On Ethnic Indifference in Northwest Bulgaria in the First Half of the Twentieth Century or A Discourse on why so many Vojvodovo Protestants intermarried with Catholics from Bărdarski Geran

Abstract

The article deals with the relationship in northwest Bulgaria in the first half of the 20^th century between the inhabitants of two villages – Vojvodovo, inhabited by Czechs, and Bărdarski Geran, whose inhabitants were Banat Bulgarians and Swabians. The villages in question differed confessionally – Vojvodovo was Protestant and Bărdarski Geran Catholic – and they shared the ideal of confessional endogamy. Yet despite this, the inhabitants of the two villages repeatedly and purposefully entered into mixed marriages. To explain this paradox is the main aim of the article. The author sees the reason for this marriage strategy in the fact that inhabitants of Vojvodovo and Bărdarski Geran were ethnically indifferent, i.e., in the case of these groups, the “us-them” dichotomy did not take place in the sphere of ethnicity. Instead, the domain that was constitutive and defining for them was religiosity. In both communities religiosity was the dominant organizational principle and the main factor for the identity-construction of its members. So, on the one hand, people from Vojvodovo and Bărdarski Geran shared faith (though not confession), on the other hand they were not separated by different ethnicity, so intermarriage did not imply crossing the ethnic border. So the case was not that Czechs married Germans or Bulgarians, but rather believers were marrying other believers.