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43 Chapter 2 No Smoke without Fire Tobacco and Transformation, 1878–1914 In 1892 the young Bulgarian principality staged an International Agricultural and Trade Exhibition in Plovdiv, its second-largest city, with the idea of drawing crowds of international and domestic participants and spectators.1 The fair’s organizers saw the event as fulfilling a number of important functions, prime among them the stimulation of trade and local industry. As in other fairs of the period, displays of Bulgaria’s rich resources, handicrafts, and manufactured goods shared the stage with entertainment and displays of folk and high culture, carefully ensconced in an ensemble of specially commissioned works of architectural and landscape design.2 The resulting assembly of people,buildings,and goods was meant to display and sell the glories of “free Bulgaria” to foreign visitors as well as its own population—both urban dwellers and peasant delegations from the provinces. In addition,Bulgarian planners encouraged legions of Slavic peasants to attend from the adjacent Ottoman provinces of Thrace and Macedonia, offering cheap train fares and accommodation. From the earliest planning stages of the fair organizers wistfully asked, “and who of those Bulgarians who live outside our borders does not want to see the happiness and delight, the life force, riches and successes of their free brothers, which reflect the prosperous future of the whole nation?”3 With broadly defined goals and a diverse audience in mind, they presented an interesting amalgam of exhibits that combined informational displays with pure 44 CHAPTER 2 entertainment, artifacts of progress with quaint folksiness, and the modern European with the exotic and Oriental. Undotubtedly this event was a veritable coming out for the nation, albeit with sufficiently ambiguous messages and often contradictory goals. Bulgarian statesmen were keen on displaying national culture and progress to the citizens of the principality, as well as to visiting Bulgarian nationals from neighboring regions and to foreigners. But the fair was also meant to drive (rather than express) economic and social advances. With its display of agricultural and industrial technologies,the fair had clearly stated “instructional” functions for the Bulgarian populations.4 Foreigners,on the other hand,were meant to bear witness to Bulgaria’s potential for development as well as its exotic desirability. From the moment they walked through the Orientalstyle entrance gate visitors were invited to immerse themselves in the pleasures within, from the Turkish sweets to the colorful panoply of peasants in national garb. Along these lines, one of the central buildings in the center of the fairgrounds was the tobacco pavilion of Dimitŭr Stavrides, a Greek and one of Bulgaria’s most prominent tobacconists of the period. Beyond its evocative Oriental-Mughul style exterior, spectators observed demonstrations of sorting and cutting the rich and flavorful Oriental tobaccos grown in the Bulgarian provinces.5 Oriental or Turkish tobaccos had already attained a degree of international renown in this period for their exceptional quality and unique aroma and flavor. Generally these tobaccos tended to be associated with other Balkan provinces, Thrace and Macedonia, still under the direct control of the Ottoman Empire—or with Egypt, through which many of them were re-exported. In Plovdiv, however, Turkish tobacco was explicitly displayed as Bulgarian, in and among the other products of newly autonomous Bulgaria. In 1892 the Bulgarian nation was still an amalgam of elements, not yet untangled from the Ottoman past and still trying to negoti ate a future within Europe. This was a process that would unfold, among other ways, through internal and international economic relationships and commodity exchange. By the 1890s tobacco was a central player in such interactions as one of the few highly valuable and marketable Bulgarian commodities with an immediate potential for export growth. Although other products were sold and displayed at the fair, tobacco was the only commodity with its own pavilion, and its centrality marked the beginning of the tobacco era in Bulgarian history. The Stavrides pavilion was visited and experienced by Bulgarians and foreign spectators at a historical moment when tobacco was becoming a pervasive palliative for Bulgarians . The rapid expansion of tobacco cultivation,processing,and commerce NO SMOKE WITHOUT FIRE 45 by the late nineteenth century reflected a domestic and growing global tobacco addiction. As with other nondurable addictive goods, consumers required ever large quantities of tobacco in order to achieve its desired effect. Bulgarian statesmen and merchants had begun to recognize that the expanding domestic and international market for this cash crop offered an opportunity to mitigate...

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