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11 Chapter 1 Coffeehouse Babble Smoking and Sociability in the Long Nineteenth Century Ganko’s kafene was, as usual, filled with noise and smoke. It was the meeting place of old and young alike, where public matters were discussed, and the Eastern Question too, as well as all the domestic and foreign policy of Europe. A miniature parliament one might say. —Ivan Vazov, Under the Yoke Awash in smoke and sociability,Ganko’s kafene is the fictional social hub and main setting for the most widely read Bulgarian novel, Ivan Vazov’s Under the Yoke (Pod Igoto). With Vazov as guide, the reader experiences Ganko’s social panorama, its parade of archetypal characters from a Balkan mountain town in Ottoman Bulgaria who drink bitter coffee, ruminate and debate, laugh and observe, within a “dense fog of tobacco smoke.”1 Set in the period before Bulgarian political autonomy, Ganko’s has an air of political excitement. On the canvas of the kafene Vazov skillfully paints a late Ottoman landscape—the months leading up to the April Uprising of 1876—rife with social change. Indeed, in Under the Yoke Vazov portrays a time of upheaval in which generations, ways of life, and political objectives collide head on, noticeably between the kafene walls. Yet in spite of this ferment, the kafene and the surrounding Balkan towns strike the reader as somehow timeless; stagnation is the subtext to the impulse for change. The social life of tobacco in Bulgaria’s long nineteenth century is virtually inseparable from the life and times of the kafene. Slavic-speaking Christian , or “Bulgarian,”2 men had traditionally gathered in the alcohol-imbibed krŭchma (tavern), but over the course of the century they began to enter the “sober” social life of the kafene. Already a centuries-old Balkan Muslim tradition, the kafene was a new phenomenon for Balkan Christians, a 12 CHAPTER 1 portal to a new world. Facilitated by the ritualized consumption of coffee and tobacco, the discovery and invention of “Bulgarianness” took place, at least in part, amid kafene conviviality. Smoking and sipping coffee in the kafene (and later in the European café) became intimately connected to Bulgarian upward mobility; to their increased authority in Ottoman villages , towns, and cities; and for many, to a national and political awakening.3 The changing clientele of the Balkan kafene to a large degree mirrored the dramatic changes in Bulgarian society in the long nineteenth century.4 Patterns of tobacco consumption both reflected and drove new modes of political organization and cultural identification, particularly inside privileged smoking venues like the kafene. Smoking, in a sense, was connected to Bulgarians’ initiation into a broader world of commerce, politics, and urban culture that took on a decidedly European hue over the course of the century. It is tempting to map this story through the familiar paradigm of “Europeanization,” which so often shapes understandings of this period in both Bulgarian and Ottoman-Balkan history.5 Certainly the penetration of European ideas, material culture, social mores, and a range of institutions was an important aspect of change in the nineteenth-century Balkans. This was especially true after the Crimean War (1853–56) and the momentous Russo-Turkish War (1877–78), in which Bulgaria gained autonomy and de Bulgarian men at a traditional krŭchma in the Plovdiv region, date unknown. Courtesy of the Regional State Archive in Plovdiv. COFFEEHOUSE BABBLE 13 facto independence from the Ottomans. Western commerce, consular and missionary activity, and the travels and studies of Bulgarians abroad brought an avalanche of influences, and the kafene was an important conduit. But an emphasis on Europeanization offers a rather false and value-laden teleology of change that belies the complexity of the Bulgarian introduction into a world of smoking and sociability. For many Bulgarians, their entrance into kafene culture was entirely local or connected to work and travel to Ottoman towns or cosmopolitan port cities. Of course, Bulgarian merchant colonies abroad were also exposed to European café culture, but Ottoman kafene culture in Istanbul and the Bulgarian provinces was the most readily available coffeehouse experience. Significantly, the Ottoman coffeehouse was the original model for ritualistic coffee and tobacco consumption in Europe, imported and appropriated into early modern culture along with other Eastern “pleasures.”6 Over the centuries its shape and aesthetics evolved in various contexts, subjected to a range of both laudatory and critical appraisals.7 And while the café drew scrutiny, European observers also projected onto the Ottoman kafene their own...

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