A Concise History of Bulgaria Read online

  Yet the language remained alive during the years of Ottoman rule and eventually its literature was to be reborn. The language survived primarily because most Bulgarians lived in their small, isolated and usually ethnically homogenous villages. In such communities there was no need to adopt Greek for everyday economic or commercial transactions, nor to use Turkish when dealing with government officials. The villages therefore preserved the Bulgarian language and with it Bulgarian names, Bulgarian folk tales and legends, Bulgarian forms of family organisation and Bulgarian festivals and holidays.

  The Bulgarian Church under Ottoman Rule

  The festivals and holidays which the small Bulgarian villages preserved were primarily religious and the church’s role in keeping alive a separate sense of ‘Bulgardom’ was critical. In 1394, the year after the fall of Tûrnovo, the Bulgarian patriarchate was dissolved and the Bulgarian church subjected to the authority of the patriarch in Constantinople. The patriarchate of Ohrid, however, continued to be known as ‘Bulgarian’, although in fact most of its prelates were Greek and were nominated by the Greek patriarch in Constantinople. Despite the Ohrid patriarchate, therefore, the church in both eastern and western Bulgaria was subjected to Greek domination, more especially at its higher levels. At the parish level, however, many Bulgarian priests were still nominated and at least until the eighteenth century the liturgy was still usually held in Bulgarian if the congregation so desired. In many communities the parish priest provided guidance in every aspect of life as well as spiritual leadership, and it was significant that, particularly in the seventeenth century and afterwards, priests often came from the most affluent section of the local population; they were the only ones who could afford the increasingly stiff bribes required to secure a parish appointment. Had the church not played this role, however, the survival of the Bulgarian language would have been much more difficult.

  In the early years after the conquest the Ottomans generally abided by the letter of their law forbidding the building or rebuilding of churches. Later this was relaxed but even then the process of building or rebuilding Christian places of worship was a slow one, and one greatly demanding of money, time and patience. Yet a long pocket and careful organisation on the part of the village council and the priest could secure the necessary permission and thus, as in Poland under the communists, church building and restoration assumed more than a mere spiritual significance: it became a contest with the dominant non-Christian authority and victory could bring a great sense of pride and achievement. It could also mean that Bulgarian iconographers and painters could go to work and thus keep alive Bulgarian traditions in religious art.

  The Bulgarian monasteries too helped keep alive religious art. Immediately after the conquest they had fallen upon very hard times. By the middle of the fourteenth century many of them were destroyed or in a state of sad decline, but thereafter a slow regeneration began. Many were re-established far from the main routes used by the Ottoman armies, and some lucky ones were able to transform their properties into vakûf lands and thereby secure their income. The great foundation at Rila near where Ivan Rilski had spent his life as a hermit, was repopulated and rebuilt by three brothers from near Kiustendil and in 1469 it received an enormous boost when the remains of Ivan Rilski were brought back from Tûrnovo. Severe taxation was to threaten it once again in later years but the foundation survived, and with it its great library. Rila also helped to sponsor the flourishing school of religious painting to be found in the Sofia area in the seventeenth century and thereafter.

  Monasteries also played a vital role in maintaining the rudiments of education. Mount Athos had provided refuge for a number of Bulgarian writers and other men of letters immediately after the fall of Tûrnovo, and when political conditions stabilised in the Bulgarian lands pilgrims were able to visit the holy mountain. Those monasteries on Athos, and others in the Bulgarian lands, which had retained their properties sent out monks to collect revenue and maintain contact with the inhabitants of those properties. The itinerant monks, or taxidiots as they were known, played an essential role in linking village and monastery. This was extremely important when monasteries began to develop ‘cell schools’ in which a small number of young men would be trained for service in the church or in monastic orders. In the fifteenth century, refugees from Tûrnovo founded a large Slav school in Zograf on Mount Athos which later became a model for others throughout the Bulgarian lands, villages having encouraged the taxidiots to arrange for the establishment of such schools. These schools were relatively few in number and they did not produce either the questioning religious minds of the reformation and counter-reformation or anything resembling an intelligentsia, but they did keep literacy alive. They also facilitated the merging of the old Bulgarian language with more vernacular usages, a process which produced in the seventeenth century what philologists have called ‘new Bulgarian’.

  Some monks copied old hagiographies, one of which was that compiled by Patriarch Evtimii in Tûrnovo shortly before the conquest and which gave great prominence to Bulgarian saints and martyrs. However, one should not be tempted into making this process into anything approaching a modern national revival, or even a precursor of it: of the 261 extant Bulgarian manuscripts dating from the seventeenth century only 46 contain mention of specifically Bulgarian saints. What the monasteries and the scriptoria did was to preserve that basic sense of ethnic separateness without which a national revival would have been impossible.

  Protest against Ottoman Power

  Protest against Ottoman rule was not a Christian monopoly. In 1416, for example, there was a rising by the Muslim Bedreddin order. In later centuries, however, political and social protest were predominantly Christian and when they came were usually based on the hope, always dashed, that Christian powers were about to inflict defeat upon the Ottoman empire. The ‘long war’ fought by the Habsburgs and their Transylvanian and Wallachian allies against the Turks at the turn of the sixteenth century created the belief that a campaign south of the Danube was imminent, the agents of Vienna and Rome using the Dubrovnik merchants who were so powerful in the Balkans to encourage such beliefs. The result was a rising in the Tûrnovo region in 1598. It was suppressed with the customary brutality, but further to the west, in the mountains near Sofia, there remained armed groups of so-called haiduks who were more than mere robbers, if less than the nationalist heroes depicted by some later historians.

  Plate 3.3 Christ Sabaoth and Christ Pantocrator (below) from the church of Sveti Iliye, Boboshevo village, Struma district. Executed in 1678 these represent, in the words of the leading western scholar of the subject, ‘one of the most complete and best preserved ensembles of Bulgarian painting from the Ottoman period’. Machiel Kiel, Art and Society of Bulgaria in the Turkish Period, Maastricht, Van Gorcum, 1985, p. xviii.

  Almost a century later, in 1686, there was another rising around Tûrnovo, this time prompted by expectations of a Russian invasion. Two years later a larger outburst occurred around Chiprovets in the north-west of the Bulgarian lands. The Chiprovets area was unusual. It was rich in mines which had originally been worked by Serbs imported in the thirteenth century and then by Saxons whom the Ottomans settled there. The Orthodox Serbs were rapidly assimilated into the local Bulgarian population but the Saxons, though they became Bulgarian-speaking, retained their Catholicism. When it was learned that Habsburg armies were approaching from the north a rebellion was organised and the flag raised when it was believed the Christian forces were but a day’s march away. Some rebel units managed to fight their way through to join the Habsburg soldiers but the latter gave no assistance to the rising which was crushed with exceptional severity. The town of Chiprovets was destroyed and some estimates put local fatalities at two-thirds of the population. Many of those who survived fled to the Banat of Temesvar, now in Romania, where their descendants still live as one of Eastern Europe’s lesser known minority groups.

  The Decline of the Ottoman Empire

  The Hab
sburg advance into the Balkans in the 1680s had followed the failure of the Ottomans to take Vienna in 1683. By this date the sultan’s empire was in obvious decline. The timar system no longer functioned adequately. Too many properties had been allowed to convert to vakûf status with their inhabitants naming their descendants as the testamentary beneficiaries. This had a number of results. In the first place it made easier the emergence of estates which were worked purely for revenue rather than to equip the sultan’s forces, and on the new properties the peasants were subjected to much greater exploitation. The decline of the timars also meant that too few soldiers were recruited from the timar lands thus forcing the government to rely more upon the janissaries as the mainstay of the army. But the janissaries were not the force they had once been. They were no longer as exclusive, as élitist, or as disciplined as in the first days of Ottoman power in Europe. They had long since been allowed to marry, then they had been allowed to admit their own children to their ranks, and finally other Muslim children had also been allowed to become janissaries.

  Another effect of the decline of the timar system was the disappearance of the beglerbeg, the official who had once been the commander in chief of the spahis in his area and at the same time entrusted with the civil governance of that area. He was replaced by the vali. The vali’s main task was the collection of tax revenue in his allotted district and there were few restrictions on the way he could go about achieving this objective. The appearance of the vali was in part a consequence of the intensifying financial crisis which faced the Ottoman empire in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. The burden was in large measure the consequence of the almost constant state of war in which the empire found itself, but this burden was made less easy to bear because as the European–Asian trade routes shifted from land to sea the empire lost revenue levied on goods in transit. Nor did it benefit from the opening of western Europe’s links with the Americas, not least because it suffered greatly from the inflation which followed. Increased military expenditure without a concomitant increase in revenue merely compounded the inflationary problem. The government naturally did all it could to maximise revenues and the tax burden which in the beginning of the seventeenth century had been approximately a third of the average value of family property in the Bulgarian lands was by the end of the century over four-fifths of that value.

  A minor but useful source of revenue for the Sublime Porte was that derived from the bribes which those appointed to important offices were expected to donate to the government. The highest religious dignitaries were state appointees and they paid handsomely to assume their posts, no-one more so than the head of the Orthodox church, the patriarch of Constantinople. In the financial crisis of the seventeenth century the Porte would use any excuse to remove a patriarch and thus raise another bribe from his successor. By the end of the century only the wealthiest Greek families could afford high office; most of these Greeks were resident in the Phanar district of Constantinople, then, much in contrast to the present day, one of the wealthiest districts in the city. The ‘Phanariots’ thus came to dominate the patriarchate. Because ecclesiastic appointments in the provinces also required financial sweeteners, the policy whereby wealthy locals, again usually Greeks, came to dominate the church was repeated. Each cleric expected to recoup his expenses from those below him and this process percolated down until the burden fell eventually upon the ordinary villager and town-dweller. So onerous were church taxes in the seventeenth century that Orthodox bishops frequently used Ottoman troops to help collect them.

  The sale of office and therefore the concentration of high posts in the hands of the financially capable also affected the civil administration. Here again it was the Greeks of the Phanar who could pay the most and it was they in the eighteenth century who came to dominate the Ottoman administrative system as well as the Orthodox church. But not even the undoubted ability of the Phanariots could save the Ottoman empire from decline. The pace of that decline accelerated during the eighteenth century and from it eventually emerged the seeds of the Bulgarian national revival.

  4 The national revival and the liberation

  The vûzrazhdane, or national revival, is a phenomenon in which the Bulgarians take considerable and justifiable pride. As a historic process the revival was long and complicated with economic, social, cultural and psychological factors interweaving in intriguing and complex patterns. The first calls for a cultural revival were made by a small number of ‘awakeners’ in the eighteenth and very early nineteenth centuries, but though they saw the need for a revival they had no concept of what form it might take. The cultural revival, when it did take place, was made possible by the profound economic, social and political changes which overcame the Ottoman empire in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The manner in which the cultural revival was transformed into a national revival with its own institutions, first ecclesiastical and then political, was the work of the activists who emerged from the economic recovery and the cultural revival.

  The Awakeners

  The seminal work of the Bulgarian national revival was that of Paiisi, a monk in the monastery of Hilendar on Mount Athos. Paiisi Hilendarski was born in the town of Bansko in 1722. In 1745 he entered Hilendar where after a few years he became a taxidiot and as such travelled around the Bulgarian lands on monastery business. His travels left a deep impression of the tribulations of the ordinary people and of the inferior status of the Bulgarians vis-à-vis the Greeks. As a natural scholar Paiisi seems to have become almost obsessed with the contrast between the present low standing of Bulgarian culture and its glorious past, a past with which he had become familiar through his avid reading of history; Paiisi is known to have travelled in 1761 as far as Sremski Karlovac in the Habsburg monarchy where he consulted copies of Russian manuscripts. In 1762, exhausted and ill, he moved from Hilendar to the nearby monastery of Zograf, where he consulted an earlier history of the Bulgarians. All this experience and learning he poured into his own great work, A Slavonic-Bulgarian History of the Peoples, Tsars, Saints, and of all their Deeds and of the Bulgarian Way of Life. Written in Old Church Slavonic but with the enlivening addition of some contemporary spoken forms, the book recalled the lost and great days of the mediaeval Bulgarian state and church. The work looked both backwards and forwards because together with his evocation of past greatness Paiisi warned of the dangers for the future posed by the Bulgarians’ capitulation to hellenisation and he called upon his contemporary co-nationals to change their attitudes, to stand firm against Greek influences, and to ‘keep close to your heart your race and your Bulgarian homeland’. He pointed out why there was reason to be proud of that homeland:

  of all the Slav peoples the must glorious were the Bulgarians; they were the first who called themselves tsars, the first to have a patriarch, the first to adopt the Christian faith, and they it was who conquered the largest amount of territory. Thus, of all the Slav peoples they were the strongest and the most honoured, and the first Slav saints cast their radiance from amongst the Bulgarian people and through the Bulgarian language.

  Given this glorious past, said Paiisi, the Bulgarians need not feel inferior to the Greeks, quite the contrary:

  But, they say, the Greeks are wiser and more cultured, while the Bulgarians are simple and foolish and have no refined words. That is why, they say, we had better join the Greeks. But . . . There are many peoples wiser and more glorious than the Greeks. Is any Greek foolish enough to abandon his language and his teaching and his people as you abandon yours . . .? Bulgarian, do not deceive yourself, know your own nation and language and study in your own tongue.

  Map 4.1 The national revival.

  In the mid-1760s Paiisi took to the roads again, this time primarily to propagandise his manuscript which had been, he said, written ‘for the ordinary Bulgarian’ and for ‘the benefit of the whole Bulgarian nation’. In 1765 in Kotel he met Sofronii Vrachanski (of Vratsa) who was so impressed with the History that he had it copied and placed
in his church. Paiisi’s work was much copied in subsequent decades and at least fifty copies are now extant, but knowledge of its author faded. When a printed version of the great text appeared in 1844 in Budapest, it was as an anonymous work; not until 1871 did Marin Drinov, Bulgaria’s first modern, professional historian, reidentify Paiisi as the author.

  Until Drinov’s identification of Paiisi the most notable of the awakeners was Yuri Venelin, a Habsburg subject and pioneer Slavicist who did much to rediscover the Bulgarian language and bring it to the notice of foreign scholars. Born in 1802 in Ruthenia, Venelin had been schooled in theology in Hungary but this he abandoned for history which he read at the University of Lemberg (Lvov). In 1829 he published The Ancient and Present-Day Bulgarians in their Political, Ethnographic and Religious Relationship to the Russians. Historical-Critical Researches. The main purpose of the book was to argue that the Bulgarians were of Slavic rather than Turkic origin. This argument gained as few supporters as his call for Bulgarian to be made into a virtual dialect of Russian.

  The importance of Paiisi and his fellow awakeners lay not so much in their roles as creators of the national revival as in the fact that they provided post facto explanations for it. By the time Paiisi was widely read, let alone reidentified as the author of the History, the cultural revival was well under way. What prompted Bulgarians to call for more recognition of their cultural identity was not so much a consciousness of the past gained from reading Paiisi or one of the other awakeners, but contact with the world outside the Bulgarian lands, a contact gained through commerce, through education abroad, through the seepage of modern ideas into the Balkans during and after the French Revolution, and through participation in or knowledge of the Serbian and Greek revolts against rule from Constantinople. And few if any of these developments would have taken place without the upheavals experienced in the Ottoman empire in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, upheavals which both delayed the spread of the awakeners’ ideas and yet brought about the profound economic, social and political changes without which those ideas could not have been translated into action.