Bulgaria: A Paradise On Earth

Ottoman rule

In the mid 13th century, the Second Bulgarian Empire dominated the Balkan Peninsula. By the end of the following century factional divisions between Bulgarian feudal landlords (boyars) had gravely weakened the cohesion of the Empire which therefore collapsed before the invading Ottoman armies in the 1390s. The Bulgarians, most of whom lived in the quadrilateral contained by the Danube, the Aegean coast of Thrace, the Black Sea and the valley of the Vardar in the west, now entered upon five hundred years of Ottoman domination.

During the second half of the 14th century Bulgaria became an Ottoman vassalage. Ottoman Sultan Bayezid I annexed Bulgaria following his victory against a crusade at the Battle of Nicopolis in 1396 .According to some historians the five centuries of Ottoman rule featured violence and oppression. The Ottomans decimated the Bulgarian population, which lost most of its cultural relics. Turkish authorities destroyed most of the medieval Bulgarian fortresses in order to prevent rebellions. Large towns and the areas where Ottoman power predominated remained severely depopulated until the nineteenth century.

Shipka memorial

The new authorities dismantled Bulgarian institutions at anything above the village or communal level, and merged the separate Bulgarian Church into the Orthodox Patriarchate in Constantinople (Istanbul), although a small, semi-independent Bulgarian Church did survive until 1767. The conquerors also assumed virtual ownership of the land, though they vested legal ownership in Allah’s representative on earth, the Sultan. The new system of land-tenure imposed by the Turks functioned to provide the Ottoman army with cavalry troops: the sipahi or landlord had to provide a number of men proportionate to the amount of land he held, while maintained economically by his tenants, or rayahs.

For the Bulgarian peasant the new system offered greater security than the old Bulgarian Empire had provided and exceptional privileges accrued to peasants living on vakif land — land with its income permanently entailed for the upkeep of a religious or charitable institution.All tenants, Christian or Muslim, who lived on vakif land had the right to such privileges, but in general the Christian subjects of the Sultan had to endure a number of disabilities; they usually paid more taxes than Moslems, they lacked legal equality with Moslems, they could not carry arms, their clothes could not rival those of Moslems in color, nor could their churches tower as high as mosques. The new rulers made few attempts to enforce conversion to Islam and relatively few Bulgarians felt attracted to the new ruling faith by the legal privileges its adherents enjoyed. Those who did convert, the Pomaks, retained their native language, dress and customs, and lived primarily in the Rhodope mountains.

The Ottoman system at its height did much to protect the rayah, but by the 17th century the system had started to decline, and at the end of the 18th had all but collapsed. Central government weakened over the decades, and this had allowed a number of local adventurers and freebooters to establish personal ascendancy over separate regions. These local ayans employed armed retainers and having established their authority frequently imposed new and far more arduous tenancies on the peasantry under their control. During the last two decades of the 18th and first decades of the 19th centuries the Balkan Peninsula dissolved into virtual anarchy, a period known in Bulgarian as the kurdjaliistvo after the armed bands or kurdjalii who plagued the area at this time. In many regions thousands of peasants fled from the countryside either to local towns or more probably to the hills or forests; some even fled beyond the Danube to Moldova, Wallachia or Southern Russia.

In the 18th and especially during the 19th century, conditions improved in certain areas. Some towns such as Gabrovo, Tryavna, Karlovo, Lovech, Skopie prospered. The Bulgarian peasants actually possessed their land, although it officially belonged to the sultan. The nineteenth century also brought improved communications, transportation and trade. In 1834, the first factory in the Bulgarian lands opened in Sliven, and in 1865, the first railway system started running between Ruse and Varna.

Throughout the five Ottoman centuries Bulgarian people organized many attempts to re-establish their own state. The National awakening of Bulgaria became one of the key factors in the struggle for freedom. In the 19th century, there came into existence the Bulgarian Revolutionary Central Committee and the Internal Revolutionary Organisation led by liberal revolutionaries such as Vasil Levski, Hristo Botev, Lyuben Karavelov and many others. In 1876, the April uprising broke out: the largest and best-organized Bulgarian rebellion against the Ottoman Empire. This rebellion, however, did not receive the expected support from the Bulgarian masses.

Source - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia