the Balkans have often changed their positions. With advancing territorial expansion of the new nation-states, the first border towns of Romania, Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece found themselves later on deep within national territories. In the recent violent break-up of Yugoslavia, this process of moving borders and changing border towns repeated itself yet again. Also, the border line between Serbia and Bulgaria changed, but for Tsaribrod the border remained a crucial feature of the town throughout its existence. Until 1920, when the town was in Bulgaria, the border was situated to the northwest, afterwards, when it became part of Serbia, it ran in southeasterly direction; in each case the border was close by (within a distance of six kilometers), except for the period from 1941 – 1948 when it was not functioning.

In 1952, the name of Tsaribrod was changed to Dimitrovgrad. In this way, the Yugoslav communists tried to demonstrate their principal attachment to Yugoslav-Bulgarian friendship even in times of confrontation during the conflict between Tito and Stalin. Nevertheless, the local population still calls the town Tsaribrod. There were two attempts to reinstate the old name, but finally the town assembly decided that a renaming would be too costly and not necessary, given that Tsaribrod was used by the public, anyway.

In sum, Tsaribrod’s permanent function as a border town as well as the fact that it was contested between Bulgaria and Serbia offers an opportunity to examine the dialectics between bordering and communication from a longue durée perspective.

2 Nationalism, Territory, and Borders

As Bernard Lory noted for Bitola, a city today in North Macedonia which had been contested between Greece and Bulgaria since the end of the nineteenth century, the disputed areas themselves were of little interest for the intellectual and political elites at the centers of the new nation-states.³ The areas only became relevant as future “components” or “pieces” of the national territory, which had to be assembled from the “hereditary mass” of the Ottoman Empire. This perception and practice were also particularly pronounced in the region being discussed in detail in this chapter. The area between Sofia and Niš was disputed between the nation-states of Serbia and Bulgaria and it symbolized age-old military confrontations between the two states; any phases of peaceful cooperation appear as exceptions. The area, when finally incorporated in one of the nation-states, turned afterwards into an irrelevant space on the fringe of the national territory.

In the Balkans—and of course not only there—ethno-national demarcations became meaningful in the course of the emergence of national states. Nation was and is understood as a community of descent, independent of the subjective state of mind and the will of the individual. Such an “objective” understanding of nation⁴ (as opposed to a “subjective”) was primarily a politically defined community and was based on the idea of an ancestral community with clear limits independent of the will of the individual, and it constructed society as a homogeneous ethno-national or ethno-confessional community.

In the nineteenth century, the protagonists of the national idea usually defined nationality according to “objective” criteria such as language or religion. In Bosnia and Herzegovina, for example, following such an “objective” understanding, Catholics became Croats and those of Orthodox confession became Serbs. It is a peculiarity of the Central Balkan region being discussed here that the state border newly drawn in 1878 itself was the crucial factor in producing differences among a local population, which now suddenly found itself on either side of a new dividing line. Religion, language, as well as cultural practices were the same on both sides of the border and still are today. There was simply no “objective” criterion to serve as an anchor for a clear dividing line.

Nationally minded politicians, intellectuals and scholars in the two new states were well aware of this, so they made no effort to impose some sort of artificial ethnic dividing line on these two groups as they materialized on a state border. However, this did not encourage tolerance. On the contrary, the Serbian and Bulgarian nationalisms were structurally congruent; they functioned as mirror-images of one another. Both were determined by an integral nationalism: of course, there were no differences (as said on the Serbian side); after all, the people even to the east of Sofia were all Serbs. The Bulgarian variant corresponded with this: After all, the people to the south of Niš were without exception Bulgarians, as old travel descriptions and historical maps proved.

Only in recent decades has a—still small—current emerged among geographers and historians in Serbia and Bulgaria, which has set itself apart from such interpretations. In their opinion, the people of this region form their own ethnic group, which can be defined by the local language, which differs from both the Serbian and Bulgarian standard languages. This group called Shopi was separated by the border just shortly before the development of an ethnic self-awareness. The demarcation had halted and broken off the process of ethno-genesis; the people had then adapted to the Serbian or the Bulgarian ethno-national context.⁵

This last interpretation refers to the time before the founding of the nation-states to explain the identical language, cultural practices and cult of saints on both sides of the Bulgarian-Serbian border. Although challenging current ethnic classifications, this interpretation does not consistently question ethno-national categories as social constructs. It tries to acknowledge the specificity of the region but does not free itself fully from the established shapes of ethno-national “groupism” (Brubaker) by taking the observed ambiguity seriously in order to question the concept and practice of ethno-national classification as such.

3 Space and Infrastructure in the Late Ottoman Period: The Kaza Şehirköy/Pirot

Before turning to the central issue of this chapter, we have to reflect on the place and meaning of Ottoman infrastructures in the middle of the nineteenth century. This is important in order to demonstrate that, in the Balkans, it is problematic to equate modernization⁶ with the national states. Transformations in state organization and particularly improvements in infrastructure took place before the new national states emerged, as will be demonstrated by a short but close look at regional roads. We also have to take into account the relationship between the local inhabit...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Bordering and Mobility as an Approach to the History of the Balkan Route
• The Via Militaris in Transition: From Late Rome to the Crusades
• Continuity of Travel and Transport Infrastructures from Antiquity to the Middle Ages: The Case of Via Militaris in the Morava and Nišava Regions
• Transforming the Landscape of the Constantinople Road in the Fifteenth and Sixteenth Centuries (Section Niš–Dragoman)
• The Istanbul–Belgrade Route in the Ottoman Empire: Continuity and Discontinuity of an Imperial Mobility Space
• Cities along the Route: Plovdiv Becoming “Modern” at the End of the Nineteenth Century
• Tsaribrod, a Dot on the Line: A Microhistorical Approach to Societal Change along the Route in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries
• Park ve Restoran: About Oblivion, Obstinate Mobility and Temporary Infrastructures on the Road
• Voices of the Via Egnatia: Deliberating Migratory Pull-Factors along the Roman Road in the Western Balkans
• Balkan Transit: Conclusion and Outlook
• List of Contributors
• Index