The Shaping of Bulgarian and Serbian National Identities, 1800s-1900s February 2003 Katrin Bozeva-Abazi Department of History McGill University, Montreal A Thesis submitted to the Faculty of Graduate Studies and Research in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy 1 Contents 1. Abstract/Resume 3 2. Note on Transliteration and Spelling of Names 6 3. Acknowledgments 7 4. Introduction 8 How "popular" nationalism was created 5. Chapter One 33 Peasants and intellectuals, 1830-1914 6. Chapter Two 78 The invention of the modern Balkan state: Serbia and Bulgaria, 1830-1914 7. Chapter Three 126 The Church and national indoctrination 8. Chapter Four 171 The national army 8. Chapter Five 219 Education and national indoctrination 9. Conclusions 264 10. Bibliography 273 Abstract The nation-state is now the dominant form of sovereign statehood, however, a century and a half ago the political map of Europe comprised only a handful of sovereign states, very few of them nations in the modern sense. Balkan historiography often tends to minimize the complexity of nation-building, either by referring to the national community as to a monolithic and homogenous unit, or simply by neglecting different social groups whose consciousness varied depending on region, gender and generation. Further, Bulgarian and Serbian historiography pay far more attention to the problem of "how" and "why" certain events have happened than to the emergence of national consciousness of the Balkan peoples as a complex and durable process of mental evolution. This dissertation on the concept of nationality in which most Bulgarians and Serbs were educated and socialized examines how the modern idea of nationhood was disseminated among the ordinary people and it presents the complicated process of national indoctrination carried out by various state institutions. The historical data examined demonstrate that before the establishment of their sovereign states ordinary Serbs and Bulgarians had only a vague idea, if any, of their national identity. The peasantry was accustomed to defining itself in terms of religion, locality and occupation, not in terms of nationality. Once the nation state was established peasants had to be indoctrinated in nationalism. The inculcation was executed through the schooling system, military conscription, the Christian Orthodox Church, and the press. It was through the channels of these state institutions that a national identity came into existence. Resume L'etat-nation est maintenant la forme dominante du Statehood souverain, cependant, il y a un siecle et demi, la carte politique de l'Europe comportait seulement une poignee d'etats souverains, tres peu d'entre eux, des nations dans le sens moderne du terme. L'historiographie traditionnelle tend souvent a reduire au minimum la complexity de la creation d'une nation, soit en se referant a la communaute nationale comme etant une unite monolithique et homogene, ou simplement en negligeant certains groupes sociaux dont la conscience a changee selon la region, le genre et la generation. De plus, l'historiographie Bulgare et Serbe prete bien plus d'attention au probleme du comment et du pourquotcertains evenements sont arrives, qu'a l'apparition de la conscience nationale des peuples balkaniques comme un processus complexe et durable d'evolution mentale. Cette dissertation sur le concept de la nationality dans lequel la plupart des Bulgares et des Serbes ont ete eduques et socialises examine comment l'idee moderne du nationhood a ete diffusee parmi les gens du peuple et elle presente le processus complique de l'endoctrinement national mene divers etablissements d'etat. Les donnees historiques examinees demontrent qu'avant 1' etablissement de leurs etats souverains, les peuples serbes et bulgares n'avaient qu'une vague idee, ou meme aucune, de leur identite nationale. Le i • paysannat a ete accoutume a se definir en termes de religion, de localite et ( de metier et non en terme de nationalite. Une fois que l'etat-nation etait etabli, les paysans ont du etre endoctrines dans le nationalisme, par le biais du systeme scolaire, de la conscription militaire, de l'eglise orthodoxe chretienne et de la presse. C'etait par les voies de ces etablissements d'etat qu'une identite nationale a pris naissance. / <: < y;<"0( w<<•:. • •frfpr/f^-'T^&V /: ,-'--- >5-/ • / •V > , /", Note on Transliteration and Spelling of Names A contemporary historian has written that "he felt great sympathy with T. E. Lawrence who once announced he was going to use as many different systems of transliteration as possible because he considered it the only effective form of protest against the inadequacies of them all". Bulgarian and Serbian names have been distinguished in the text by the use of s, c, c and j for the Serbian, which correspond to the Bulgarian sh, ch and ya. Bulgarian u is transliterated as ts; TK as zh; i> as u. All foreign terms are first translated into English, followed by the original spelling in brackets. Since there is no generally accepted form of standard for Serbian regions like Krajina or the Krajina; Banat or the Banat; Vojvodina or the Vojvodina, they might appear in either form. In the Serbian case the "linguistic" system of transliteration applied uses diacritical marks such as c (H); S (HI); Z (HC) and is based on the Croat form of Serb-Croat language. The Serbian name of Beograd is Anglicized into Belgrade; the Greek port of Thessaloniki (Thessalonica) could be also found as Solun (the Bulgarian version of the name); the same is valid for Istanbul (Tsarigrad). Some towns and cities have more than one name or a form of spelling like Dojran (Doiran in Bulgarian); Ksanti (Xanthe; Xanthi in Greek); Zajecar (Zaichar in Bulgarian). The name of the leader of the First Serbian Uprising Djordje Petrovic (1768- 1817) has many different spellings. It could be read as Kara George, Karadjordje, Karageorge or Black George. I prefer to use Karadjordje. I have tried to avoid any unusual spellings of personal names and towns, however, I take responsibility for any technical errors and quotes. Acknowledgements The completion of this dissertation would be impossible without the support of research grants and awards, including the Max Stern Academic Fellowship (1997/8); the Bernard Tarshish Academic Award and the Robert Vogel Commemorative Award (1997/8); a Hydro-Quebec McGill Major Fellowship (1999/2000); an International Bursary (2000/01); an Alma Mater Research Fellowship (1999/2000) and a grant from the History Department McGill University (2002). A number of scholars were extremely supportive and helpful. My gratitude goes first and foremost to my supervisor who read several drafts, suggesting constructive corrections and providing invaluable guidance. Professor Brian Lewis was kind enough to read an earlier draft and made valuable comments on it. Professor Ivo Banac (Yale University) helped with the translation and interpretation of some difficult passages in Serb-Croat. Professor John Hall of McGill University was generous with his support and advice. I am also grateful to the administrative staff of McGills' History Department: Mary McDaid, Colleen Parish, George Mikula and Joddy Anderson, who were exceptionally helpful and contributed to the successful completion of the thesis. Introduction How "popular" nationalism was created The southern Slavs, divided according to historical regions rather than ethnographic principles, without a uniform language and spelling, were no more than ethnographic raw material out of which nationalities could grow. - Hans Kohn The nation state is now the dominant form of sovereign statehood. However, a century and a half ago the political map of Europe comprised only a handful of sovereign states, very few of them nation-states in the modern sense. In the Balkans, the Ottoman conquest of the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries destroyed what was left of the Byzantine Empire and the medieval states of Bulgaria and Serbia. For some five hundred years their territories were part of the Ottoman Empire. From the 1820s to the end of the First World War, the Great Powers decided which parts of the Ottoman Empire in Europe would be granted autonomous status and which governed directly by the Sublime Porte, the "Sick Man" of Europe. As a result Serbia and Greece became autonomous in 1829 in accordance with the provisions of the Treaty of Odrin1; the Danubian Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia were united after the Crimean War (1859-1861) and constituted 1 The status of the Principality of Serbia was reviewed in Articles 28 and 29 of the Paris Peace Treaty (1856) and according to Article 28, Serbia was to remain a vassal state with the recognition of "son administration independente et nationale, ainsi que la pleine liberte de culte, de legislation, de commerce et de navigation". The next article stipulated that Ottoman garrisons were to remain in Serbian forts, but that no armed intervention could be launched against Serbia without previous agreement between the signatories to the Treaty. See Ljubodrag Ristic, "Serbo-Russian relations from 1856 to 1862 according to reports by British Consuls in Belgrade", Balcanica XXVII, (Belgrade, 1996), 99- 100. as the Kingdom of Romania in 1880; Bulgaria was declared autonomous in San Stefano (March, 1878) and her status finally determined by the Treaty of Berlin (July, 1878). When Serbia and Bulgaria were created, in 1830 and 1878 respectively, their populations could not be said to have been nationally conscious. By 1914, however, every Serb and Bulgarian knew he was both a member of distinct cultural community and a subject of a nation state. The thesis which follows addresses the question of how this transformation came about. Most Balkan historians would question the truth of the foregoing statement, maintaining that the establishment of sovereign Serbian and Bulgarian states was the consequence of national movements, of the people's own efforts2. However, the frontiers of the new states did not coincide with ethnic-linguistic boundaries which were in any case blurred3.