1 Introduction

The book¹ looks at the beliefs and religious practices of mixed Muslim and Orthodox Christian communities in the Western Rhodopes in the context of popular attitudes towards non-coreligionist neighbours. The problem, which is of pressing importance locally, seems to be increasingly important in the global context of heightening conflicts with the world of Islam and the growing wave of Islamophobia. The study focuses on mixed Muslim-Christian communities whose historical experience is in some ways analogous to similar communities in Macedonia or Bosnia, primarily through the shared experience of several centuries of Ottoman rule, which left a lasting mark on daily life and culture, including the strategy of good relations between neighbours in religiously and ethnically mixed populations.

The book examines the role of religious syncretism in the social and religious life of Muslim-Christian communities in the Western Rhodopes. My interest is mainly on the origins and motivations of various beliefs and behaviors which at first sight may appear to be syncretic. I also look at syncretism in the context of anti-syncretic tendencies, particularly pronounced among Muslim neophytes and young members of the Muslim religious elite, who are not interested in the local forms of traditional Islam (which I call “Adat Islam”²), preferring instead a “pure” form of religion modelled on Sunni Islam as practiced in Saudi Arabia (which I refer to as “Salafi Islam”).

This is the first study to look at syncretism in Bulgaria from this perspective. Reliable and unpoliticized research on Bulgarian-speaking Muslims has been available in Bulgaria since the early 1990s, however Bulgarian studies of Muslim-(Pomak)-Christian relations tended to skirt the questions formulated above (partly for ideological reasons), and were content to simply point out that syncretic phenomena were present on the ground (which tended to be implicitly presented as a good thing). In that case, syncretism is treated as a quality of folk religion: symptomatic of doctrinal ignorance, evidence of people clinging to surviving holdouts of pagan belief. In a sort of mental shortcut (which explains its unorthodox nature without having to probe into folk culture more deeply), syncretism in this way thinking is perceived as an inseparable quality of Bulgarian folk culture.

In a similar manner, comparative studies of the religious cultures of Muslims and Orthodox Christians are an under-researched area. Given the dynamic international situation influencing the life of the mixed populations of the Rhodopes, this is a research gap which urgently needs to be filled.

This book focuses on syncretism from a broad perspective in which it is treated as an ambiguous phenomenon through which a religiously mixed population is able to conceal and manage conflicting emotions through bottom-up cultural strategies (“strategies from below”).

I was first inspired to think of syncretism in terms of adaptation strategies after completing a research project on folk soteriology in mixed Muslim-Christian communities in the central Rhodopes in the summer of 2002. My thinking was influenced by the theoretical formulation of the problem proposed by Rosalind Shaw and Charles Stewart in Syncretism/Anti-syncretism. The Politics of Religious Synthesis (1994). Shaw and Stewart propose a dialectical understanding of religious synthesis, which they treat as a product of opposing syncretic and anti-syncretic tendencies. In this perspective, anti-syncretism is antagonistic to religious synthesis: a tendency to preserve a distinct religious identity in a pure, “authentic” form, and to resist the influence of an outside religion perceived as a threat. Each of those processes may take place “from below” (through a bottom-up strategy, usually intellectually unexamined) or “from above” (through a planned and deliberate top-down strategy orchestrated by religious elites).

Syncretism “from below” may involve spontaneous and unexamined adaptations of external religious influence, leading in its extreme form to the emergence of a new local Muslim-Christian form of religious life. Anti-syncretism is a form of resistance against the assimilationist ambitions (symbolic violence) of another religion. It, too, may be spontaneous (taking place “from below”) or orchestrated by the elite (“from above”, in a top-down fashion). Depending on the particular agenda, a religious elite may throw its weight behind synthetic processes (syncretism) or “purifying” efforts (anti-syncretism). Unlike syncretism, which may be conscious or unconscious, anti-syncretism tends to be conscious and often intellectual.

Where syncretism functions as an adaptation strategy for peaceful coexistence I use a term proposed by Aleksander Posern-Zieliski (1987, p. 338–339) to distinguish between “shallow” (apparent) syncretism and “deep” (structural) syncretism. “Shallow” syncretism does not modify belief in any significant way; it finds expression in such religious practices as two religious groups visiting a shared holy place or using the religious services of specialized members of the other religion (healers, hodzhas³, priests). The functions of “shallow” syncretism may be varied and fluid. As Shaw and Stewart point out, it can even function as a form of resistance, appearing in tandem with isolationist and fundamentalist attitudes which could be described as anti-syncretic. The depth of this process (the difference between “shallow” and “deep” syncretism) can only be gauged through the lens of religious belief: on its surface, a cultural phenomenon may look like religious syncretism even though its actual (deep) structure of belief is diametrically opposed to such an interpretation. Accordingly, I regard beliefs expressed in the various local narratives as cultural evidence of the motivations underlying cultural practices, including those practices which at first sight appear to be syncretic. This book proposes to examine such practices more closely to reveal their deeper layers.

This perspective privileges belief (religious beliefs, elements of religious doctrine) over religious practice, a choice which may be questioned⁴ in the context of the recent trends in the anthropology of religion with its shift towards an emphasis on the embodied and material dimensions of religious life, which relegate verbalized religious expression to a position of lesser importance. However, anthropologists need not, and perhaps even should not, follow theoretical fashions where those are flatly contradicted by the emic ways of thinking about the world. The book’s emphasis on creed as the most important marker of religious syncretism seems warranted in the light of my research material. In situations where Muslims spontaneously invoke richly symbolic religious narratives or use sacred exegesis to explain the meaning of their own religious practice (or to discredit Christian practice), it is difficult to dismiss their beliefs as being less important than behaviors such as their sporadic visits to Christian priests or churches made for purposes of healing. Given the prevalent Muslim belief that Christians cannot be “saved”, it would not be warranted to treat such practices as evidence of a deeply syncretic religious life in the Rhodopes. And conversely, it would be difficult to disregard the strong influence of Muslim religious culture on the Christian understanding of blood sacrifice, as revealed in the Christian explanations of the origins and significance of the so-called “vowed kurbans⁵” (Turkish: kurban, Arabic: qurban), a practice modelled on the sacrifice of Abraham (Bulgarian: Avraam, local Muslim variant: Ibrahim, Turkish: brahim, Arabic: Ibrahim) in which animals are sacrificed so that God may spare a human life. Christians treat this ritual as being more important than the Communion, which they regard as not particularly relevant to personal salvation or spiritual needs.

Relationships of power (dominance and subservience) are one of the dimensions of religious syncretism and anti-syncretism. In my research area relationships of power have historically gone through a series of major shifts. Muslims were the dominant group in the period of Ottoman rule, only to become marginalized after Bulgaria was liberated in 1878⁶ (experiencing intermittent persecution under different regimes, including the Communists). Today, Bulgarians are the dominant group at the state level, while Muslims mostly predominate locally in the Western Rhodopes. Notably in this context, the Turkish minority party DPS⁷ led by Ahmed Dogan has been a significant power in Bulgarian Parliament since the collapse of Communism, nimbly leveraging its votes for political advantage. Also, attempts to get a Pomak political party off the ground were reported in the media in the fall of 2008.

This book attempts to answer the question of syncretism and power: To what extent do power relations influence religious dialogue and potential criticisms of syncretism? Who gets to represent a religion in religious dialogue? In addition to identifying the dominant group (religious authorities) I also want to give voice to people who are not members of local elites because they often represent the hidden religious motivations of the local population (syncretism from below).

I do not address the broader nature of Islam and Christianity as syncretic religions.⁸ Instead, I want to identify the pro- and anti-syncretic attitudes which organize the contacts between the religions and the religious cultures of selected mixed Muslim-Christian communities in the Western Rhodopes. My emphasis is on analyzing the symbolic dimension and the cultural function of syncretism to find out whether religious syncretism helps to integrate the two religious groups, or is perhaps a kind of pretence obscuring an underlying isolationist and anti-syncretic tendencies in the two religious. Do members of those communities engage in syncretic or anti-syncretic strategies in their relations with non-coreligionist neighbours? What do they think about their neighbours’ religion, and what kind of narratives do they use to express their views? Do they adopt any religious practices from their non-coreligionist neighbours? How do they sanction such borrowed practices?

1.1  Research Method

My field research was conducted in local Muslim-Christian communities in the region of Gotse Delchev⁹ (formerly Nevrokop) in the Western Rhodopes. My material is based on a selection of case studies. My respondents include members of the local functional elites¹⁰, i.e. influential individuals who shape the relations between the religions, including the mayor of Garmen and his wife, Ahmed and Shurfe Bashev¹¹, mufti Aydin Mohamed (head of the Muslim community in the Gotse Delchev region), three members of Orthodox Christian clergy: Metropolitan¹² Natanail, Archimandrite¹³ Grigoriy and one priest who wished to remain anonymous, eight hodzhas, the principal of the school in Satovcha and her husband (a religion teacher), five teachers, three local healers (one dzhindzhiya¹⁴ and two female healers), female members of staff at the culture center in Garmen and a male member of staff at the culture center in Dabnitsa, and three female members of staff in the local council in Garmen.

The material in the book comprises data from field observations and 63 in-depth interviews in Bulgarian conducted in 2005-2009.

My methodology favors what Michael Herzfeld describes as “empirical reflexivity”, an attitude where an ethnographic encounter (with all its limitations) is perceived through an imperfect interlocking of two different codes, with a multiplicity of different identities and conjectures (cf. Herzfeld 2001). Through reflexivity we are able to emphasize the meanings ascribed by participants to cultural practices as basic data points in ethnographic record. In my case, I attempted to identify the categorizing role of religion in relations between members of different religions: the specific beliefs and religious practices shaping attitudes towards non-coreligionist neighbours, the context in which they operate, and above all the meanings attributed to them by the respondents.

Ethnographic field research involves an experience which could be described in the language of Gadamer’s hermeneutics as “transposing oneself”, i.e. imagining oneself in the situation of the other, an act which ”consists neither in the empathy of one individual for another nor in subordinating another person to our own standards; rather, it always involves rising to a higher universality that overcomes not only our own particularity but also that of the other” (Gadamer 2004 p. 304), an experience Gadamer describes as a “fusion of horizons” (p. 305). In social science, such fusing of horizons can be interpreted as the effort to identify the emic categories used by the respondents, which can be used to unlock the interpreted material and translate it into the researcher’s own etic terms. Our preconceived notions are tested when the answers supplied by our respondents force us to recognize our initial understanding as inadequate. In such a case, we need to revise it in terms of our experience (Hastrup 1995). In my case, such a moment of realization came when my conversations with Muslims led me to wonder what Christianity would be like if the apostle James, rather than the apostle Paul, had played a more formative role in its early stages (some Muslims, mostly hodzhas, described Christianity as a religion created by the apostle Paul). I think one of my Muslim respondents had a similar experience as he realized that the touching of the black stone when circling the Kaaba was not unlike the Orthodox cult of the icons – a reflection he quickly tried to suppress by insisting that any similarity between the two was spurious and only obtained “logically speaking”.

Anthropological analysis is not a faithful and objective description of culture; it is a subjective interpretation seeking to identify those elements which participants in a given culture regard as significant. This is not to say that a limitless number of equally valid interpretations is possible; on the contrary, when we comply with the hermeneutical postulate to analyze pars pro toto et totum pro parte, the range of possible interpretations narrows down significantly. However, every researcher will have different ways of looking at the same social reality. The book contains a large number of passages quoted directly from my respondents in an attempt to show their ways of understanding and articulating the problems. By quoting extensively from my interviews I wish to lay open the basis for my conclusions. In formulating my questions I tried to negotiate them with my respondents in accordance with the values of ethnography based on dialogue and polyphony¹⁵ (Clifford 1988, p. 51).

My book does not aspire to what Clifford calls “a Flaubertian omniscience” or to ascribe subjective states to the culture I am describing (cf. Clifford 1988, p. 48). My analysis remains centered on specific situations and conversations in which I try, inasmuch as possible, to give voice to the people I spoke to.

The subject of the book frequently touches upon difficult religious and political problems, and much of the data has been anonymized to protect my respondents, but many of my respondents spoke as public figures and did not expect anonymity.

1.2  Transliteration, Spelling and Terminology

My transliteration from the Bulgarian Cyrillic alphabet into Latin is based on familiar and intuitive English equivalents (=sh, =ch, =zh, =ts, =yu). One exception is the special character for the Bulgarian letter . However, I do not use in geographical names (which follow the Latinized spelling used in most online maps) or names of Bulgarian researchers and public figures (which reflect the forms they use in English publications and media reports).

The local dialect used in the Rhodopes, where I did my field research, contains numerous borrowings from Turkish and Arabic which are often difficult to trace or pin down. Historically, the culture of the region remained under Ottoman influence, and many of the terms used in the local dialect are borrowings from Turkish. This derivation is often reflected in their phonetic structure, even though their etymological roots often go deeper, extending all the way to Arabic or Persian etymons. Recent linguistic developments confuse the picture even further as young Islamic teachers are often trained in Arabic countries and import a lot of Arabic religious terminology into their communities. As a result, no single homogeneous transliteration system is possible, and a degree of variation has been retained in the book where meaningful.

To avoid complication, most of the Islamic religious terms follow the versions customarily used in English texts, which are usually based on Arabic. Because different transcription and transliteration systems are used in different English sources, I use a uniform simplified system unencumbered by specialised symbols, which I hope will be intuitive to English speakers without departing from the Arabic original (such as Sunnah, Shi‘ah, Shari‘ah, surah). Exceptions include those terms and proper names which operate in English almost exclusively in a modified form (such as muezzin, Kaaba, Mecca, Medina, al-Qaeda). Religious terms borrowed from Arabic or Turkish but relating to the local habitus or with no widespread English use (hodzha, kurban, tyurbe, abdest) are transliterated from Bulgarian. When appearing in the text for the first time, such non-English terms are accompanied by their Turkish equivalents in modern Turkish spelling and, where applicable, by their Arabic and Persian equivalents.

Depending on the context, names of Biblical and Qur’anic figures appear in English or are transcribed from Arabic in the simplified form. Given the subject of the book, a unified approach did not seem advisable; an English version would unduly favour the Christian perspective (and the Hebrew perspective, as in the name “Ishmael”), and a uniformly Arabic transcription would skew the perception towards the Muslim perspective. This kind of linguistic intervention implies a symbolic appropriation as each version generates a different set of connotative, psychological and hagiographic tones, which elides the considerable difference between, say, the Christian figure of Jesus and the Qur’anic prophet ‘Isa. In many cases my decisions were made on a case-by-case basis, guided by the context and the speaker’s presumed intentions. Where such culturally contested figures appear in the text for the first time, I list the variant forms of the their names in brackets.

In interview transcripts, religious terms and proper names of Qur‘anic figures appear in the local dialect of Bulgarian in keeping with the Bulgarian transliteration rules described above (e.g. the archangel Gabriel or the Muslim Jibra’il is transliterated as Dzhibrail in quotes from interviews). Where my Muslim respondents used both the Muslim and Christian variants to make themselves clear, I retained the dual variants in the quoted material.

The names of classical Muslim writers appear in simplified transcription from Arabic, with the exception of bibliographic notes and the bibliography, where the names follow the published version. To make it easier to identify such authors, the bibliography also includes the names in my simplified transcription. Names of contemporary scholars publishing in European languages appear in the versions used in their published works.

In material quoted from other sources, original published versions are adhered to throughout.

1.3  Field Research and Methodology

I conducted my research in several towns and villages in the region of Gotse Delchev in the communes of Garmen and Satovcha in the Western Rhodopes including Garmen, Satovcha, Ribnovo, Osikovo, Ognianovo, Dabnitsa, Hadzhidimovo, Breznitsa¹⁶ and “Vodino”¹⁷.

In the Ottoman Empire, Gotse Delchev (then: Nevrokop) was the only city located in the Rhodopes Range (Radushev 2005, p. 35), founded by Emperor Trajan (98–117 CE) to commemorate a victory over the Dacians in Dobruja (Radushev 2005, p. 35). Accordingly, the city was named Nikopolis ad Nestum¹⁸, meaning “the city of victory on the River Mesta” (Radushev 2005, p. 35).

1.3.1  Ribnovo

My first research location was Ribnovo. Established in 1826, Ribnovo is located on the mountainside of Dabrash and has a population of ca. 3,000, making it the second largest village in the region of Gotse Delchev. In the 17th century the village was called Ribne (identified in Ottoman records as Ribna), and some of its inhabitants were Christian families. My respondents mentioned the fact that Christians used to live in Ribnovo, but the village had an all-Muslim population since the 19th century (marriages with outsiders are sporadic, and many inhabitants of Ribnovo are related).

The etymology of Ribnovo is unclear, and my respondents were unable to explain it. Although the name is outwardly similar to the word “fish” (Bulgarian: riba), the locals associate the name with a herb which used to grow in the area. They say that Ribnovo used to be located at the intersection of trade routes connecting Bulgaria and Greece. At 700 meters above sea level, Ribnovo is the last Bulgarian village before the Greek border.

Compared to other localities, Ribnovo is characterized by a large number of hodzhas (more than any other town or village in the Rhodopes) and religious conservatism.

Not many male inhabitants of Ribnovo (and almost none of the females) have a higher education. For fear of “corruption”, families rarely consent to young women temporarily moving to cities on their own, but the situation is beginning to change. A local high school was opened in 1993 thanks to assistance from George Soros’s Open Society Foundation (Otvoreno Obshtestvo), significantly improving the educational prospects in Ribnovo. In addition to the high school, the area also has a primary school, a kindergarten and two mosques.

My research in the area was greatly facilitated by the Ottoman Studies researcher Antonina Zhelyazkowa from the International Center for Minority Studies and Intercultural Relations (IMIR) in Sofia.

In Ribnovo I stayed in the house of the parents of the Mayor of Garmen who are senior citizens (the mayor lives in Ognianovo but was born in Ribnovo). This gave me a chance to observe the daily life of my hosts: the host performing ritual ablutions before prayer, the hostess praying on rug at home during Muslim prayer times, dinner served on rugs and newspapers spread on the floor (invited guests, the mayor and his wife were served food at the table), or the host playing the tambourine. During my stay at Ribnovo, my “gatekeeper” wore the traditional costume of a married woman (as she explained it to me, “out of respect for her mother-in-law”), but in her own town (Ognianovo) she wore “European-style clothes”. Other women behave in the same way when they travel (especially to the capital). Otherwise they feel uncomfortable in alien surroundings when wearing the traditional costume, which makes them feel uncomfortable.

Almost all of the women wear traditional Muslim clothes: flower-patterned shalvari trousers in various colours and made of different fabrics (on special occasions young girls might wear plain, sequined shalvari made of satin), zabradkas or kerchiefs (kerchiefs worn by older women are white and tied under the chin to cover the neck and the hair; unmarried women wear bright colored kerchiefs with a colourful flower pattern, tied at the back of their heads to leave the neck exposed¹⁹), dark blue socks, long-sleeved tops (often sport sweatshirts), and (for married women) a manto, looking like a long-sleeved over-dress which replaced the traditional feredzhe²⁰ (Turkish: ferace) which were banned in Communist times. Unmarried women often wear tights and high heeled shoes with the shalvari. Males wear no distinguishable clothes, with the possible exception of a black beret worn by some men (during Communist times it replaced the fez²¹). Local shops are well-stocked with traditional clothes and fabrics.

On a few rare occasions I also met women wearing “Arab style” clothing, to borrow a term used by Kristen Ghodsee, who noted its increasing popularity in the region of Madan, where she did field research on the connections between post socialism, gender and modern Muslim religious life (Ghodsee 2010, 2, 162). Ghodsee notes that this style of clothing was often chosen for financial reasons as competing religious factions active in the area offered financial incentives to Muslim women in exchange for wearing “Arab” clothes (Ghodsee 2010, p. 175).

During my field research (especially in Ribnovo) I tried to dress inconspicuously in long, loose-fitting dresses with high necklines and long sleeves but my clothes still proved to be inadequate compared to the local standards. On one occasion, a local conservative hodzha pointed to me with his cane and said that it was improper for women to be parading around “naked”. Being fully clothed except my head I found that surprising before I realized that a married woman with her head uncovered was practically naked from the hodzha’s perspective²².

Ribnovo turned out to be a place of contrasts. The local cafés-cum-shops sold sugar in packaging featuring pictures of half-naked women, and televisions in private homes were often tuned to music channels, with music videos of sexy Bulgarian popstars constantly running in the background as a sort of unintended commentary on our discussions about the moral decline of the West: an irony blithely ignored by my respondents, who seemed to make no connection between their own entertainment, consisting as it did of gyrating women in various stages of undress, and the scrupulously covered local women.

Ribnovo is dominated by patriarchal values. As one Muslim woman told me, those values are guarded by older women (primarily mothers-in-law) and the local hodzhas. She complained about the double standards involved in a social arrangement where men keep women sheltered and isolated while they spend time away from Ribnovo meeting lovers in other towns. Local girls marry young, mostly at the age of 15 and tend to stay indoors after 9 o’clock at night while the man spend nights in bars to talk and, in some cases, to drink alcohol.

1.3.2  Satovcha

I conducted my fieldwork in Satovcha in 2005 in the company of my thesis supervisor, Prof. Magdalena Zowczak (Institute of Ethnology and Cultural Anthropology, University of Warsaw) and my sister, Pavlina Carlucci (who provided the photographic documentation). Our respondents were mistrustful and noncommittal, so establishing rapport was not always easy. Fieldwork began inauspiciously, with a failed attempt at interviewing the local imam²³, who refused to shake my hand²⁴ and initially did not turn up for the interview; when he finally gave us an interview, he was rather laconic. However, respondents in Satovcha provided me in the end with some of my key observations as long interviews in religiously homogenous groups made it possible for my Muslim and Christian respondents to reveal their hidden mutual fears (see Chapter 3). As the conversations circled around topics they found visibly painful, at times it felt like they were oblivious of my presence.

My Christian respondents seemed warm and open but they did not feel competent to discuss religious matters, and indeed were often quite uninformed about religion, not being able to even narrate the story of Adam and Eve²⁵, and the “fall” of the first parents. They were disappointed that I was not collecting folk songs, as the Polish theatre company Gardzienice did when it had visited the area several years previously, leaving a strong, lasting impression on the local inhabitants. Wherever we mentioned the fact that we came from Poland, people were offering to sing their traditional songs or even, in one case, to enact the traditional ritual lamentations for the dead.

Muslims are in the majority in Satovcha, accounting for two thirds of the population (they also predominate in the local government). Christians explain the numerical advantage of Muslims with the fact that many local Christians migrated to central Bulgaria in 1944-1945. Local opinions about the area’s past demographics vary, with each religious group overestimating the size of the other.

In Satovcha I stayed with the local school principal and her teacher husband, a family of Muslim neophytes.

Several conjectures exist concerning the etymology of the town’s name. The first is connected with a vessel used in beekeeping (possibly a historical occupation in the area), known as a sat in the local dialect. Others have speculated that the name derives from the word “matchmaker” (Bulgarian: svat) or “wedding” (Bulgarian: svatba), corrupted to Satovcha in Ottoman times from the original Svatovitsa. According to my respondent, a Bulgarian teacher in the local primary school, some of the older inhabitants still use the former name Svatovitsa.

The local region is also known as Chech, which my respondents interpreted as “forgotten by the world”. According to the Bulgarian historian Evgeni Radushev, Ottoman records mention a village named Chech²⁶ in 1478 (Radushev 2005, p. 433) which afterwards drops out of historical record, but that village was probably unrelated to the region and located near the village of Radibosh near Drama, Greece (Radushev 2005, p. 434).

1.3.3  Garmen

In the summer of 2006 and spring of 2009 I conducted my research in the Christian town of Garmen (the only Christian town in the local commune). I also conducted two interviews in Dabnitsa (located several miles from Garmen and inhabited by Orthodox Christian Bulgarians, Turks²⁷ and Roma people) and several more in the mixed Muslim-Christian village of Ognianovo (formerly Fotovishta), famous for its healing mineral springs.

Today, Garmen comprises a quarter called Zagrade, formerly Chuflike (Turkish: Çuflike, Çiflike) and the new Garmen, which is located less than a mile away. Only ruins remain of the old Garmen, which used to be located on higher ground and away from the road (an unfavourable location which probably sealed its fate). The inhabitants of old Garmen were resettled to new Garmen in 1924–1948 (Minaloto… 2003, p. 30).

There are two conjectures concerning the name of Garmen. One etymology derives the name from the word “thunder” (Bulgarian: grm) as the local iron deposits supposedly attract lightning strikes. The other derives it from the name of an early settler, one “German” from Albania. The quarter in which German settled was supposedly known as Germanova, and ultimately the name came to be applied to the town as a whole, which was renamed Garmen.

Despite the conjectural presence of Christian Albanians/Arnauts²⁸ among the early²⁹ settlers in Garmen, the local inhabitants consider themselves pure Bulgarians: “if they built a church, that means they were Bulgarians”. Still, some of the families in Garmen are believed to be descended from those early outsider settlers (Minaloto… 2003, p. 26). Some argue that Garmen predated the arrival of Albanian settlers.

Garmen is the seat of the mayor’s office. The mayor, Ahmed Bashev, was one of my respondents and provided me with invaluable help. My local “gatekeepers” were two Christian women, Krasimira and her mother Sofiya. The ancestors of Krasimira and Sofiya built the local chapel of St. Nedelya/St. Kyriake after seeing the saint in their dream, and later unearthed an icon of St. Nedelya from the ground. Today, prayers are held in the chapel only on the feast of St. Nedelya and on the Feast of the Holy Spirit (which involves a ritual sacrifice of five rams).

1.4  The Respondents

The studied population comprised two religious groups: Bulgarian-speaking Muslims (Pomaks) and Orthodox Christians. Both groups are indigenous to the area.

I interviewed a total of 85 people including 40 Sunni Muslims, 41 Orthodox Christians, one Protestant and 3 atheists. 50 women and 35 men were interviewed. The respondents were mostly middle-aged or in their retirement age. Only several people were under the age of 30. Most of my older respondents (over 65 years of age), including hodzhas and one women I refer to as a bula³⁰, had elementary or primary education.

Most of the middle-aged respondents were college-educated or were pursuing college education (several people had a secondary education). College-educated respondents included the Mayor of Garmen, the Mufi of Gotse Delchev, the Bishop of Nevrokop, the archimandrite Grigoriy, four schoolteachers (two female and two male), a female school principal, a female kindergarten principal, two female civil servants, two secretaries of local culture centres (one male, one female), three hodzhas and one priest.

To protect the anonymity of my respondents, their names have been changed or abbreviated to initials, with the exception of people speaking on the record as public figures (Mayor Ahmed Bashev, Metropolitan Natanail, Mufti Aydin Mohamed). The following abbreviations are used in interviews to identify respondents: W (woman), M (man), Ch (Christian), M (Muslim).

During my research I had the impression that the religious life of the local Muslims was at a crossroads: on the one hand the local population preserves many elements of traditional religion (in the book I refer to this as “Adat Islam”), on the other hand they are subject to ideological pressures from “Salafi Islam”, a global presence seeking to unify Islam worldwide by eliminating its local elements.

I was struck by the disproportion in the levels of religious knowledge in the two groups. Muslims are increasingly knowledgeable about matters of their faith, whereas the local Christians tend to know very little about their religion. The local Muslims also seem to be far more affected by the pressures of modernity on religious life, such preferring expert authority and written sources to the authority of elders. The standards of religious education are likewise higher among the Muslims. They often read the Qur’an, during Ramadan they listen to sermons preached in mosques by hodzhas, who are increasingly being trained abroad in places such as Macedonia, Saudi Arabia or Turkey. The local Muslims buy religious books (which are often sponsored by local Muslim associations), and even listen to recordings of Muslim sermons on CDs.

The following sections contain introductory information helpful in understanding the main ideas of the book. In the case of Pomaks, this includes topics such as the perspective of Bulgarian historiography on the processes of Islamicization and conversion to Islam, or the attempted state-sponsored assimilation campaigns, a traumatic experience self-described by Pomaks as “an open wound” in their collective identity and a significant experience in the context of religious syncretism and anti-syncretism.

The religious life of Bulgarian-speaking Muslims is described in more detail in the later chapters. This reflects the nature of the collected material, as the two religious groups provided very different answers to the questions in my research plan. Although I posed the same questions to Muslims and Orthodox Christians, only the former replied almost invariably with religious narratives favorably contrasting Islam with Christianity, sharing a great deal of information about their beliefs and religious practices.

On the other hand, my Christian respondents had little to say on the subject of religion, whether their own or that of their Muslim neighbours. When questioned about the religious life of Muslims, they ignored comparisons between Islam and Christianity, and focused instead on the ethnic identity of the Pomaks. Although their narratives make it possible to draw conclusions about their attitudes towards Islam, they offer little information about their opinions about their own religious life. Unlike the Muslims, who tended to explain their religious practices in terms of elaborate symbolic religious narratives, my Christian respondents typically replied that they engaged in religious practices “for health”. Based on my research material I conclude that the kurban, blood sacrifice, plays a crucial role in their religious life, next to beliefs connected with averting the evil eye and “fright”.

1.4.1  Bulgarian-Speaking Muslims (Pomaks)

Bulgarian-speaking Muslims are referred to in the literature as Pomaks, Bulgaromahommedans or Bulgarian Muslims. In this book I use two terms interchangeably, Bulgarian-speaking Muslims and Pomaks. “Bulgarian-speaking Muslims”, an appellation used by the German historian Ulf Brunnbauer (2007, p. 94) or the American historian Mary Neuburger (2004), seems to be the most politically correct term. Unlike the exoethnonym “Pomaks”, it does not carry any pejorative connotations and is free of symbolic violence: it has no ideological implications and does not impose an ethnic identity on the group (unlike “Bulgarian Muslims”, which presupposes that members of the group are Bulgarians).

However, given the widespread prevalence of the term “Pomaks” in the literature of the subject (particularly written in English and German), I do not reject it outright. In common with Mary Neuburger I believe that it is a handier term than “Bulgarian Muslims” or “Bulgaromohammedans”³¹ (Neuburger 2004, p. 2). The latter term, proposed by the ethnographer Stoil Shishkov (1931) to emphasize the group’s Bulgarian identity, is unacceptable because it not only presupposes that members of the group are Bulgarians, but also suggests that they worship Muhammad³² rather than Allah, which would be an act of idolatry (Muhammad being only a prophet). Despite those two serious shortcomings, an updated form of the term (“Mohammeddan Bulgarians”) continues to be used by some Bulgarian researchers (Raychevski 2004, Boneva 1994). The term was also criticized by my Muslim respondents, who are highly sensitive to any attempts at imposing a national identity on the group after experiencing the traumas involved in the “revival process” (vzroditelen protses)³³.

“Bulgarian Muslims”, the preferred term used by modern Bulgarian researchers (Gruev, Kalionski 2008), suffers from the same defect. Pomaks, despite being an exoethnonym as well, is generally accepted in the literature where it relates to the indigenous local Slavic population professing Islam and found in Bulgaria but also Albania, Greece, Macedonia³⁴ and Turkey, with an estimated combined population of 500,000. At 150,000–200,000³⁵ (Mancheva 2001, p. 358), most Pomaks live in Bulgaria, mainly in the Rhodopes, with smaller dispersed groups in several villages of the central range of the Stara Planina between Lovech and Tetven (Mancheva 2001, p. 358). Pomaks profess Islam, which brings them closer to the Turkish population, but they speak the Bulgarian language³⁶, which places them closer to the Bulgarians. As demonstrated in the 1990s by Tsvetana Georgieva, a Bulgarian historian and Ottoman scholar, Bulgarian-speaking Muslims identify themselves as Turkish in the Western Rhodopes, and as Bulgarian in the Central and Eastern Rhodopes³⁷ (Georgieva 1995, p. 142). In my own research in the Western Rhodopes I never encountered Muslims who identified themselves as Turkish. Almost all of them emphasized that they considered ethnic identity to be secondary compared to their identity as members of the Ummah³⁸ or the collective community of Islamic peoples, even though they insisted they were taking their duties as Bulgarian citizens very seriously. According to Mary Neuburger, “[n]o Balkan Muslim identity is more contested, more wrapped in multiple intertwining twisted webs of myth and history” (Neuburger 2000, p. 181).

Unlike the literature of the subject, in which the term “Pomaks” tends to be treated as neutral (Zhelyazkova 2009), Bulgarian-speaking Muslims are ambivalent about it. This is connected with the most popular etymology of the word³⁹, derived from the word pomcheni, meaning people who have been “tortured” or “persecuted” (implicitly: by the Turks) when Bulgaria was part of the Ottoman Empire. Widely accepted by the local Christians, this etymology was part of official historiography in Communist Bulgaria (1944–1989). In this context, Bulgarian-speaking Muslims are discussed either as traitors who gave up their religion and national identity to save their lives, or as “purest Bulgarians”⁴⁰ who sacrificed their faith and accepted Islam to protect Bulgarian blood from Turkish miscegenation from rapes committed against Christian women (Karavelov⁴¹ 1982, p. 305). In this interpretation, accepting Islam was a lesser evil, preferred to rapes which might produce “Turkish bastards”. Shishkov argued that the Pomaks spoke the purest old Slavic dialect and were therefore “purest” Bulgarians (cf: Neuburger 2004, p. 40).

In spite of this complicated situation, some Bulgarian-speaking Muslims identify themselves simply as Pomaks.

There are several ideas concerning the ethnogenesis of the Bulgarian-speaking Muslim population⁴². The “Turkish” theory speculates about their Turkish-Kumanian descent and their migration to Western Thrace, the Rhodopes and the Pirin Mountains in the 11th century, classifying their language as a Turkish dialect. This theory minimises the importance of Christian presence in the area, arguing that they were a late arrival in 1912 after the Balkan wars⁴³.

Based on so-called “haematological data” obtained by researchers from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, an alternative “Greek” theory proposes that the Pomak population was supposedly of a Thracian-Greek orign, indicating a “haematological affinity” of 50-70% between Greeks and the Pomak inhabitants of villages in the Greek Rhodopes (Zhelyazkova 1997, p. 37). This is an obvious example of science being misused to justify a naturalistic vision of the nation, where ethnic ties are based on blood kinship.

According to a third, unscientific theory, propagated in brochures distributed to Pomaks in the 1990s, the local population in the valley of the river Arda in the Rupchos region and in the upper reaches of the Vacha and its tributaries is described as a(k)hreni (according to one etymological theory, the word is derived from ahr myusyulmani – the last Muslims, Arabic: sing. akhir, pl. akhirun – ostatni), who migrated to Bulgaria, Macedonia, Albania and Bosnia before the Slavs and the Turks following instructions of Muhammad himself. In this theory, they were descendants of peygambers⁴⁴ – prophets sent by Muhammad to proclaim God’s word (Aleksiev 1997, p. 62). According to this theory, which has no basis in scientific evidence, this group belonged to one of the Thracian or Slavic tribes which accepted Islam directly from Arab missionaries before the Bulgarian lands became part of the Ottoman Empire (i.e. between the 9th and the 12th centuries)⁴⁵. This theory is particularly popular in the Western Rhodopes (Radushev 2005, p. 149). Some of my Muslim respondents accepted similar theories, emphasising that it was Christianity rather than Islam that was introduced to Bulgaria by force.

According to Galina Lozanova, a Bulgarian folklorist and anthropologist, those theories about the origins of Islam in the Rhodopes get adopted by Pomaks to compensate for the “historical stress” of persecution experienced during the”revival process” and the social perception of the Pomaks as a population professing a “religion of slaves” (Lozanova 1998, p. 455). Such legends are perpetuated as forms of reinterpreting the past in such a way as to reject the idea of Islam as a religion imposed by force in a traumatic process.

The process of Islamic conversion in the Rhodopes and its causes are still elusive and riddled with gaps. Bulgarian historiography has speculated that a wave of colonization in the 15th-16th centuries (in which Ottoman migrant populations from Anatolia were resettled to Rumelia⁴⁶) played an important part in the Islamicization of the local population. However, according to Antonina Zhelyazkova this migration did not cause any changes to the religious-ethnic composition of the occupied lands. Members of the Ottoman state apparatus remained primarily occupants and officials, with no assimilation on the part of the local populations (Zhelyazkova 1990, p. 141). “Given the large size of the Balkan territories, the extent of Ottoman colonization was not sufficient to cause Islamicization on its own” (Zhelyazkova 1997, p. 31).

According to Antonina Zhelyazkova, Islamicization in the Ottoman Empire was not caused by direct coercion; although some acts of violence had been committed in some historical periods, they were not as frequent as the Bulgarian chronicles would have it (Zhelyazkova 1990, p. 63). Until relatively recently, the most influential source in Bulgarian historiography offering evidence of the supposedly compulsory nature of the conversion of Bulgarian-speaking Muslims was the chronicle on the Turkish defeat of Chepino, ruled a revivalist forgery in the second half of the 20th century⁴⁷ (Zhelyazkova 1997, p. 51).

Modern Bulgarian historiography argues that many of the conversions were voluntary, if motivated by aspirations of upward social mobility⁴⁸ and by economic factors, since Muslims were exempt from the jizyah⁴⁹ (local Muslim variant: dzhizye, Turkish: cizye, Arabic: jizyah) and aspirations of upward social mobility⁵⁰. “The new convert immediately became the equal of any other Ottoman subject and could rise in the state apparatus to the highest level his abilities would allow, since all posts, bar that of sultan, where open to him” (Norton 2001, p. 187). Forced conversion applied to “blood tax” or devshirme⁵¹ (Turkish: devirme), in which Christian boys were converted to Islam and pressed into the Janissary corps or the Ottoman state apparatus. This practice features prominently in recorded Bulgarian folklore in the oral tradition in many areas of Bulgaria, including my research area. Religious propaganda also played an important part in the Islamicization process, with particular effect in those areas where Christianity was weak or unorthodox (influenced by Bogomil⁵² and Paulician sects) (Zhelyazkova 1990, p. 63).

According to the Bulgarian historian and Ottoman scholar Antonina Zhelyazkova, Islamicization began with isolated individual conversions in the 16th century and gradually intensified over the 17th century (particularly in its second half). In the Rhodopes, the process continued until the 18th century (Zhelyazkova 1997, p. 52). In the Western Rhodopes, particularly in the Chech region located along the middle of the Mesta valley, the earliest isolated conversions took place in the third quarter of the 15th century⁵³ (Radushev 2005, p. 434). According to another Bulgarian historian Evgeniy Radushev, this coincides with the appearance of the semi-nomadic shepherd Yörük tribes⁵⁴ as the conversions occurred in villages and towns located along the shepherd migration routes along which they travelled with their herds (Radushev 2005, p. 439). More important to the Islamicisation process was the introduction of Ottoman administrative structures in the region, which changed the local population’s social and economic environment (Radushev 2005, p. 440). The 16th century⁵⁵ could be described as a period of mass conversions, often involving entire families (Radushev 2005, p. 441). In the second half of the 16th century, Muslims became a majority in the town of Nevrokop (today’s Gotse Delchev) and accounted for 28% of the rural population (Radushev 2005, p. 444); in the 17th century, more than half of the local rural population were Muslims (Radushev 2005, p. 445). This process ended around 1720 with 80% of the local population professing Islam. Early in the 18th century, two-thirds of the local towns and villages were entirely Muslim or inhabited by mixed populations⁵⁶, a situation which continues to this day⁵⁷ (Radushev 2005, p. 447).

***

Whereas in the Ottoman Empire Pomaks found themselves among the relatively privileged segments of society, the liberation of Bulgaria (1878⁵⁸) brought dramatic changes. In 1912⁵⁹, Pomaks were compelled to convert to Christianity on the initiative of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, Tsar Ferdinand and Geshov’s cabinet. “As Bulgarian troops, themselves occupiers, euphorically ‘liberated’ the ‘Bulgarian lands’ from Ottoman occupation, they were accompanied by Orthodox priests who forcibly converted some 200,000 Pomaks from Islam to Christianity in hundreds of villages in Thrace, Macedonia and the Rhodope Mountains” (Neuburger 2004, p. 41). Those events occurred thirty-six years after Bulgaria’s April Uprising of 1876, in which some of the Pomaks fought on the Turkish side (Genchev 1998, p. 385). The uprising involved many dramatic acts of violence⁶⁰, the most terrible of which was a slaughter of the Christian civilian population of Batak committed by the Pomaks. In 1913⁶¹, the Pomaks “converted” to Christianity in 1912 returned to Islam and their traditional costume⁶², and the new liberal government of Vasil Radoslavov allowed them to use their Muslim names again.

The 20th century involved several traumatic experiences to the Pomak population. In the 1940s, Rodina (Fatherland), an organisation formed in Smolyan in 1937, orchestrated a new wave of assimilation efforts. The language of political propaganda used in the campaign relied on a crude version of psychoanalysis, presenting Bulgarian-speaking Muslims as a group which “forgot” its Bulgarian roots because it was afflicted by a slave mentality. Lack of enthusiasm for voluntary name changes⁶³ was interpreted as evidence of Pomak “slave fanaticism”, a state of false and repressed consciousness from which they needed (and subconsciously longed) to be “liberated”. Bulgarian-speaking Muslims were seen as victims of Islamicization whose insistence to maintain a Muslim identity could only be explained by a failure to realize their “condition as victims”.

The “enlightenment” efforts aimed at the Pomaks were calculated to “reawaken the Bulgarian national spirit” in a population that needed to be “reminded”of its Bulgarian roots. In this effort, they should be led by those Muslims who already managed to reawaken their Bulgarian spirit, i.e. Muslim activists who were proponents of the Bulgarian state (ironically, the idea was mandated in a top-down fashion, as Evgenia Ivanova rightly notes). At the turn of 1939-1940, the Pomaks were again banned from wearing traditional clothes, and in 1942 they experienced compulsory change of names. However, as Ivanova points out, Rodina activists often complained about the refractory character of the Pomaks who resisted the changes despite wearing European style clothes (Ivanova 2002, p. 47). Muslim clothes (like the fez, the feredzhe, or the shalvari), Turkish or Arabic names and Islam were treated as attributes of slavery⁶⁴, stigmatizing the Pomaks as victims of persecution and reminding of the Ottoman colonization of Bulgaria. Despite the differences of historical context, we might conclude that this official reaction to Turkish influence is not dissimilar to the way Nazis projected their anxieties onto the Jewish “other”, seeking to rid themselves of “impurity”. The assimilation tactics of Rodina were reused in later assimilation campaigns involving compulsory change of names (Ivanova 2002, p. 57).

The situation of the Pomaks changed after the Communist takeover as the Communists initially distanced themselves from the methods of Rodina. On 1 November 1945, Pomaks were allowed to use their Turkish names. However, in the following year the same Communist government conducted a census in which Bulgarian-speaking Muslims could only identify themselves as one of several approved options including “Pomak”, “Rhodope Mohammedan”, “Bulgarian” or “Other”⁶⁵. “Turkish” was not available as an option. In 1948, the government began to implement a resettlement program to rid the country of its Turkish population⁶⁶, which it was hoped would facilitate Pomak assimilation. In 1953, changes were made to identity papers, reclassifying Pomaks (formerly described as “Bulgaromohammedans”) as Bulgarians. In some towns, including Satovcha, where I did some of my research, Pomaks were not allowed to venture outside without their identity papers, even to visit a local shop or public well (Ivanova 2002, p. 65).

In 1959, a new campaign was launched banning Muslims from wearing traditional clothing (Bulgarian: razferedzhavaneto) which continued until the mid-1960s and affected not only Bulgarian-speaking Muslims but also other, smaller Islamic communities in the country (Gruev, Kalionski 2008, p. 28). Certain religious restrictions were introduced: circumcision or syunnet (Turkish: sünnet, Arabic: khitan) was banned⁶⁷, as was animal sacrifice or the kurban (Gruev, Kalionski 2008, p. 42). In 1964, a new renaming campaign was under way, which also affected Muslim Romas. The official tactic involved obtaining support from local activists who changed their names voluntarily (Gruev, Kalionski 2008, p. 53), but willing participants were not always easy to find. Mihail Gruev and Aleksei Kalionski note that no volunteers were found in Ribnovo - a town which plays an important part in my research project - which may have contributed to the local resistance to assimilation at the time⁶⁸ (Gruev, Kalionski 2008, p. 53). In the end, the government backtracked, allowing Bulgarian-speaking Muslims to use the Turkish-Arabic names (Gruev, Kalionski 2008, p. 54).

After the failed effort in 1964, another renaming campaign was attempted in 1970-1974. Renaming took place as part of local ceremonies called sbor⁶⁹. In addition to artistic performances and talks from members of the Komsomol, such ceremonies culminated in a mass renaming in which new identity papers were presented to individuals. Women’s feredzhes were also removed as part of the “ritual” (Ivanova 2002, p. 97), symbolizing not only a break with Islam but also liberation from patriarchal bondage⁷⁰. Renaming campaigns often provoked resistance in the local population, sometimes resulting in deaths (Barutin, Kornitsa), mass internment and lawless imprisonment. According to some data, 400-500 Muslims who objected to having their names changed were interned in the Belene labour camp (Gruev, Kalionski 2008, p. 77). In 1980–1984, a renaming campaign was held among the Turkish minority.

Since the 1990s, Pomaks may use their Muslim names and practice Islam freely. Some choose Christian names for pragmatic reasons since having a Christian name makes it easier to find employment abroad, mostly in Greece, Spain and the United States.

The collapse of Communism in 1989 made it possible to conduct reliable and transparent social research in the Pomak population, free from nationalist ideological pressure. Such research was conducted by number of centers including the New Bulgarian University in Sofia, the American University in Bulgaria (Blagoevgrad), the St. Kliment Ohridski University and the International Center for Minority Studies and Intercultural Relations (IMIR) in Sofia. No longer hampered by political doctrine, new interpretations of historical sources became possible.

The new research has dismantled the official historical interpretation in effect under the government of Todor Zhivkov, in which conversion to Islam in the Rhodopes was compulsory, with the “spilling of blood” as an ominous alternative. This martyrological approach has been debunked as an ideological iteration of one of the strongest Bulgarian national mythologems, namely the myth of Turkish oppression as a dark age responsible for Bulgaria’s current political and cultural shortcomings (Gałzka 1992, p. 21–27). At the same time, there is a resistance towards explaining conversions to Islam in terms of economic incentives, an approach some believe to be a symptom of fadish obeisance to the multicultural idea, which is ultimately irreconciliable with nationalistic patriotism⁷¹.

Today, Pomaks dominate in the research area in demographic terms. In Satovcha and Garmen, Muslims hold the most important elected positions, running as members of the Turkish party DPS or as independent candidates. It should be emphasized that some of the elected officials are Christians, often as a result of an intentional Muslim strategy which treats power-sharing as an element of peaceful coexistence. For instance, the mayors of Satovcha and Garmen are Muslims, but their deputies are Christians. Still, the local Christians complain that they are unable to elect their candidates to top jobs, given the numerical advantage of the Muslim population.

1.4.2  Orthodox Christians

The 20th-century experience of the Orthodox Christian population in the research area has been less complex than that of the Bulgarian-speaking Muslims. Consequently, the scholarly literature on the subject is much less extensive than that relating to the Pomaks. Notable exceptions include research conducted in the region since the 1990s by the Bulgarian foklorists Albena Georgieva and Vihra Baeva (Bulgarian Academy of Sciences). Baeva has published her results in books including Razkazi za chudesa. Lokalna traditsia i lichen opit (2013, 2001) or Nishkata na zhivota. Mezhdu kolancheto na rozhba i Bogorodichniyat poyas (2012) and many articles. Georgieva is the author of two books Razkazi i razkazvane v blgarski folklor (2000) and Folklorni izmereniya na hristiyanstvoto. Ustni razkazi i lokalna religioznost v rayona na Bachkowski Manastir “Uspeniye na Presveta Bogoroditsa” i na Hadzhidimovski Manastir “Sv. Velikomchenik Georgi Pobedonosets” (2012) (Georgieva is not interested directly in the problem of religious syncretism). Georgieva has also co-edited a collection of folklore material which has been published as Minaloto prez pogleda na nash entsi. Sbornik na folklorni materiali ot selata Garmen, Dabnitsa, Koprivlen i Pletena, Gotsedelchevsko⁷² (2003).

Regardless of age, the biblical expertise of my respondents was extremely limited. Many of them were unable to say anything about Adam and Eve beyond the fact that they were the “first parents”. The local religious knowledge seems to be limited to the theologeme of Abraham’s sacrifice (though Abraham is not usually identified by name) and Jesus⁷³’s (Bulgarian: Issus) death on the cross and resurrection. The respondents did not discuss God, to whom the older respondents refer as “Grandpa God” (dyado Gospod). By contrast, they were prepared to discuss freely many religious-magical practices which have no connection to Christianity, such as offering blood sacrifice (kurban) to saints in order to secure health and long life for a specific individual, sleeping in holy places as a healing practice, consulting hodzhas when harmed by Muslim jinn, visiting female healers who cast lead to dispel “fright”⁷⁴ or break eggs to avert uram⁷⁵ or the “evil eye”. All of those practices are discussed at length in later chapters. This section will focus on the relationship between the faithful and the Orthodox clergy.

My Orthodox Christian respondents described themselves as “unenlightened believers”, “simple folk” or “Gypsies”, meaning people whose grasp of the doctrine is random and fragmentary:

G.: It’s not like we’re atheists, some kind of infidels or unbelievers, but we’re not enlightened believers, either. We lack the education that each of us should have as a Christian. (Interview 23, W, Ch, Satovcha 2005)

M.: Plainly put, we are like Gypsies. How much does a Gypsy remember?!… [In the church – M.L.] there are prayers, but I can’t remember all of that because I don’t go there often. (W, Ch, Interview 48, Garmen 2006)

The ties between my respondents and the Orthodox Church are loose: they do not regularly attend church on Sundays or take Communion, and they do not fast. Many of them have never been to confession. My respondents in Garmen actually insisted that confession was not available in their local church: those willing to confess have to travel to Hadzhidimovo or Gotse Delchev. In practical terms, my respondents never feel the need to do so, and argue that the requirement to go to confession is a recent introduction. To be able to partake of the Sacrament of Holy Communion, explained my respondents, one has to fast for two weeks in advance, but availing themselves of the Sacrament of Penance (commonly called Confession) is not required.

For his part, the local priest in Garmen complains about the fact that the locals are unwilling to go to Confession. Reportedly, he has only been asked twice to hear a confession. Only a single child goes to Communion on a regular basis (Interview 50, Garmen 2006).

My respondents explained that the reason they did not go to Communion lay in the harsh Orthodox fasts, which they were only able to observe partially (i.e. for several days rather than weeks). One female respondent (born in 1926) said that the last time she had been to Communion was when her mother carried her into the church for that purpose (Interview 48, Garmen 2006). The priest in Garmen reports that maybe a dozen members of the local congregation go to Communion at Easter or Christmas because the people “are more attuned to that which is of the devil than to spiritual things” (Interview 50, Garmen 2006).

My respondents explain that they do not go to church every Sunday because they cannot afford to buy the candles and votive gifts that need to be left in the church. The purpose of placing lit candles on candelabra or leaving votive gifts such as towels, blouses or socks is to ensure health for the worshipper or a loved one. My respondents regard those rites as more important than the Communion or participation in the liturgy:

M.: We don’t go every Sunday. Some people can afford it. I don’t have enough money to go.

M.L.: What do you need the money for?

M.: Why, I have to light a candle, I have to leave a little candle.

M.L.: And you can’t do that without the money?

M.: When it’s a holiday you need to buy a gift. You need money to go to church.

M.L.: What kind of gift?

M.: A kerchief, a shirt or other kinds of clothes, an apron, a shirt. (W, Ch, Interview 48, Garmen 2006)

When explaining their lax religious practice, respondents took part of the blame, but they also expressed their disappointment with the clergy, who they feel have been negligent for years. Perhaps one historical reason is that until 1870⁷⁶ the higher-ranking clergy members in charge of the official cult were recruited from the Greek elites and were perceived as outsiders by the common people, who found the Greek liturgy of the church incomprehensible (Georgieva 2009, p. 117). The lower Bulgarian clergy were, and still are, relatively uneducated and permeated with the same religious culture as the local communities.

During the Communist period, this was coupled with anti-religious discrimination in Bulgaria, which alienated people from their religious practices, a point they make when discussing the situation today.

Today, the priests have little rapport with the faithful, whom they tend to visit in their villages only sporadically (not even every Sunday), mostly on the feast of the patron saint of the local church⁷⁷. With the exception of Satovcha, in all of the towns and villages I visited I found no respondents who felt positive about their local priests, whom they accused of negligence and laziness.

The problem of the “absent priest” in the local religious community seems to be endemic not only in my research area but also in Bulgaria as a whole. References to absent priests crop up repeatedly in the writings of Dimitar Marinov, a well-known Bulgarian ethnographer working at the turn of the 19th century, who wrote in Narodna vyara i religiozni narodni obichai: “On private holidays, i.e. those organised privately by a zadruga, the table is set and blessed by a priest. If there is no priest in the village or if he cannot come, he is replaced by old man and an old woman” (Marinov 1994, p. 347, translated from Bulgarian) or “The lamb was sometimes blessed in the absence of a priest, as in those cases where priests were few, and one priest worked in several villages, and could not reach every village and say a prayer over a live lamb. Then, the blessing was performed by an old man or an old woman from the zadruga” (Marinov 1994, p. 608 translated from Bulgarian). It appears that little has changed since.

Unmotivated, negligent priests are another problem, often caused by low attendance in church. The priest in Garmen told me that he gave no sermons for that reason, and complained about the religious ignorance of the local community and its Communist past (Interview 50, Garmen 2006).

The problem of the loose ties between the believers and the Orthodox Church is also noted by Bulgarian researchers. Albena Georgieva writes that the believers are given the role of passive observers in church liturgy, made even more inaccessible by the abstruse language used in the liturgical texts (Georgieva 2012, p. 43), a situation which Georgieva argues pushes the faithful to seek alternative ways to the religious experience as most believers have learned to find spiritual support and nourishment in private practices (Georgieva 2012, p. 126).

Georgieva explains the disconnect between official and popular religion by portraying the clergy and the faithful as inhabiting different mental worlds. Georgieva argues that liturgy calls for a special pietistic attitude and worshipful devotion, humility and self-control – qualities which rural communities tend to perceive as a kind of impossible challenge or a chafing ideal dangerously bordering on hypocrisy. Accordingly, Georgieva points out, attending church services traditionally tended to be dismissed in rural communities as a predominantly female thing (Georgieva 2012, p. 44).

Georgieva clearly sides with the common believers and accepts their point of view of the clergy. This sense of reserve about the clergy in Bulgaria seems to be as deeply entrenched among the intellectuals as it is among the uneducated:

V.: I believe the priest and the hodzha are lying. I believe in God, but I don’t believe in them. I’m being honest. I listen to the things he sings or says, but he does not live by his word. (W, Ch, Interview 11, Osikovo 2005)

The respondent lists examples of priestly hypocrisy, such as failure to observe fasts. This negative perception of priests is also present in Bulgarian folklore, where priests are portrayed as hypocritical, lazy and greedy. Bulgarian proverbs say, “What’s much to God is not enough to a priest”⁷⁸; “It’s never enough in a priest’s eye”⁷⁹, “A trussedup priest makes for a quiet village”⁸⁰, “Being a priest is the best occupation because you can fleece the living and the dead”⁸¹, “Listen to the priest’s words and ignore his actions”⁸², “Never believe a hadzhiya ⁸³ (Turkish: hacı, Arabic: hajji) or a priest”⁸⁴, “A priest is a shameless thing”⁸⁵, “The priest’s son will be the first to turn Turk”⁸⁶.

1 This book is a modified version of my doctoral dissertation published in book format as Synkretyzm a podziały religijne w bułgarskich Rodopach (2012) Warsaw: WUW (Syncretism and Religious Divisions in the Bulgarian Rhodopes). The translation of the book from Polish was funded as part of a Ministry of Science and Higher Education programme “Narodowy Program Rozwoju Humanistyki” (National Programme for the Development of the Humanities) in 2014-2015. My dissertation grew out of a research project conducted in 2005–2010 in the Gotse Delchev region. My field research was funded by the Polish Ministry of Science and Higher Education, Project NN 109176334, Synkretyzm i antysynkretyzm religijny w wietle koegzystencji muzułmamów (Pomaków) i prawosławnych w Rodopach Zachodnich w Bułgarii [Religious Syncretism and Anti-Syncretism in the Light of the Coexistence of Muslims (Pomaks) and Orthodox Christians in the Western Rhodopes, Bulgaria].

2 Later chapters contain a detailed discussion of the categories of “Adat” and “Salafi Islam”, but I wish to emphasize that the ”Adat Islam” and ”Salafi Islam” are intended to provide a typological structure rather than a reflection of the full complexity of social realities on the ground. My categories conceptualize the religious attitudes of my respondents for analytical purposes, however I realize they are not sufficient to describe the full range of Muslim attitudes towards Islam and Christianity. For instance, the book does not focus on the religiously indifferent, non-practicing Muslims who form part of the local community. Still, I believe that the categories of “Adat” and “Salafi Islam” offer a useful insight into the process of religious change currently taking place in the Western Rhodopes.

3 Turkish: hoca. A colloquial term used to describe an Islamic teacher. My respondents use this term to address Islamic teachers who have been officially nominated by the mufti (to act as heads of Islamic communities and experts in Islamic law for a specific period of time) as well as other men who have either worked as Islamic teachers in the past or who are regarded as authorities in matters of religion. The term is also applied to imams. In the Ottoman Empire the term was used to address members of the ‘ ulama (religious scholars), especially teachers (Todorova 2004, p. 494). For an explanation of the religious terms used in this book see Glossary of Religious Terms.

4 I am referring to the “Protestant bias” in anthropological definitions of religion, which has come under criticism in recent years. See also Eastern Christians… 2010.

5 1) blood sacrifice, 2) sacrificial animal, 3) a meal made of a sacrificial animal.

6 In 1912 in the Rhodopes.

7 Bulgarian: Dvizhenye za Prava i Svobodi (Movement for Rights and Freedoms).

8 Outside of the specific case of Islam and local Christian unity in the Western Rhodopes.

9 The town was renamed Gotse Delchev in 1951 to commemorate Georgi Nikolov Delchev a Bulgarian revolutionary. The local metropolitan see of the Orthodox Church retains the old name of “Metropolitan of Nevrokop”.

10 I am grateful for suggesting this particular piece of terminology to Prof. Joanna Kurczewska, my tutor in the Faculty of Social Sciences at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology, Polish Academy of Sciences (PAN). I presented early drafts of several chapters of my thesis in her seminar National Cultures, Ideology and Politics: The Theory and Practice of Daily Life in 2005–2008.

11 These are real names as the Bashevs are public officials identified by name in Bulgarian media.

12 The Metropolitan Bishop of Nevrokop.

13 Head of a male monastery.

14 Local term for an exorcist hodzha who helps people believed to have been harmed by jinn (local Muslim variant: sing. dzhin, pl. dzhins, Turkish: sing. cin, pl. cinler, Arabic: sing. jinni, pl. jinn) – in Islam these are believed to be supernatural creatures. Although jinn share certain qualities with humans (they eat, procreate and are endowed with free will) they are distinct from either humans or angels.

15 In terms of J. Clifford’s typology of ethnographic authority I prefer polyphonic authority (represented by V. Turner and others) and dialogical authority (represented by K. Dwyer and V. Crapanzano, among others). I realize that each of those positions has its limitations. Dialogical authority does not change the fact that the egalitarian nature of the dialogue is often illusory since “a purely dialogical authority would repress the inescapable fact of textualization” (Clifford 1988, p. 43), whereas in fact it is the researcher who has the final say over which statements should be quoted, and in what context. Nonetheless, the anthropologist‘s main task is still to develop emic interpretations and translate them into anthropological terms.

16 Located in the commune of Gotse Delchev.

17 The name has been coded to protect the respondent’s privacy.

18 The ruins of the ancient city are located in Garmen, and have only recently been fenced off and come to be treated like a protected historical monument. The inhabitants of Garmen said that stone blocks from the ancient city were often used locally as building material in the construction of houses.

19 There was a similar difference between Christian and Muslim women in the Ottoman Empire: Christian women tied their kerchiefs at the back of the head, Muslim women wore them tied under the chin (cf. Neuburger 2004, p. 125).

20 A broad, ankle-length over-dress with long sleeves and a collar. Some of my respondents reported that girls start wearing a feredzhe after her first period.

21 Male headgear shaped like a truncated cone, worn during the Ottoman Empire.

22 According to the Bulgarian ethnographer D. Marinov, this expectation applied to all women in Bulgarian villages, particularly to married ones (cf: Neuburger 2004, p. 122).

23 Literally “leader, one who proceeds, master”. The leader of the Friday prayers in the mosque responsible for preaching sermons and performing Muslim rituals. Unlike Christian priests, imams are not seen as intermediaries between God and people.

24 Obviously, offering to shake the imam’s hand was a social solecism on my part.

25 Also referred to as Hawwa further in the book (in the local Muslim variant Havva, Turkish: Havva, Arabic: Hawwa) in keeping with Muslim tradition.

26 The site of the earliest conversions of the local population to Islam (Radushev 2005, p. 434).

27 Probably descended from the Yörüks who were settled in the area. According to the Angel Lazarov, Secretary of the Culture Center in Dabnitsa, the local population comprises 1,000 Turks, 350 Bulgarians resettled from Greece in 1927–1929 and around 500 Muslim Roma people.

28 1) Albanians, 2) soldiers in the Sultan’s private guard.

29 It is not clear wherether all or only some of the settlers were Albanians. The inhabitants of Garmen are divided on this matter. Some respondents said the early settlers were refugees or runaways from Albania.

30 T. Bringa defines a bula as a “female religious instructor” (Bringa 1995, p. 253). I choose this term because of the impressive religious knowledge of my respondent and respect she has among local population.

31 For the local Christian uses of the term see Chapter 8.

32 The term “Mohammedan” was widespread in all of Europe, stemming from the misapprehension that the function of Muhammad in Islam was analogous to that of Jesus in Christianity (Said 1991, p. 102).

33 I borrow this term from the Bulgarian sociologist E. Ivanova to describe the assimilation efforts orchestrated by the Bulgarian authorities in the period 1912-1918 (Ivanova 2002); the sense of the term is therefore broader than that commonly accepted in Bulgaria since its first use by Communist propaganda to describe the effort to assimilate Turks to a Bulgarian identity at the turn of 1984-1985. This “propagandist euphemism” (Gruev 2008, p. 11) presented the political and ideological assimilationist efforts as a “revival” of the Bulgarian national spirit which involved, among other things, forced changes of Arabic and Turkish names to Bulgarian ones.

34 Where they are known locally as “Torbeshes”, an appellation perceived as pejorative by the local Macedonian-speaking Muslims, similar to the term “Pomaks” among Bulgarian-speaking Muslims. Etymologically, the word “Torbesh” implies opportunism, suggesting that the formerly Christian group gave up their religious identity and embraced Islam for a bag (torba) of cheese or flour (Luba 2011, p. 42). According to what I see as the most plausible interpretation, the term was used in the Middle Ages to describe Bogomil missionaries who carried banned apocrypha in their travel bags – this might suggest that the Torbeshes are descended from medieval Bogomils, a dualistic Christian sect.

35 There are no precise statistics about the size of the population. According to other data there were 270,000 of them in the 1990s (Norris 1993, p. XVIII). Writing about the same period A. Balikci puts the figure at 280,000 (Balikci 1999, p. 51). Based on 1989 data from the Bulgarian Ministry of Internal Affairs, U. Brunnbauer quotes the figure of 268,971, accounting for three per cent of Bulgaria‘s total population at the time, however 10 years later the Pomak population was estimated at 250,000 (Brunnbauer 1999, p. 36). Again, writing about the same period A. Balikci puts the number at 280,000 (Balikci 1999, p. 51). Given Bulgaria’s negative demographic growth, the current figure is estimated to be somewhere between 160,000 and 240,000.

36 According to some theories, their dialect is the closest to the Bulgarian language in its “pure” form (Neuburger 2000, p. 182).

37 Similarly, the Macedonian Torbeshes variously identify themselves in census data as Macedonians or Albanians (Bielenin-Lenczowska 2011, p. 271).

38 The Islamic community.

39 Researchers working in this field do not accept this etymology as certain. According to the 19th century German traveller F. Kanitz, the term is derived from pomotsi, literally “helpers”, meaning the helpers or collaborators of the Ottoman army (cited in: Aleksiev 1997, p. 61). This etymology was also accepted by G. Rakovski (cited in: Raychevski 2004, p. 23). A folk etymology derives the term from the verb pomavali se, pomamili se, meaning people who allowed themselves to be “tricked” or “duped” (cf. Aleksiev 1997, p. 61). There is also a Greek etymology based on the term pimion (shepherd).

40 According to some theories, the Pomaks use the purest and most archaic form of the Bulgarian language. Stoian Raychevski writes that many experts in Slavic Studies confirmed this thesis of Iordan Konstantinov, suggesting that the language of “Bulgarian Muslims” in the Rhodopes and Macedonia is closest to the language used by Saints Cyril and Methodius, (important 9th century missionaries among the Slavic nations) and their students in the Ohrid School who created Slavic translations of the liturgical books (implicitly suggesting that saints Cyril and Methodius were Bulgarians) (Raychevski 2004, p. 21).

41 Lyuben Stoychev Karavelov (1835–1879), a Bulgarian writer actively involved in the Bulgarian National Revival (Blgarsko Natsionalno Vzrazhdane). He received his college education in Russia and wrote in Russian, Bulgarian and Serbian. His best-known novel is Blgari ot staro vreme (Old Time Bulgarians).

42 On a point of minor historical interest we might also mention the “Polish” theory, published in 19th-century press, according to which the Pomaks were descended from a group of 100 Poles (men, women and children) who migrated to Macedonia and Thrace as a result of Turkey’s wars with Poland, and converted to Islam to avoid persecution from Greek Orthodox clergy – in this theory, the term “Pomak” is derived from the word “Polak” or Pole. The theory was aired in “Bulgaria”, a newspaper published in Constantinople (Issues 108 and 109 dated 1861, cited in: Raychevski 2004, p. 28). According to Raychevski, the newspaper cooperated with Bulgarian members of the Unicki church, an Orthodox community in Poland which recognized the authority of the Pope, who “maintained good relations with Polish emigrants and revolutionaries” (Raychevski 2004, p. 28, translated from Bulgarian).

43 It was published in H. Memiolu’s Pages from the history of Pomak Turks, Ankara 1991 (cited in: Zhelyazkova 1997, p. 37–38).

44 Turkish: peygamber – a prophet named in the Bible or the Qur’an.

45 According to another version, their ancestors were criminals from Asia Minor interned in the Rhodopes, where they married local Thracian or Slavic women, explaining why their descendants speak Bulgarian (Lozanova 1998, p. 452–453).

46 Former Byzantine lands conquered by the Ottoman Empire.

47 Supposedly containing a record of forced conversion to Islam among the Pomaks in the Rhodopes in the 17th century, during the reign of Sultan Mehmed IV. The chronicle (supposedly written by a priest named Metodi Draginov from the village of Korova in the Western Rhodopes) was cited in textbooks and revivalist sources. It was revealed to be a forgery based on historical discrepancies in the names and dates of sultans and linguistic analysis (carried out in the 1980s by the Bulgarian historian of literature I. Todorov (Zhelyazkova 1997, p. 51). Todorov argues that the chronicle was forged by one Zahariev, a 19th-century Bulgarian patriot involved in the national revival movement, who based his forgery on an authentic source (Zhelyazkova 1997, p. 51).

48 The Serbian ethnologist D. Drljaa speculates that the motives behind conversions to Islam in Serbia followed a similar pattern (Drljaa 1997, p. 145).

49 An obligatory tax levied in the Ottoman Empire on non-Muslim population, perceived as a form of subjection to the State.

50 The Serbian ethnologist D. Drljacha speculates that the motives behind conversions to Islam in Serbia followed a similar pattern (Drljacha 1997, p. 145).

51 In the Balkans, the practice of drafting boys into the Ottoman Empire’s elite military corp of Janissaries dated back to the 14th century (it was instituted by Sultan Orhan) and continued until the early 18th century. In 1826, the Janissary corps was disbanded.

52 The Bogomils was a neo-Manichean gnostic sect which evolved in the Balkans for more than 400 years (10th-15th centuries) (Szwat-Gyłybowa 2005, p. 14). Some of the Bogomils who did not convert to Islam merged with the Paulician sect following the fall of Tarnovo in 1686, and later converted to Catholicism. Others were probably absorbed into the local Orthodox Christian population, perhaps secretly preserving their Bogomil beliefs (Szwat-Gyłybowa 2005, p. 27).

53 Everywhere else in the Balkans the process began at a later stage (Radushev 2005, p. 434). Ottoman tax records in 1464 mention 12 converts in Nevrokop (today’s Gotse Delchev) and 42 more scattered among 19 villages in the region, accounting for 3.5% of the local population at the time (Radushev 2005, p. 438, 442).

54 Yörüks were partly nomadic Turkish tribes migrating from Anatolia to Rumelia as auxilliaries in the Ottoman army, some of whom began to settle in Rumelia in the 17th century. This group left a mark on the local toponymy, naming peaks, pastures, rivers and crossings. Names of villages remained Slavic even after most of the population converted to Islam (Radushev 2005, p. 53).

55 Records from 1519 show that out of 120 including Nevrokop, 101 were inhabited by a mixed Christian and Muslim population, and only 19 were exclusively Christian (Radushev 2005, p. 441), accounting for 17.5% of the local population (Radushev 2005, p. 443).

56 Despite two plague epidemics in the 18th century which caused catastrophic demographic decline in the region (Radushev 2005, p. 447).

57 More than half of the villages in the Nevrokop region (Turkish: kaza) in the Ottoman Empire were located in today’s Greece (Radushev 2005, p. 55).

58 The Rhodopes did not become part of Bulgaria until 1912.

59 The renaming campaign of 1912 which also involved forced Christianization of the Pomaks affected 200,000 people and involved forcing new converts to chew on a piece of pork to prove the sincerity of the conversion (Ivanova 2002, p. 13).

60 For instance, the inhabitants of Perushtitsa in the Rhodopes hid from Turks and Pomaks in a church. When church was shot at and set on fire, leaders of the uprising fighters killed their wives and children before committing mass suicide. As N. Genchev, fighters in other towns followed the example of Perushtitsa (Genchev 1998, p. 385).

61 On 29 September 1913, a peace treaty was signed in Istanbul guaranteeing religious freedom to Muslims in Bulgaria.

62 As M. Neuburger notes, “Bulgarian assumptions dating from the nineteenth century about the barbaric and oppressive nature of the veil are based mostly on suppositions from outside the local context. In the Balkans there is no evidence that heavy veiling, especially of the entire face, was ever a significant practice among a large sector of the Muslim population” (Neuburger 2004, p. 118).

63 According to a Muslim belief, Allah on the third day of Ramadan Bayram (Turkish: Ramazan Bayramı, Arabic: ‘Id al-Fitr) allocates good or bad fortunes to every name in the coming year. In this sense, new names rob people of their destiny on earth (Gruev, Kalionski 2008, p. 65).

64 Even though, as M. Neuburger notes, the regional variation in Bulgarian dress meant that the costume of Pomak women was not that different from fully covered Bulgarian women. This observation relates to the period predating the modernizing effects of the Communist (Neuburger 2004, p. 120).

65 According to the Bulgarian sociologist E. Ivanova, many of them chose this option (Ivanova 2002, p. 61).

66 A new resettlement agreement was signed with Turkey in 1969, however, less than 100 people in total migrated to Turkey on that occasion (Ivanova 2002, p. 67).

67 Circumcisions could only be carried out under the supervision of a doctor, which practically excluded Muslims (Gruev, Kalionski 2008, p. 37).

68 On 29 March 1964, a religious rebellion against the renaming campaign was sparked off in Ribnovo when a crowd gathered on the central square attacked the so-called “revival activists” with stones, hatchets and tree branches as they entered (Gruev, Kalionski 2008, p. 52). The activists and the accompanying soldiers started to flee. One of the soldiers was captured by the crowd and forced to wear a fez; a Turkish flag was hoisted on the minaret; “Christian teachers and their families were expelled from the village, and told that the village needed Turkish rather than Bulgarian teachers” (Gruev, Kalionski 2008, p. 52). The village became a leading pocket of resistance: night patrols were organized, and contacts were established with other Muslim villages and towns. The village cut itself off by severing the phone line and demolishing the bridge to Gotse Delchev (Gruev, Kalionski 2008, p. 53). After 1989, nearly all of the inhabitants of Ribnovo returned to their Muslim names.

69 Sbor is a solemn gathering, such as a religious feast or a secular occasion (e.g. a music concert).

70 Fashion shows were held to encourage Muslim women to wear European style clothes, use make up and visit hairdressers (Neuburger 2004, p. 132–133). The campaigns were presented as part of a modernization and emancipatory effort. The wearing of shalvari, feredzhe or zabradkas were treated as symptoms of resistance against the Communist regime (Neuburger 2004, p. 134).

71 One such admittedly eccentric voice is that of P. Dyulgerov, who was given the mission of popularizing his version of history by the late Baba Vanga, once a charismatic and popular Bulgarian fortuneteller, who told him to “bring light to the lost souls, and to tell them how the Ottomans took the Christian faith by force and turned them Turk” (cited in: Dyulgerov 2000, p. 11). Concerning the recent publications concerning Islamicization, Dyulgerov said, “in recent years we’ve had some publications, people arguing that there was no Turkish oppression. Even the history textbooks describe this as “the Ottoman presence”, writing of forced conversion to Islam as voluntary religious conversion” (Dyulgerov 2000, p. 14). Dyulgerov mentions dramatic events from the period using folk tradition as evidence, implicitly assuming that the tradition is accurate.

72 The book features practically no mention of religious elements relating to Orthodox Christianity, which is perhaps understandable given the paucity of religious narratives in the field relating to biblical figures and events, a fact I also note in my book.

73 Later also referred to according to the Muslim tradition as ‘Isa (local Muslim variant: Isa, Turkish: sa)

74 Fear or fright caused by a traumatic experience, e.g. fleeing from danger.

75 The word is derived from the Turkish urama. In this case it means an ilness, especially paralysis, or stroke caused by samodivas (rusalkas) or other demons. Because the condition is believed to be caused by angry demons, the word may be etymologically related to the Arabic word ‘uram, meaning ‘spite’. I am grateful to my colleague and Arabic scholar Joanna Musiatewicz for pointing this out.

76 In that year an independent Bulgarian Orthodox Church was established.

77 A. Georgieva notes the same problem. Georgieva points out that this sometimes leads to a situation where the priest becomes replaced by a charistmatic lay member of the local community, as is the case in the village of Gubesht or Gorni Voden (Georgieva 2012, p. 123). Vihra Baeva makes a similar observation, adding that the charistmatic lay leaders are mostly older women who tend to stand in strong competition with the priests (2012, p. 170).

78 Na Boga e mnogo, za popa e malko (Stoykova 2007, p. 223).

79 Vse e malko na popovo oko (Stoikova 2007, p. 223).

80 Vrzan pop – mirno selo (Stoykova 2007, p. 223).

81 Popstvoto e naydobriyat zanayat – che i ot zhivi i ot martvi harach vzima (Stoykova 2007, p. 224).

82 Na popa dumite slushaj, na rabotite ne gledaj (Stoikova 2007, p. 224).

83 A Muslim pilgrim travelling to Mecca. In Bulgaria, the term also means an Orthodox Christian who has made a pilgrimage to Jerusalem. See Glossary of Religious Terms.

84 Na hadzhiya i pop da ne vyarvash (Stoykova 2007, p. 224).

85 Pop sram nyama (Stoykova 2007, p. 225).

86 Popski sin naylesno se turchi (Stoykova 2007, p. 226).