Becoming Bulgarian : the Articulation of Bulgarian Identity in the Nineteenth Century in Its International Context: an Intellectual History
Total Page:16
File Type:pdf, Size:1020Kb
UvA-DARE (Digital Academic Repository) Becoming Bulgarian : the articulation of Bulgarian identity in the nineteenth century in its international context: an intellectual history Sampimon, J. Publication date 2006 Document Version Final published version Link to publication Citation for published version (APA): Sampimon, J. (2006). Becoming Bulgarian : the articulation of Bulgarian identity in the nineteenth century in its international context: an intellectual history. Uitgeverij Pegasus. General rights It is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like Creative Commons). Disclaimer/Complaints regulations If you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the Library know, stating your reasons. In case of a legitimate complaint, the Library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. Please Ask the Library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: Library of the University of Amsterdam, Secretariat, Singel 425, 1012 WP Amsterdam, The Netherlands. You will be contacted as soon as possible. UvA-DARE is a service provided by the library of the University of Amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) Download date:23 Sep 2021 Becoming Bulgarian The articulation of Bulgarian identity in the nineteenth century in its international context: an intellectual history ACADEMISCH PROEFSCHRIFT ter verkrijging van de graad van doctor aan de Universiteit van Amsterdam op gezag van de Rector Magnificus prof. mr. P.F. van der Heijden ten overstaan van een door het college voor promoties ingestelde commissie, in het openbaar te verdedigen in de Aula der Universiteit op donderdag 12 oktober 2006, te 10.00 uur door Jacqueline Anette Sampimon, geboren te Alkmaar Illustration 1: A map of modern Bulgaria 2 Foreword This dissertation forms part of the Philology and National Culture programme at the University of Amsterdam. More precisely, it was written as part of the project: Cultural nationalism in the Balkans during the nineteenth century: Scholarly and intellectual institutions and networks in a multi-ethnic region, initiated by Joep Leerssen, professor of Modern European literature1. In addition to my research, this project consists of studies about national movements among Greeks, Serbs/Croats and Romanians2. Other projects undertaken within the programme include studies of the scholars Joast Hiddes Halbertsma and Jernej Kopitar3. Most of the documents from archives used in this study have been edited, interpreted and published, mainly by Bulgarian scholars. In the Bulgarian tradition it is quite common for scholars to render citations in Bulgarian, sometimes even without mentioning which language was used in the original. I have tried to find and use original versions of quotations as much as possible. In the case of longer citations from languages which use the Cyrillic alphabet, the Cyrillic writing system has been adopted. To avoid practical problems with letters and ligatures like å, •, ø, œ, «, æ, ˝ and Á, older citations are quoted using the modern spelling. Nevertheless, I have tried to keep their original grammatical and lexical features. Shorter citations, names and book titles in Bulgarian, Russian, Serbian or Greek are presented in Latin transliteration, according to the system recommended by the United Nations4. Geographic names have, as far as practical, been represented by their modern names. Therefore ‘Istanbul’ instead of ‘Carigrad’ or ‘Constantinople’. This last name is used only in reference to the Patriarch of Constantinople. Whenever mention is made of ‘Bulgaria’, I use it in the 21st-century sense, unless stated otherwise. For the areas (partly) inhabited by Bulgarians in the 1 See http://www.hum.uva.nl/philology/ (under projects) for a description of the project. 2 These studies are carried out by Marjolijne Janssen, Floris van Nierop and André Kom respectively. In short, the term ‘the Amsterdam Balkan Group’ is sometimes used to refer to the four PhD students, coordinator Roel Schuyt and project leader Joep Leerssen. 3 Undertaken by Alpita de Jong and Ingrid Merchiers. 4 See http://www.eki.ee/wgrs The system presented here leads to an unambiguous way of pronunciation, also for people who do not have a command of the language in question. Some remarks about the pronunciation of unfamiliar letters: Bulgarian: č š ž are pronounced as ch sh zh in English, u as the oo in fool, h is pronounced as the ch in loch, ă as the u in mud, c sounds like the ts in let’s, and j is pronounced as y. In transliterations from Russian, ë is pronounced yo, and y is pronounced as a sound in between i and u. Transliterations from Serbian have two more letters: ć which is pronounced ch, but further forward in the mouth than č, and đ, which sounds roughly like dj. In transliterations from Greek, ch is pronounced as the ch in loch. 3 nineteenth century (modern Bulgaria, Macedonia and Thrace) I use the combination ‘the Bulgarian lands’. The same basic principle holds for personal names, although there are numerous cases of people who in modern conceptions, have more than one nationality, or none at all. I have chosen to use the name and spelling which reflects the national tradition to which individuals contributed most. Thus I speak of Nikolaos Sava Pikkolos (the way Greeks do), and not Nikola Pikolo (the Bulgarian version) or Piccolo (the French version); and Adamantios Korais (Greek), instead of Coray (French, the way he did himself). An exception to this rule is made to avoid obscuring family links between people. Thus I used the Bulgarian version Atanas Bogoridi over the Greek Athanasios Vogoridis, to express his kinship with the prince Stefan Bogoridi and his descendants, who are much better known among Bulgarians. The names of Pavel Jozef Šafárik and Franz Miklošič are represented not in the German version that they used themselves, but in their native Slovak and Slovenian respectively. For readers who are not familiar with any Balkan language the endings of personal names will often provide a clue to a person’s primary identification. A widely-known anecdote tells the story of a man who, depending on the political situation and the place where he is at the moment, can introduce himself as: Petrov (Bulgarian) Petrović (Serbian/Croatian) Petro(v)ski (Macedonian) Petroglu (Turkish) Petrou/Petridis (Greek) Petrescu (Romanian) Personal and geographical names that are well known in another language, like the Greek Moschopolis (nowadays Voskopoja in Albanian), or have a current English name, like Vienna and Moscow, have been given in the more widespread form. The appendix to this dissertation provides a glossary of some terms that might be unfamiliar to the reader. 4 1: Introduction. Aims, backgrounds, method By 1914, when the First World War was unleashed as a result of the Sarajevo incident, Bulgaria was already an established state on the Balkans. It had, in the immediately preceding Balkan Wars, seen a dramatic expansion, and then a re-curtailment, of its territory, and counted as one of the major geopolitical players in the region. A century previously, the very concept of ‘Bulgarian’ was practically unheard-of. If the name of ‘Bulgaria’ was known at all, it was as the name of a medieval realm which had disappeared; ‘Bulgarians’ were a tribe of uncertain identity and origin, like other shady ethnicities from an undocumented past such as Thracians, Sarmathians, Huns, Magyars or Turks. The name had survived as byword for a heresy, and as a term of abuse (Bugomil, bougre, bugger). The population was identified only as subjects of the Ottoman Empire, ruled by a Greek-Orthodox (and Greek-speaking) church hierarchy under Ottoman auspices, and at best speaking (in the private sphere) some obscure dialect which was not even generally recognized yet as belonging to the Slavic language family. In the nineteenth century, then, this amorphous group was constituted into a Bulgarian nation5. The present thesis wants to analyse this process. It is known, generally, as the Văzraždane or Bulgarian ‘rebirth’, culminating in the creation of a Bulgarian state when the Treaty of San Stefano concluded the Russian-Turkish war of 1877-78. This San Stefano-Bulgaria was extensive and the Great Powers of Europe feared that it would give Russia too much influence on the Balkans. As a result, in July 1878 at the Berlin Congress, the European powers decided that the size of Bulgaria was to be reduced drastically. The 5 Many definitions have been applied to the term nation. In this work I will follow the definition as given by Ernest Gellner. He stated that two men are of the same nation if 1) and only if they share the same culture, where culture in turn means a system of ideas and signs and associations and ways of behaving and communicating, and if 2) they recognize each other as belonging to the same nation. Gellner, Ernest (1983). Nations and nationalism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press), 7. A nation is, according to Miroslav Hroch, to be distinguished from what he calls a Non Dominant Ethnic Group in the following aspects: 1) the nation possesses a complete or almost complete hierarchical social structure, including educated elites and an entrepreneurial bourgeoisie; 2) members of the nation also form a community of citizens with equal rights, and they act and proceed as such; 3) they have or strive for an institutionalized internal administration for the territory they inhabit, and are aware of its boundaries; 4) they use a codified standard language, or demand that this be used in schools; 5) they claim a collection of works of high culture, specifically their own, although this may include elements from a previous pre-national period; 6) next to their awareness of a common origin, they also acquired a knowledge of their own history.