The Pre-National Balkans: A View without Hindsight Bias. Three Variations on the Theme of Religion and Ethnicity

Abstract

Among the many entities people in the past could identify with and feel loyal to, the ethnic group appears to have been far less important than the religious community, social class, local community or the clan. Ethnic consciousness is often projected into the past from a modern mindset as if the same feelings of loyalty that matter today were significant to social communities in the past. Under Ottoman rule, Orthodox Christians constituted a single community, within which ethnic distinctions played a secondary role. The fact that into the nineteenth century ethnonyms could refer to religious, vocational and social groups, remains an additional indication of the limited importance that was attached to ethnic appurtenance.

This contribution describes the main cultural features of the Orthodox Christian community in the Ottoman Empire and offers two additional case studies. The first deals with the Bulgarian poet Grigor Părličev, whose path to Hellenization was smoothed by a his primal Orthodox Christian origin, which subsumed ethnic identity to the duties towards one’s religious community. The second case is related to the goudilas, Hellenized Bulgarians in Plovdiv, who changed their identity as a result of collective upward social mobility. Both cases illustrate the irrelevance of ethnic identity to those concerned.