The Vizier's Dream: “Seeing St. Dimitar” in Ottoman Bitola

Abstract

Drawing on an idiosyncratic case, the re‐building of an Orthodox church in the Ottoman town of Bitola in 1830, I revisit one of the black‐and‐white schemes of the Balkan national historiographies relative to the Ottoman rule, namely the lack of religious freedom. In Bitola, the erection of the new church was made possible thanks to the substantial sponsorship by the highest Ottoman dignitary, the Grand Vizier. The local oral tradition “translated” the historical fact into a legend according to which “the pasha” had seen the patron saint of the church in a dream. The church was (re)built in a particular context, which is reconstituted in the paper. My conclusion is that after the complicated circumstances were forgotten, an element of divine intervention was introduced to make sense of the unusual help of a Grand Vizier for the building of a church.

Keywords:

• Balkan History
• Ottoman Millet
• Monastir
• Bitola
• Orthodox Church
• Vizier

Notes

[1] The claim of a Slavonic national identity appears in Bitola only in the 1860s; at that time it is labelled as “Bulgarian”; the notion of “Macedonian” identity does not appear in Bitola before the beginning of the twentieth century. This evolution occurs rather later than in other towns of Macedonia.

[2] Grigorios VI raised the importance of the bishopric of Bitola (metropoly of Pelagonia) inside the hierarchy of Ottoman bishoprics in 1836: it ranked just after the see of Bursa (Bitoski 1968: 24).