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• 1 The Mixing and Unmixing of Bulgarians and Greeks In his 1762 book, The Slavic-Bulgarian History of the Bulgarian People, Kings, and Saints, Father Paisiı̆ of Hilendar commented on the perils of Greek influence among his contemporary Bulgarians: “There are those who do not care to know about their own Bulgarian people [rod] and turn to foreign ways [chuzhda politika] and a foreign tongue; they...learn to read and speak Greek and are ashamed to call themselves Bulgarians.” Reprimanding those who considered it “better to become part of the Greeks [luchshe pristati po grtsi],” the Mount Athos monk refuted the notion of Greek superiority and exalted the “simple” (prosti) but virtuous Bulgarians in opposition to the “refined” (mudri) but “calculating” (politichni) Greeks. In the rest of his narrative, Father Paisiı̆ presented the history of the Bulgarian people from biblical times to the fall of the medieval Bulgarian kingdoms under the Ottoman Turks in the fourteenth century. Describing the “greatest glory” of the Bulgarians throughout the centuries and singling out language as the main factor differentiating Bulgarians and Greeks, the monk urged his reader: “You, Bulgarian, do not be fooled, but know your people and language.”1 The Slavic-Bulgarian History contained many ideas that would shape the development of Bulgarian nationalism when a new generation of national 1. Paisiı̆ Hilendarski, Slavianobâlgarska istoriia, ed. Petâr Dinekov (Sofia, 1972), 212–218. For interpretations of the text, see Marin Pundeff, “Bulgarian Nationalism,” in Sugar and Lederer, Nationalism in Eastern Europe, 98–103; Maria Todorova, “The Course of Discourses of Bulgarian Nationalism,” in Eastern European Nationalism in the Twentieth Century, ed. Peter Sugar (Washington, D.C., 1995), 74–75; and Nadia Danova, “Vzaimnata predstava na bâlgari i gârtsi. XV-sredata na XIX vek,” in Predstavata za “Drugiia” na Balkanite, ed. Nadia Danova, Vesela Dimova, and Maria Kalitsin (Sofia, 1995), 179–187. 18 | Chapter 1 leaders in the nineteenth century took on Father Paisiı̆’s message.2 Proudly enumerating the medieval Bulgarian kings and patriarchs and their deeds, the Mount Athos monk reminded the Bulgarians that they had an equally glorious past as the rest of the Balkan peoples, which became the mantra of nineteenth-century intellectuals who taught Bulgarian history in a growing number of Bulgarian-language schools. Discussing the Ottoman conquest in the Balkans, he introduced the term “yoke” (igo) to describe Ottoman rule, which served as an explanation of the Bulgarians’ current bleak situation and remained a lasting metaphor in the Bulgarian national imagination until present times. Yet, when explaining the demise of the medieval Bulgarian kingdoms, Paisiı̆ placed the blame for the Bulgarian misfortunes on the fact that the “Greek,” or Byzantine, rulers had pitted the Turks against the Bulgarians; he equated the “Byzantines” from medieval times with the contemporary “Greeks,” branding the two as cunning, disloyal, and distrustful. In the end Father Paisiı̆’s book gave rise to the “double-yoke theory” that influenced the development of the Bulgarian national movement from its inception to the present. In this view, because the Greeks inhibited the development of Bulgarian national consciousness, the spiritual domination of the Greek clergy and teachers over the Bulgarian population in the Ottoman Empire was as oppressive as the political domination of the Ottoman administration over the historic Bulgarian lands. Thus Father Paisiı̆’s SlavicBulgarian History created a tenacious image of the Greek spiritual “yoke” that suffocated the “awakening” of the Bulgarian people and hindered their emancipation from the political “yoke” of the Ottoman Turks. From Empire to Nation-States Father Paisiı̆’s ideas of ethno-cultural differentiation between Bulgarians and Greeks, based on history and language, are best understood in the context of the political, social, and cultural changes that started to transform the Otto­ man Balkans in the late eighteenth century. As old principles of social organization based on religious allegiances gave way to new ideas associated with ethno-linguistic differences and later national consciousness, the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire started redefining their traditional ideas of social hierarchy and group belonging. Within the Ottoman Empire, the millet system of social relations divided the subjects of the sultan according to religion. While such divisions established the secondary role of the Orthodox Christian (as well as Armenian and Jewish) communities in relation to the Muslims, they also guaranteed the social acceptance of the Christian population in the Ottoman realms. After the fall of Constantinople, in 1453, the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Istanbul supervised all matters pertaining to the 2. Some sixty...

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