South-Eastern Europe: challenges and prospects for family history

This special issue arises out of a conference held in 2010. Following a Regional Symposium on ‘Social behaviour and family strategies in the Balkans (sixteenth to twentieth centuries)’ held at the New Europe College in Bucharest in June 2006, an informal ‘Balkan network’ was established. In June 2010 this resulted in an international conference at the Institute of Historical Research, University of London, on the theme ‘The history of families and households: comparative European dimensions’. As its title indicates, this event tried to assess developments and the current state of affairs in the field of family history. A specific aim of the initiative was to locate south-east European family history – under-represented in comparison to other European regions – in broader historiographical debates, as well as to give historians from the region opportunities to engage with a wider audience and encounter different methodological approaches. The conference attracted over 40 speakers from 19 countries. Papers relating to a broader, wider European debate on family history will be published separately in a forthcoming book, while some of the more regional papers with specific focus on south-eastern Europe are presented in this volume.

The essays collected here have been selected to illustrate the range of developments in the historiography of the Balkans, and in particular to give voice to family historians from the region. In this volume we have attempted to present and open a debate on alternative sources for studying family history and kinship in this region, as well as to explore issues that have been somewhat neglected in this field over the years. In addition to well-established approaches based on historical demographic documents such as census-type registers, the contributions encompass sources with a local flavour and specificity, such as juridical and court records, testaments, memoirs, diaries, correspondence and interviews, to shed light on different aspects of family life in the past.

In the first study, ‘History of family and community life through the study of civil registers: Paros in the twentieth century’, the emphasis is on seasonality. Using classical demographic sources, registers of births, marriages and deaths, and taking two communities which he demonstrates can be considered to be representative of the whole island, Vasilis Gavalas traces the changes in seasonality of life events through the fundamental transformation over the century from an island economy based overwhelmingly on agriculture and fishing, to one dominated by tourism. It is a nuanced picture, since the seasonality of agriculture is not entirely different from that of tourism, but the other dominant factor in the traditional seasonality of marriage and conception, the religious calendar, also played a part; over the twentieth century the influence of Orthodox religious precepts regarding periods of abstinence appears to have been sustained, and ‘traditional’ periods for marriage, and most notably the absence of marriages in March, still held sway. The study also analyses changes in the seasonality of deaths, and the impact of two World Wars.

The discourse of the next two contributions goes beyond the traditional demographic sources by exploring the complex relationship between parents and children. In ‘The dynamic of family structures in seventeenth-century Moldavia: adoption and godparenthood’, Elena Bedreag focuses on spiritual kinship and argues that this was heavily influenced by the Byzantine model. Her evidence derives from a variety of documents, mainly of juridical or economic nature, such as deeds of ownership, sale and purchase, court cases, transfer of ownership, wills, etc. At the end of the sixteenth century and in the seventeenth century the expression for adoption used in Moldovan documents was ‘to take into one's soul’. The practice of spiritual adoption is illustrated through the reconstitution of a number of case studies. The author points out that in general the main reason ‘for the act of adopting a person spiritually was that of appointing an heir’. Moreover, the study suggests that in some cases ‘spiritual adoption could also be used as an artificial method of bequeathing a legacy to a more distant relative, or even a person outside the family, who, as a rule, and according to the laws of the time, had no right of inheritance’.

In ‘A dimension of private life in Wallachia: violence between parents and children (1830–1860)’ Nicoleta Roman investigates manifestations of violence within families in Wallachia, a Romanian principality under the suzerainty of the Ottoman Empire. The study highlights the state's interest in the protection of children at the point when it began to regard a child ‘as a future citizen with an economic and social potential’, especially from the legal point of view. The newly formed Pauper Institute was founded in 1832 and the author draws an interesting comparison between French and Romanian abandoned infants; they were called ‘orphans of the nation’ in France and ‘children of the state’ in Romania. The author seeks to conceptualise the term violence, and by using various types of memoirs, e.g. those of politicians and doctors in the nineteenth century, and the diaries of women of standing, this study provides an important insight into less familiar aspects of family life in this region. The examples of infanticide, parricide, violence by children against their parents, and theft (among other types of crime) are discussed in her study along with educational differences and practices of discipline among different social classes.

Ljiljana Stankov's contribution on ‘Teachers as collectors of national heritage of customs in Serbia from 1880 to World War I’ points to the little-known role of teachers as educators not only of children but also of adults in nineteenth-century rural Serbia. The systematic gathering of data through carefully constructed questionnaires was initiated by a professor of geography, Jovan Cvijić. The main aim of this exercise was to ‘modernise’ Serb society in the context of the nationalistic sentiment of the time. Stankov's chief purpose is to look at the underlying values informing family upbringing, which includes the much-debated phenomenon of zadruga (perceived both as family organisation and hamlet), and although in Cvijić's questionnaire the teachers were given instructions on how to collect information in the field, Stankov emphasises that the definitions of zadruga provided in these instructions were ‘imprecise and conflicting’. Stankov's study does not engage with the long-standing debate as to whether or not zadruga existed in the first place. Rather it explores the role of teachers in collecting material on family life in the nineteenth century and the ‘discovery’ of the popular or folk culture so typical for this period in other European countries. Stankov invites researchers to critically evaluate these rich records, which could be used for future research into the values and normative system of Serbian society at the time.

The concluding article in this volume also indirectly addresses the issue of zadruga. In his ‘Ideological dimensions of the Balkan family patterns as a ritual practice and an ideological construct’, Petko Hristov considers family ideology connected with the rituals of family kin celebration dedicated to the patron saint (known in Serbian as slava, in Bulgarian as svetac) in the mountainous area between Serbia and Bulgaria in the first part of the twentieth century. He adopts an ethnological approach. The first part of his article reviews family research in the south-eastern Balkans in recent years in its much-problematised theoretical complexity. His main purpose is to ‘study the connection between the traditional “ideal” of the extended family household and the ritual patterns for communal union creation identified in the family festive cycle’. The ritual activities are described in great detail on the basis of two case studies, one in western Bulgaria and the other in the village of Osljane situated in north-east Serbia, to demonstrate the relationship between family ideology and complex family households ‘in which a number of authors would recognise the “mysterious” zadruga’.

The debate over zadruga is typical of the historiographical issues persistently confronting family historians, and illustrates the need for greater critical exchange between local specialists and those engaged in family history on a comparative basis. For the latter, zadruga is a distinctive Balkan phenomenon to be studied as exemplifying regional peculiarities and, more broadly, difference. From Laslett onwards, modellers and quantifiers have taken at face value the image of zadruga presented by those who championed the notion that in specific regions of south-east Europe, large families lived harmoniously together in communal settlements. It has fallen to local scholars, for the most part anthropologists, to deconstruct this image, pointing to the ideological purposes for which the concept was invented (by Vuk Karadžić and others in the early nineteenth century), emerging as it did in the context of factors such as the creation of national and pan-Slavic identities (against the backdrop of declining and resented imperial rule, whether Ottoman or Habsburg), and the exaltation of traditional cultures and folkloristic ideas as a response to fear of collapsing feudalism and economic change. For some decades now scholars committed to the regional modernisation of ethnology have been engaged in critical discourses on popular culture, including detailed studies of how nineteenth-century data was collected and evaluated (Čapo Žmegač, 1996; Kremenšek, 1970; Rihtman-Auguštin, 2004). Yet comparative historians have mostly not been interested in this. In the same way that the zadruga suited the nationalist aspirations of the nineteenth century (and, it has to be said, some of the revived aspirations of the post-communist era, which has seen some local revival of this romanticised view), it also suited the discipline of family history, fitting perfectly with Hajnal's ‘East–West’ paradigm of family forms, the quantitatively-based model that has been so enduring since its appearance at the height of the cold war (Hajnal, 1965, 1983); while for less quantitatively-minded historians the alleged internal structure and practices of the zadruga lent itself well to the stereotyping of ‘Balkan patriarchy’ (on the whole debate see Sovič, 2008).

The controversy over the zadruga has effectively reached a stalemate, with scholars disagreeing over approaches, definitions and even the appropriate mode of interplay of disciplines, and largely ignoring Rihtman-Auguštin's observation that ‘the zadruga as we know it from the majority of descriptions from the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century, is, in fact, an intellectual construct’ (Rihtman-Auguštin, 2004, p. 32). Without a consensus over what the zadruga was, and without a clear theoretical foundation, there is little hope of progress, let alone comparative study (which otherwise might include, for example, the Russian mir, another idealised collective form of residence that emerged in the same period). The contributions published here, however, do point to a more constructive way forward. They show that there are alternatives to unsourced generalisation on the one hand and reliance on folkloristic material on the other; fully historical sources await the researcher. The study of tensions and the role of outsiders within families, and the proactive function of the state and church in shaping attitudes and influencing behaviour, could all repay further study. There are other welcome signs that these subjects are increasingly engaging researchers – such as a recent international workshop in Bucharest (October 2013) on ‘Paupers in the midst of others. Orphans and abandoned children in Europe (eighteenth–twentieth centuries)’. Perhaps, indeed, the lesson in this is that the history of south-east European families needs to be yet further de-mythologised, de-romanticised, normalised and then integrated with trends in research elsewhere before they can reveal their true value for family history.