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Abstract
This paper is dedicated to a specific religious community, a women's Orthodox association founded in the early twentieth century in a southern Bulgarian town with mixed population and complex cultural history. We explore the place visions and miracles played in the establishment of the association and its present‐day role in the local society. The impact of this small group of women, united in a moral community, on the religious and social life of a Balkan town is explained with attention to what might be described as “politics of divine intervention” in a world of continuous political, ethnic and religious strife. The stories of miracles, dreams narratives and other accounts of divine intervention in the broadest sense allow us to articulate the interweaving of hidden history, social order and religious life.
Acknowledgements
The present paper would not have been written without the help of William A. Christian, Jr. We are also indebted to Dorotea Dobreva, Albena Georgieva and Yordanka Kotseva from the Institute of Folklore, BAS, as well as to Mina Hristemova from the Museum of Assenovgrad and Slavcho Kissiov, ex‐secretary of Bačkovo monastery, for sharing valuable observations and unpublished material.
Notes
[1] In addition to Eastern Orthodox (Greeks and Bulgarians), at the end of the nineteenth century Stanimaka had small communities of Armenian Christians and Baptists. Evangelicals have been active there since the inter‐war period.
[2] We do not know how membership varied through the twentieth century: according to some of Galia Valtchinova's informants, the association was created by twelve or thirteen young unmarried women (“maidens”). By the end of the 1930s, when the association was the most influential, it had about 200 members out of about 2500 inhabitants.
[3] This profile seems more as a consequence of the communist decades, when any involvement with religious life could harm the professional careers and social standing of active persons. During her fieldwork Vihra Baeva observed the recruitment of younger women and of men, and more generally an opening of the association to temporary visitors who “want to learn more about God”.
[4] This one, as most of the quotations hereafter, is from interviews Vihra Baeva undertook with the leader, Olga Tomova.
[5] When the association was pressed to disband in 1958, it continued as a church choir (Daskalova Citation1996: 87). Under communism, church choirs were the only legal form of Orthodox organizations, and only retired people were allowed to sing.
[6] A kurban is an animal sacrifice, usually to fulfil a promise made either by an individual or a collectivity, to thank the saint for answering a petition. As a rule, the animal is a lamb or ram, but special saints may be revered with a bull, ox or rooster; in the local culture, even ritual meals during fasting periods may be called kurban. The term and the practice is widely known in Balkan Orthodox cultures in which the same term is used for the sacrificial animal, for the ritual meal prepared with it, as well as for any feast which has a kurban as a ritual sequence.
[7] For instance, marriage (requirements for the bride's dowry could be a burden for poor families but inescapable in terms of honour), or care for the sick. The topic was not directly addressed in our interviews, but comparison with the Greek Angeloudia (see Rushton Citation1984:68–69) suggests that substantial help for a bride's dowry, and even for her trousseau, is considered as part of a female Orthodox association's charitable works.
[8] This is the convenient translation of Gr. leitourgia (liturgy), the Bulgarian word used is sluzhba (service); all three are used interchangeably. It should be noted that midnight masses led by a priest have been regularly practiced in other Orthodox parishes in Southern Bulgaria.
[9] Here we take visionary experience lato sensu, which includes visions strictly speaking as perceptions of light, shapes and figures, whether recognized as saintly or not, but also the hearing of voices, “bells” and verbal exchange. Angels' singing and “heavenly bells” are referred to in the Orthodox Mass and familiar metaphors for the Orthodox. For elaborations on visionary phenomena, see Christian Citation1996; Blackbourn Citation1993.
[10] The latter element has been difficult to identify through fieldwork: it is mentioned in a cursory way in the narratives due to the current leader (interviews with Vihra Baeva) and appears as a separate thread in a few accounts by less prominent members of the association (interviews with Galia Valtchinova).
[11] For the Stenimachos area in earlier times, see Asdracha Citation1976: 58–88. The issue of the Pomaks in a nearby area is developed in Karamikhova and Valtchinova elsewhere in this issue.
[12] The issue of the so‐called Grecomaniacs has been studied in relationship to the nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century nationalist mobilizations around the major town of Southern Bulgaria, especially Philippoupolis/Plovdiv (capital city of the Ottoman province of Eastern Roumelia, 1878–1885), only 15 km from Stanimaka. For the social mechanisms of Hellenization of the local Bulgarian‐speaking Christian population, see Lory (Citation1992/94). There is a local term, langeri, still employed for pretentious people who present themselves as Greeks.
[13] The term of Makedonikos agon is coined in Greek historiography (see Gounaris Citation1997) to designate a specific period in the decades‐long rivalry between Greeks and Bulgarians for supremacy in the Ottoman province of Macedonia: it started after the Ilinden uprising in 1903, and took the form of frequent battles between pro‐Bulgarian and pro‐Greek guerrilla formations (chetas, komitadzhi, andartes). Emigrants from Macedonia, as well as from Thrace, another Ottoman province whose mixed population had large number of Bulgarian‐speaking Orthodox, were the driving force in most of these armed actions. Émigré activists of the Macedonian struggle began to settle in Stanimaka by the last decade of the nineteenth century, and a local Committee of the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) was founded as early as 1897. Gradually local people, like guerrilla commander P. Shishmanov, became involved in the Macedonian struggle. In Bulgaria, this struggle culminated in the 1906 wave of anti‐Greek pogroms in many towns economically and culturally dominated by the Greeks; see Hristemova (Citation2003). For the impact of the Macedonian struggle on the Bulgarian‐Greek relationship, see Finney (Citation2003).
[14] A typical explanation is: “Greeks used to live here. And the Greeks used to build only churches, not pubs, as we do. And that's why there are so many churches” (village of Voden, Vihra Baeva, 1996). The opposite point of view, typical of the socialist and post‐socialist period, is that the Greeks' piety was only an outward appearance.
[15] The struggle for the church of Annunciation is among the most dramatic moments of the nineteenth century history of Stanimaka; see Daskalova Citation1996. The coming of Father Ivan Bukhlev, from a well‐known Bulgarian and Exarchist family of the village of Brodi/Vrondi in the Serres area (now in Greece), marked a turning point in the struggle against “Grecomaniacs”. The forms of defiance varied from armed attacks carried out by men to symbolic gestures of disapproval by women. According to oral accounts, Greek women lamented in a loud voice, “O, poor Holy Mother of God, even you have been Bulgarized”.
[16] The following paragraph is based on interviews (Vihra Baeva) with the leader and two members of the association (November 1997); with the parish priest of Annunciation, and with a rank‐and‐file female believer (November 1996). The priest's account is strikingly similar to those produced by the leader and members of the association.
[17] The two by then very old ladies were interviewed on the eve of the patron's feast of Annunciation (March 24). We are indebted to Mrs. Y. Yanosh, the female sexton of the church of St. George, for providing us with a copy of the “testimonies”.
[18] Set on a rocky hill that dominates the town from the south, the castle received the name of the Bulgarian King Ivan Assen II (1218–1241) in the late‐nineteenth century, after the discovery (1868) of an inscription bearing the king's name. Dated to 1231, the inscription commemorates a historical Bulgarian victory over the Byzantine army. The evocation of King Ferdinand's (1887–1918) name is meaningful in the context of the struggle for Bulgarian independence, which was achieved only in 1908 in the aftermath of the Young Turks' revolution.
[19] An important element in Roman Catholicism, religious orders and brotherhoods with formalized rules and strict obedience are barely known among Balkan Orthodox Christians, despite widespread monasticism. In the first decade of the twentieth century the form, and the very term of “association”, was employed mainly for organizations with cultural and charity purposes which were generally politically connoted and, as a rule, became involved in the ongoing nationalist struggles. After the First World War, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church created female Orthodox associations; see Popova Citation2001.
[20] In one of Vihra Baeva's interviews, the visionary is anonymous; in all the others the visionary was Sultani. According to the current parish priest (in whose interest it was to support even an indirect involvement of his predecessor), both the priest's wife and Sultani had revelations; see Daskalova Citation1996: 92–93.
[21] The word baba (grandmother) which is used for Sultani denotes the respect paid to an elderly woman, but also to a nun with high position, for example the Mother Superior of a convent. The respect paid to Sultani is like the devotion to a holy woman: according to the lay secretary of the Bačkovo monastery Sl. Kissiov, “people were happy to touch her” (interview, Vihra Baeva).
[22] We draw on the unpublished memories of Sultani's brother, the wealthy wine merchant Sterio Kuzmov, in the archives of Assenovgrad Museum.
[23] Born in a village of Orthodox Bulgarians, Slaveyno, in a predominantly Pomak area of the Rhodopes, Peyo Shishmanov led a band of Macedonian (IMRO) fighters that operated from 1901 to the aftermath of the Ilinden uprising (1903) in the vast area between Stanimaka and Xanthi. He remained an IMRO activist till 1908/1909.
[24] Uteha (Consolation), VI, N. 63/10.XII. 1937 : 3–4. This periodical was published by The Good Samaritan, a royalist and fundamentalist Orthodox association which favoured popular prophets and religious visionaries.
[25] Especially in interviews with O. Tomova (Vihra Baeva): “Baba Sultani saw a large folded banner fixed to the ground on the peak of Krastov, and pointing toward the town [Assenovgrad]. It was like in a dream … And she said: ‘Suddenly, a strong wind began to blow, so the banner unfolded’ and she read [on the banner]: ‘Krastov protects Bulgaria.’” In another popular version, the same saying is attributed to the well‐known and more recent visionary, Baba Vanga.
[26] O. Tomova has remained unmarried, and her fellow citizens emphasize the fact that she is “a virgin” as a marker of her special, almost saintly status. Some actually refer to her as “Saint Olga” and show their respect by bowing. For a detailed description, see Baeva (Citation2001: 78).
[27] In an interview with Vihra Baeva, O. Tomova declared that she “used to have many religious dreams when younger”, but she has already forgotten most of them. Such an assertion might be also due to the drastic change of public attitudes vis‐à‐vis religious visionaries under socialism; in many cases such people were forced to undergo medical treatment for madness. According to believers, she does not tell about her visions and revelations “out of modesty”.
[28] Throughout the Eastern Orthodox Balkan cultures, the term of hadj is used also for the Christian pilgrimage to Jerusalem; accordingly, the one that has made a pilgrimage to the Holy Land is called hadži, a honorary title that was generally associated to the family name starting for successive generations. Many pilgrims of Stanimaka to Jerusalem have made donations of yerusalmiye (richly embroidered covers featuring scenes of the Bible and the Evangels, produced in the Holy Land) to parish churches, where they were hung up on the walls.
[29] In this vein, the relationship between the two icons is described as bonds between a “mother” (the Bačkovo icon) and a “daughter”, a pairing that (according to O. Tomova) was suggested by Our Lady herself.
[30] According to some (Kissiov Citation1990: 41–42, Marinova Citation1996: 125), Prepolovenie developed from a religious–political campaign that took place in 1895/6 to support the transfer of the monastery to the Bulgarian Exarchate. This “Bulgarian” procession seems to be a response to an older Greek one, which used to take place on the same day and during which the main icon of St. George's church (near the church of Annunciation) was taken to the church of Our Lady at King Assen's castle (Marinova Citation1996: 125, Daskalova Citation1996: 86).
[31] The following statements concerning the political overtones in the feasts are due to G. Valtchinova. They are not shared by V. Baeva.
[32] According to popular belief (recorded by V. Baeva), those who touch the icon during the procession are cured of any disease and have their prayers fulfilled. In recent years, expectations for such miracles draw an ever‐increasing number of pilgrims, tourists and curious onlookers to Assenovgrad.
[33] Here our understanding of ideology is M. Bloch”s large definition of “an ordered consciousness, a complete system of knowledge, which directly organizes the actions of individuals”, with an emphasis on “the construction of ideology [that] takes place in very specific and limited kinds of activities” (Bloch Citation1989: 178).
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