Across from our hotel there is an open space. Part of it is the municipal open-air swimming pool. This morning before breakfast we stood on the balcony and watched workers sweeping it out while others seemed to be repairing winter damage with cement. We think they are going to reopen the baths for the new season on the first of June, it’s certainly hot enough.
L is feeling a little under the weather so after breakfast she decided to stay in the hotel and try and get some sleep. B and I drive out of Velingrad along a valley of the Chepinska river to Draginovo to make the visit we arranged yesterday. On the way there we pass a lot of people working in the valley-bottom fields, mostly women, almost all dressed in the same blue overalls we first saw in the marketplace. It only takes a couple of stops to ask the way before we find out how to reach our hostess’ house. The village is perched on the hillside, the surfaced road ends here after crossing a bridge and barely coming into contact with the village itself. To the left, a little way off, is the local mosque. The village roads either follow the contours of the wooded hills like terraces or run steeply upwards, making for a backwoods San Francisco feeling. Driving is adventures, especially along the verticals which look like—and probably are—stream beds just waiting for the next cloudburst, Bulgarian wadis. We find the house and park the car. This is the first time I have been (consciously) in a Pomak (Bulgarian Moslem) village.
The front of the house is a small grocery shop and, next to it, a garage that has been turned into a two-table café complete with television set. We are made comfortable there by the son of the house, M. News of our arrival is sent out to F who is working in the fields. The daughter-in-law also introduces herself. |
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M tells us he is an electrician but since the local economic situation is not very good, jobs are scarce and there has been a steady increase in prices not matched in wages or pensions except in a very few walks of life. We talk about something I have been reading about: the enforced and quasi-enforced policy of Bulgarisation of family names. He says that since the change of government it has been possible to change the names back, but he is not interested in that whole thing. Maybe, I think, this is one of these cases the political becomes personal, where the freedom to do something makes the act unnecessary for many. His mother, however, can tell us more about her experience. News comes back from the fields, it would be best for us to return in the afternoon, we should return with B’s whole family—father, mother, and son who can play with the children of the house—says M and he offers to show us the videos of his wedding…
Of all the minority groups in Bulgaria the Pomaks are arguably the most fought over in terms of their status within the Bulgarian nation and they have been regarded as a critical group in the redefinition of Bulgarian identity since independence. As Bulgarian-speaking Moslems they appear to have a foot in both camps; as ethnic Bulgarians they are claimed as a self-evident part of the Bulgarian nation while as Moslems they are also seen to have strong ties to Bulgarians of Turkish ethnicity (‘of the Turkish milieu’, as Todorova (2004) puts it). Their history over the last hundred and fifty years is a demonstration in miniature of the mechanisms of constructing a nation.
During the Russo-Turkish War that led to Bulgarian independence (the Treaty of Berlin (1878)) ethnic Turks and some of the other Moslems supported the actions of the Ottoman Empire in attempting to prevent independence. |
