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Ideological dimensions of the “BalkanFamily Pattern” in the first half of the20th centuryPetko Hristova

a Historical Ethnology Department, Institute of Ethnology andFolklore Studies with Ethnographic Museum, Bulgarian Academy ofSciences, Sofia, BulgariaPublished online: 14 Mar 2014.

To cite this article: Petko Hristov (2014) Ideological dimensions of the “Balkan FamilyPattern” in the first half of the 20th century, The History of the Family, 19:2, 218-234, DOI:10.1080/1081602X.2014.892023

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Ideological dimensions of the “Balkan Family Pattern” in thefirst half of the 20th century

Petko Hristov*

Historical Ethnology Department, Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with EthnographicMuseum, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia, Bulgaria

(Received 12 December 2013; accepted 14 January 2014)

This article deals with family ideology and family ritual processes in the Central part ofthe Balkans, in the mountainous part of the Bulgarian–Serbian border areas, during thesecond half of the nineteenth and the early twentieth century. Celebration rituals,dedicated to the patron saints of family-kin households (Serbian slava and Bulgariansluzhba), have been described as an “ideology of patriarchalism” in ethnological andhistorical literature, based on the cult of predecessors. Ethnographical research in thisregion has shown the prominent social functions of the ritual cycle that built cohesionin the family-kin community, rather than archaism. Based on historical andethnological data, and on ethnographic fieldwork in Western Bulgaria and EasternSerbia, this contribution shows how the Orthodox cycle of celebrations and rituals waspracticed in a family-kin environment during the first half of the twentieth century.The analysis focuses on how family rituals built family ideology, which kept itsintegrative functions even during the decades of socialism.

Keywords: family ideology; multiple family household; saint-patron feast; slava;Central Balkans

1. Introduction

The fall of the Berlin Wall in 1990 became a symbol of the overcoming of the multiple

divisive lines in Europe that had been drawn over the decades by a variety of means: from

ideology and politics to culture and language practice. During the last decade of the

twentieth century and at the start of the new millennium, a number of interpretational

constructs and lines of separation were superceded, both in the area of historical and

ethnologic research and, in particular, in the study of family and kin formations on the

European continent. Despite this, during recent years – over the course of discussions

about family and kin models in South-Eastern Europe – a number of family-kin rituals

(especially the feasts in honour of patrilineage patron saints among several Balkan

peoples) are still used as a token of a (consciously or unconsciously) archaised social

structure, considered typical of the Balkans even until the mid-twentieth century

(cf. Kaser, 2008, p. 36). In both Eastern European (Marxist) ethnography and in Western

European and American (social/cultural) anthropology, these “archaic” social institutions

and rituals are viewed as living specimens in the European Volksmuseum (cf. the criticism

in Hammel, 1980, p. 242) or at least as fundamentally different from the “European”

model – a “non-European” marital model, divided along the “Hajnal line” from St.

Petersburg to Trieste (cf. Hajnal, 1965, p. 101). Furthermore, Hajnal suggested that

similarities in household structure in pre-modern Croatia and imperial Russia might be

q 2014 Taylor & Francis

*Email: hristov_p@yahoo.com

The History of the Family, 2014

Vol. 19, No. 2, 218–234, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/1081602X.2014.892023

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indicative of a shared “Slavic tradition” (Hajnal, 1982, p. 469). In more recent years,

further studies have complicated this picture of a specific Slavic family type, “revealing

instead a substantial amount of variation in household formation patterns even within

imperial Russia” (Dennison, 2011, p. 458).

An early example from social anthropology is Radcliffe-Brown’s analysis of the social

relations in the Montenegrin kin system, “obviously different” from the Anglo-Saxon

model (Radcliffe-Brown, 1986, p. 63). Even though in-depth structure-functional and

historic-demographic research shows the speculative nature of a number of theories that

point out the South-Slavic complex households of the zadruga type as a uniquely Slavic

institution (cf. the criticism about this theory in Kassabova-Dintcheva, 2002, p. 83;

Todorova, 2006, pp. 154–160), attempts to classify the Balkans as “radically different”

from the rest of Europe persist even today and have varying success. Family-kin

celebrations like the slava in Serbia and sluzhba in Bulgaria were viewed in literature as an

“ethnographic curiosity” (Mitterauer, 1994, p. 20) in a European context.

The image of the “underdeveloped” Balkans, part of “Wild Europe” (cf. Jezernik,

2004), in which an important part was “reserved” for Southern Slavs, also has a long

history. As Maria Todorova justly remarked in her book, the Balkans became a convenient

object for projecting “Otherness” in a magnificent, civilised Europe (Todorova, 1999,

p. 506). In ethnology, the study of the Balkans as a cultural “reserve” for different

“remnants” of archaic institutions, feasts and rituals was formed simultaneously with the

affirmation of evolutionism in European and world anthropology. In his fundamental book

Primitive Culture, Edward Burnett Tylor pointed specifically to the blood sacrifice on St.

George’s Day among Bulgarians as a representative example of pagan “leftovers” in

contemporary Christianity from the mid-nineteenth century (Taylor, 1989, p. 482).

Analysing the specifics of ritual items and activities was subordinate to a particular kind of

ethno-cultural stratification. For more than a century now, research from different fields

(but predominantly historians and ethnologists) views the family, household and village

celebrations among Southern Slavs in the Balkans as a final, complete product of a long

and complicated historical process whose layers need to be “unravelled” (on slava cf.

Bandic, 1997, p. 240; on kurban, cf. Sikimic & Hristov, 2007). After the study of Karl

Kaser, which examines the celebration of slava among the Orthodox and Catholics in the

Balkans, it became clear that, like many other Christian rituals, the feast of the patron saint

is a Christianised form of ancestor worship, but there is no antagonism between this

Christian feast, with its functions of ritual affirmation of family and kinship bonds, and its

pagan origins (Kaser, 1993, pp. 93–122). Also, as Maria Todorova notes, this is

completely in conformity with the attempt of Karl Kaser to contextualise this feast in the

framework of a social ideology he called “Balkan Patriarchy”, that is to say as a ritual

backing of the kin and family structure which for a long period of time represented a

“common ideal” (in the term used by Maria Todorova – see 1993, p. 128) for a number of

Balkan people.

The present article deals with family ideology and traditional family ritual processes in

the Central part of the Balkans during the early twentieth century. The main goal of my

research conducted in 1998–1999 in the region of Tran (Central Western Bulgaria) and in

2001 in the region of Zajecar (Northeastern Serbia) was 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. This research was

historical and ethnographic in character rather than statistical and demographic – as we

shall see in the two case studies, the ritual re-confirmation of kinship ties during the family

festivals in Nasalevtsi (Bulgaria) and Osljane (Serbia) is a form of organisation of cultural

Ideological dimensions of the “Balkan Family Pattern” 219

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memory which re-produces the cultural identity of the kindred group (Assmann, 2001,

p. 55). In the regions I have investigated, the family festivals of the svetac/slava type

function throughout the twentieth century as a milestone of patriarchal family ideology.

By “family ideology” I mean the relationship between the ideals about family, formulated

in a given social environment, and the family practices through which this ideal is realised

as an expression of the family system of values (cf. Tyszka, 1974, p. 74). That is why the

emic perspective of the interpretation of the family feasts is basic for my study – thus we

could draw near to the “thick description” with a view “from inside” proclaimed in modern

anthropology, following the model of Clifford Geertz’s work.

Like the Russian peasantry, in the ethnographical, historical and anthropological

literature the Balkans are seen as a “paradigm of ‘traditional society’, characterised by

social and geographical immobility, early and universal marriage, large multiple-family

households and strong communal ties” (Dennison, 2005, p. 536). As we shall see, there are

frequent speculations about the archaic character of the so-called “Balkan Family Pattern”,

which differs from the “European” one including the sphere of the family ideology.

My ethnological research conducted in the villages of the Bulgarian–Serbian borderland

showed the prominent social functions of the ritual cycle that build cohesion in the family/

household community, rather than archaism. My thesis is that this cycle of celebrations and

rituals, related to the so-called “traditional Christianity” among Orthodox people in the

Balkans, is part of the yearly feasts celebrated in a family-kin environment.My respondents

view them as Christian, part of “our folk religion” (“nasha narodna vera”), the main

function of which is to preserve the sense of unity among patrilineal kin groups, even when

the particular family-kin couples live in separate households or when they are spatially

distant as a result of the intensified migration from the villages to the towns in the second

half of the twentieth century. One of the emphases of my research will be on the “usage” of

celebrations in constructing various interpretational models that aim to explain Balkan

“difference” specifically through the history of multiple family households and the feasts

dedicated to their patron saint: the Bulgarian sluzhba and the Serbian slava.

The study has mainly an ethnographic character and is focused on the first half of the

twentieth century. As Maria Todorova observes in her comment on Karl Kaser’s study,

during this period the feast studied here is still a “living ritual” in Western Bulgaria

(Todorova, 1993, pp. 124–125), as well as in Eastern Serbia. That is why my

reconstruction of the ritual is based on the stories of my respondents who participated

personally in the feast, as well as on earlier records kept in the archives (for example those

of Rayna Pesheva). My field-work includes conversations with old inhabitants of a number

of villages1 as well as a direct observation of a family slava on St. George’s Day in 2001 in

the village of Osljane which was performed by middle-aged people. The scanty statistical

data and the complete lack of parochial registers in the villages that were studied

(they were destroyed in the years of early socialism) restricted the exercise within the

frameworks of the ethnographic research. The data from the first censuses in the

Principality of Bulgaria (in 1888 and 1893), the only ones to contain detailed information

about the size of the households by villages, are used solely as an illustration of the social

reality in the end of nineteenth century.

The main questions are: Did the common model of “Balkan Patriarchal Ideology”,

presented by historians, ethnologists and anthropologists, exist in the past? How and why

was this patrilineal family model developed as a “patriarchal ideology”? How does the

ritual performed on svetac/slava and the common table of the descendents of a common

patrilineage create the basis for the reproduced cultural identity of the extended family? Is

the meaning of the family feast, dedicated to the family-kin group’s patron saint, preserved

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after the large-scale migrations from the mid-twentieth century and the depopulation of

villages in Bulgaria and former Yugoslavia?

2. Family celebrations and constructing the “archaic” Balkans

The peculiarities of social structures and ritual processes among Balkan peoples have

always been used to underline their difference from “civilized Europe” (conclusion by

Kaser, 1999, p. 21), despite the non-detrimental (even “good”) intentions of many authors.

This is especially true of those Balkanistic studies in which “the models, created in one

field of research, are used by induction to make conclusions in another” (Todorova, 1999,

p. 367). We can refer to Eugene Hammel’s statement: “From the beginning of the

Romantic movement in European philosophy, the social organisation and culture of the

Balkans have been regarded as a still-living example of what life must have been like in

the misty past of the Indo-European peoples” (Hammel 1980, p. 242).

The view of the Balkans as “Europe’s ethnographic museum” not only sneaks up in the

“most refined discourses” of Western historiography (Todorova, 1999, p. 348), but is also

typical of Eastern European studies, tangled up in the framework of Marxist-Leninist

ideology in the decades before 1990. The predominant approach in the East was to view

family and kin groups in the Balkans (and the related peculiarities of the feast-ritual

system among different peoples) as remnants of earlier phases in the evolutionary

development of human civilisation. The outlines of the “kin institution” (in the

terminology of Pesheva, 1983, pp. 541–547) were sought in different family-kin social

communities in the Balkans, interpreted also as independent socio-economical units –

“patronymy” (Kosven, 1963, p. 251) – that inherited the zadruga (as an extended family

community) of the South Slavs. This approach was also used to interpret different

subsequent (“rudiments”) family-kin communities – pleme, later bratstvo among

Montenegrins, and fis and vlaznia among Albanians, a result of the decay and

segmentation of kin structure in the Western Balkans (Ivanova, 1966, p. 7).

In all research conducted by Soviet ethnographers of the 1960s, “archaic”

(or archaised) social institutions in the Balkans were identified as a sign of patriarchalism;

one of its main expressions was the existence of a common patron saint of the family-kin

community and his or her ritual worship on the common feast slava or Albanian feshta

(Ivanova, 1966, p. 13; Kosven, 1963, p. 256). The thesis that family-kin celebrations

dedicated to the patron saints of the kin and the family among South Slavs are a sign of

more archaic (even tribal or feudal) social relations preserved in the Balkans, as well as an

indicator of a patriarchal cult, was also adopted by Bulgarian ethnologists during this

period (Stamenova, 1985, pp. 154–156).

In Western European ethnology and American anthropology, the sacrificial rituals

dedicated to the patron saints of different family and kin communities in the Balkans were

unreservedly proclaimed as both the most important Christian celebration (the “Feast”) in

the family’s annual calendar feast cycle and as the most obvious sign of the “Balkan

Family Pattern” and “Balkan Patriarchy”2. Thus, torn from its natural context, with no

special research3, the slava feast (along with the Albanian feshta) was proclaimed as the

main ritual characteristic of ancestor cult, which was thought to present the main

ideological-religious basis (different from canonical Christianity) and core of “Balkan

Patriarchalism” (terminology by Halpern, Kaser, & Wagner, 1996, p. 436) and of the

patrilineal family model in the Balkans (Mitterauer, 1996, p. 390). In this, Mitterauer saw

“cult-justified patrilineality”.

Ideological dimensions of the “Balkan Family Pattern” 221

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The discussion about the essence, nature, geographic spread and historical roots of the

“Balkan Family Pattern” (Kaser, 1994b, p. 46), and about its existence and interpretative

possibilities (cf. Kaser, 1997/98, p. 127), is still ongoing (Todorova, 2006, pp. 199–211).

It will not be examined here in detail – it is beyond the specific goals of the present

research. I shall only note that the focus of the researcher’s attention on the family patron

saint celebration as a ritual basis for understanding patrilineality becomes a cornerstone

for explaining the “otherness” of the family-kin system in the Balkans within the frames of

the “Eastern European” family model, outlined as early as the 1960s by Hajnal (Hajnal,

1965). However, after the studies of Karl Kaser and Maria Todorova it became clear that

the feast of the patron saint of the family is neither an ethnic nor a confessional marker but

is part of the tradition of many peoples in the Balkans – Serbs, Bulgarians, Wallachians,

Albanians, Montenegrins, as well as Orthodoxes and Catholics (Kaser, 1993, pp. 93–122;

Todorova, 1993, pp. 123–130).

As for the family structure in the Balkans and the “mysterious” zadruga, the studies by

a number of researchers of statistic-demographic data and parameters from different areas

in the Balkans – both for the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century, as well

as for earlier ages: e.g. the military border of the Habsburg Empire of 1712 (Kaser, 1994b,

p. 49 and on), fourteenth-century Macedonia (Hammel, 1980, pp. 269–270), eighteenth

and nineteenth century Croat Slavonia (for the Cernik region, cf. Capo Zmegac, 1996,

p. 385 and on), North-Eastern Bulgaria from the late Ottoman period (Todorova, 2006) –

did not confirm the thesis about the predominance of complex households in the Balkans.

Quite the contrary, all analyses show a variety of data and ratios for different types of

family households, even within the boundaries of the same region. Peter Laslett was right

to claim that there is no visible correlation between the size of the household in a particular

municipality and the complexity of the structure of these households. He adds,

commenting on medieval Japan, that it was the ideological care for the family as a

patrilineage, for the preservation of its name, land and property, that dominated rather than

the care for its structure as a family group (Laslett & Wall, 1972, p. 70). And commenting

on Hammel’s study of fourteenth-century Macedonia, Kaser concluded that this shows the

unreliability of using average household size as an indicator of social structure (Kaser,

1994a, p. 252), especially after noting that the data regarding household size concerns only

one point in time (Halpern, 1972, p. 405). Following Hammel’s view of the “zadruga as

process”, Todorova supported the thesis that the zadruga – as one of the forms of complex

family household – is a late phenomenon that appeared as a new (or a cyclical) response to

specific developments in the Ottoman Empire after the eighteenth century. Not only that,

but also “the geographical frequency of zadrugas unequivocally follows the curve of the

mountain terrain in the Balkans overriding ethnic boundaries” (Todorova, 2006, p. 166).

An essential fact for this research is that Maria Todorova shifted the “Eastern

boundary” of the nineteenth and early twentieth century spread of complex families

(and the kin ideology related to it, represented by the sluzhba and svetac celebrations) and

included the mountain regions of Mid-Western Bulgaria (the districts of Tran, Breznik,

Tsaribrod, Samokov and Sofia) in the zones of clearly noticeable concentration and

frequency (cf. Todorova, 2006, p. 116). The assumption remains, however, that in an

ethnological perspective in the Balkans there is a whole group of kin, labour and other

structures that characterise the complex system of families and households but remain

“unseen” and are not noted in written sources (cf. Stahl, 1986, p. 168). This is why, as

Todorova writes, “the interregional variations in the Balkans were so substantive that any

generalisations at this stage of our empirical knowledge are suspect and most often render

themselves to myth-making” (Todorova, 2006, p. 207).

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At this point it is appropriate to return to a methodologically important note by the

Croatian ethnologist Dunja Rihtman-Augustin regarding complex family households of

the zadruga type. According to her, “at no point have all households in Croatia and among

all South Slavs been communal, and the principles of family organisation that we

recognise as communal were also principles in every smaller family” (Rihtman-Augustin,

1984, p. 18). This raises questions about the discrepancy between desired models and

actual practice, i.e. about the aspects of family-kin ideology in the Balkans. Viewing

family structure complexity as just one phase in the development of families and

households, Hammel wrote that in a society in which joint households are culturally

permitted, expected and idealised, most households may be small and simple Hammel

(1980, p. 252), i.e. the zadruga could be an “ideal” but rarely achieved pattern.

We can conclude that a lot has been done in historical studies, in demography and in

anthropology (social, cultural, historical) towards identifying the geographic spread of

joint family households in the Balkans during the nineteenth and the early twentieth

centuries. Localising them in a number of mountainous and semi-mountainous parts of the

peninsula is now rarely discussed. We know that the family cycle of communal family

households in the Balkans undergoes certain (longer or shorter) stages of inception, decay

and reconstruction of complexity – stages unified by Hammel in his view of “the zadruga

as process”. At the end, the gradual decay of the complexity system and the eventual

break-up of joint family households among different South Slavic peoples have been well

documented during the late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries (cf. separate

research in Byrnes, 1976; for Bulgaria, cf. Bobchev, 1907). The rest, as pointed out by

Kaser, consists of interpretative speculations: whether complex families of the zadruga

type are related to pastoral economy or not, whether they are a product of legislation or of a

specific eco-environment, whether it is an archaic social matrix that provides the context

for the inception (or revitalisation) of the “joint family structure” (Kaser, 1994a, p. 253)

and so on.

What truly challenges ethnologists and historians who study Balkan family forms is

how patrilineal kinship and family groups symbolised their unity and solidarity through

ritual practices at the feast dedicated to the patron saint of descent groups and multiple

family households, functioning as a basis for identity. In his most recent book – which had

the rather indicative title “Patriarchy after Patriarchy” – Karl Kaser wrote that

celebrations of the Serbian slava type can be interpreted as a Christianised form of a pre-

Christian ritual celebration of the lineage ancestor and provided the extended patrilineage

with a sacred, religious identity. On the basis of my own research in Midwestern Bulgaria

and the so called Torlak villages in Eastern Serbia and North-Western Bulgaria, I will

show how the feast called svetac in the border regions “could also be regarded as a

reminder of distant kinship even when the actual ties had been lost” (Kaser, 2008, p. 51).

Particular descriptions of the feast are relevant to the village of Nasalevtsi in the Tran

region of Bulgaria (during the first half of the twentieth century) and slava in the village of

Osljane in the Timok region on Serbia (during the second half of the twentieth century).

3. Family-kin celebrations in the Bulgarian–Serbian border areas

The study of the main characteristics of the ritual process in family-kin and territorial

groups in the villages in the Bulgarian–Serbian border area – both among the Serbian and

the Bulgarian populations on both sides of the border – contributed to both the

confirmation and the re-evaluation of some of the already formulated conclusions in

ethnology and anthropology regarding the characteristics of the “Balkan Joint Family”

Ideological dimensions of the “Balkan Family Pattern” 223

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ideology, the model they were placed in (Kaser, 1996, p. 383). The same is also relevant

about the patron saint feast in agnatic communes (in its regional variants, svetac/svetac) as

part of the family ideology and cultural memory.

In the regions I studied, the family-kin structure based on agnatic kinship descending

along the male line has for a long time formed the backbone of the village social system

and the structure of the households as its basic element, but after the 1920s it no longer

guaranteed the predominant complexity of family households. Despite this, in many

villages the family household cycle of complexity was prolonged during the late

nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth century – division occurred not after the

death of the head of the household, but one or two generations after that. Multiple family

households (according to Peter Laslett’s terminology) were emblematic after the liberation

from the Ottoman Empire (1878) in the regions of Midwestern Bulgaria under

investigation. In the detailed description of the Principality of Bulgaria made by

Konstantine Jirecek the village of Nasalevtsi in the district of Tran was listed as the village

that had the largest average number of members in a household in all of Bulgaria;

according to the 1888 census, 555 villagers lived in 56 households, with 27 of them having

more than 10 members4, at a time when the average for the rest of Bulgaria was 5.5

members per household (Jirecek, 1899, p. 89).

It is important to specify that according to the ethnographic data this complex

organisation of family households in the regions of the Bulgarian–Serbian border area under

investigation includes family couples from several generations of relatives descending along

the male line: the father with his undivided sons and their families, or (more rarely) the

father, his married sons and his grandchildren with their own children, with the number of

household members varying usually between 10 and 20 people. According to tradition, non-

relatives (servants, farm-hands) and the families of the sons-in-law (i.e. daughter’s families)

are not allowed to live in the households except in the cases when there are no sons. In the

majority of cases in the first half of the twentieth century, undivided family couples are

incorporated in joint family households by living together and sharing common property,

production and consumption. Shortage and poor fertility of land in these regions kept

households undivided for a long time, while the superfluous male labour force was engaged

in seasonal labour migrations to big cities; that is why there are neither rich landowners nor

completely landless households in these areas. This continued up until the mid-twentieth

century: there have been recorded cases in Bulgarian villages of three generations of family

couples living in the same household and entering collective socialist farms (so-called

TKZS) undivided during the 1950s, at the time of massive cooperation of land usage that

was forced by Socialist authorities. Despite this, statistical data of the 1940s shows that the

nuclear family household that existed throughout the entire period of studies became the

dominant type, and complexity was only expressed vertically within the frames of two

family couples – the parents, their married son (the youngest) and his children (cf. the

summary in Hristov, 2004, pp. 120–121).

An important reason for the continued preservation of traditional social structures and

the continuity of communal living in a shared household was the traditional male seasonal

labour mobility, practiced on both sides of the border. For centuries, entire generations of

men travelled as master builders in both Serbia and Bulgaria, which contributed to the

preservation of multiple family households even until the mid-twentieth century (Hristov,

2008, p. 219). In the regions of Eastern Serbia under investigation, this process was

prolonged even further due to the peculiarities of Tito’s version of socialism and the lack

of centralised (forced) collectivisation in Serbian villages. Even until the late 1960s,

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traditional social structure and relations were preserved in villages in the Timok and Pirot

districts (Drljaca, 1982, p. 95).

The members of patrilineal kinship family communes (vamilija in local dialect) who

lived within a given complex household, and the group of households related on agnatic

principles inhabited localised parts of the village (so called mahala), often scattered a few

kilometres away from each other within the village territory. Their members worked on

separate localised areas of the village’s agricultural land – even after they were divided –

and retained their sense of close kinship and their common family name, ending in –ovci/-

evci (both in Western Bulgaria and in Eastern Serbia). The social picture is identical to the

one described by Joel Halpern about Orasac, where the common descent group (vamilija)

“was not a lineage in the strict sense of the term since it was not a corporate group, nor

livestock or landowning groups; however particular vamilijas tended to live in distinct

neighbourhoods, and even today [i.e. 1972] in Orasac the various neighbourhoods

generally reflect this fact and are identified as such” (Halpern & Halpern, 1972, p. 22; cf.

Andrejs Plakans’s comment in Plakans, 1984, p. 203).

As a group, kinship patrilineal groups are situated not only on Earth, but also in

“Heaven”. Each of the family-kin groups in the village has its own fixed place in the

village cemetery, often referred to by the name of the kin, as well as its dedicated spot for

the village-wide rituals of honour for the dead – the so-called zadushnitsa. Each family-

kin group has its own dedicated spot (often marked by a special stone “chair”) at the

village-wide sacrifice rituals (kurban) in honour of the patron saint of the local church, also

celebrated as a village feast (sabor or seoska slava).

The idea of the agnatic family-kin group as a separate ritual and religious community

(cf. Mitterauer, 1996, p. 390), clearly distinguishable in a village milieu, was expressed in

the feast dedicated to the patron saint of the patrilineal union, celebrated at the home and/or

the kin’s plot of arable land. In the regions I have studied this type of festival is symbolic

evidence of the fact that the most primary and effective means for social binding and identity

development are kinship and the farms (Assmann, 2001, p. 141). In different variants from

villages in the Bulgarian–Serbian border area, a number of elements and ritual activities

related to honouring ancestors and to maintaining family and kin cohesion were typical not

only for the feast known from literature as slava/sluzhba (also as svetac in local dialects on

both sides of the border). When changing perspective and viewing this ritual as part of the

system of the annual calendar feast-ritual cycle and the overall ritual process in the family, it

becomes clear that it is an important moment, but not the only one, in the ritual maintenance

of the sense of common descent. In villages on both sides of the border, several models of

family-kin ritual processes were exhibited, related to the worship of the patron saint of the

agnatic kin. Due to the diversity of ritual activities – carried out at the home and the field by

patrilineal kin groups on feasts and known as slava/svetac and obrok – but also due to their

typological similarity in a socio-anthropological perspective, I will describe only two

examples that are representative of the regional variety on both sides of the border. I do

realise that ethnographic generalisations and modelling are provisional, and that this gives

rise to a need to abstract a number of details; however, this is the only way to achieve a

certain representative value for regional tradition within the framework of the present article.

3.1. Svetac in the village of Nasalevtsi

In the village of Nasalevtsi in the Tran region of Bulgaria, the family-kin celebration

svetac is one of the most important feasts in the annual calendar cycle. Ritual activities

related to the worship of the family-kin guardian of every “vamilija” were attached to

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celebrations from the Christian calendar, dedicated to saints that were viewed as patrons of

the respective kin commune. Often this is the saint whose name is borne by the founder of

the family or group of families. In Nasalevtsi one can hear: “We celebrate svetac in our

grandfather’s name, on St. Nicholas’s day”5. What mattered when choosing a saint was not

his rank in the church calendar, but his connection to the home’s kin community and his

worship as a patron saint – “protector” (cf. Mitterauer, 1994, p. 21). Due to the features of

male labour mobility in the region, mentioned above, and the seasonal absence of men

from the village, ritual activities were concentrated in three Christian celebrations during

the autumn–winter calendar cycle, after the builders returned from gurbet (seasonal

labour migration) around Mitrovdan (St. Demetrius’s Day – 26.106). The most common

patron saints in Nasalevtsi were St. Nicholas (used as a patron by nine family groups),

Archangel Michael (used by seven) and St. Demetrius (used by four)7.

Here is what the rituals on the feast of the family-kin svetac in Nasalevtsi look like.

In this form, the rituals were carried out until the early 1950s when widespread migration

towards the quickly developing cities and the capital of Bulgaria depopulated the villages:

today, only several elderly women live in Nasalevtsi. The main complex of ritual activities

carried out on svetac had a single common type and was persistent in different kin

vamilijas; the ritual did not change and did not depend on the Christian celebration itself.

The focus of ritual activities was directed towards the feast table for the kin families,

followed by the ritual raising, cutting and breaking up (“lomene”) of the ritual bread

(kolach), done with a number of blessings at the day of the feast.

Each family-kin group made special preparations for the feast. The ritual bread had

cross-shaped decorations and was baked by the oldest women in the house

(the housewife). The oldest man in the house (the household head) prepared the blood

sacrifice – kurban (lamb or sheep; never goats, pigs or birds). It was his duty to provide red

wine for the feast: in the Tran region, where grapes do not grow, wine was taken into the

home only for svetac and for Christmas Eve (i.e. for the home rituals of a Eucharistic

nature). If the svetac celebration fell during periods of fasting (e.g. St. Nicholas’s day), a

ritual fish meal – ribnik – was prepared in honour of the saint.

When celebrating svetac, all relevant families gathered for the main ritual at the feast

table – the families that belonged to the kin family union and descended from a common

ancestor; despite living in separate households, they most often shared a common patron

saint. According to Rayna Pesheva’s materials, recorded at the nearby village of

Staychovtsi in 1957, “it is customary law for people from the same mahala

(neighbourhood) to celebrate svetac together: they are from the same kin, ‘one vamilija’,

‘they stem from the same house’”8. In a given village, the entire mahala or a part of it

might celebrate the same patron saint. This is why all elderly men from the kin families in

the neighbourhood took part in the main rite – raising the ritual bread, cutting it up and

pouring wine over it – along with the host, the household head. From in the early 1930s

the men’s wives took part in the ritual as well. As a tradition in the past, however, only

men took part in the ritual activities for svetac; more specifically, those that were direct

descendants of the patriarch of the family-kin union: “women do not go to sluzhba, only

men do” (Pesheva, 1960, p. 740).

Led by the eldest, the old men (heads of households in the family-kin group) visited in

turn every house in the neighbourhood in which related vamilijas lived, and carried out the

bread and wine ritual. They did not follow a specific pattern, but it was preferred to vary

the order and start at a different house every year. In Nasalevtsi this group of ritual figures

was called svechari (‘consecrators’). In no house did the feast ritual begin before the

svechari arrived. The feast table would be prepared, and all members of the patrilineal

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family would be present at the house: two to three generations of family couples, along the

male descendant line. During the 1930s it was common to have guests from other villages

for svetac – relatives from affinal groups (daughters of the household head with their

husbands), but only if they did not feast on the same day.

When the svechari arrived, they were met solemnly. One of the women in the house

would pour water for them to wash their hands “so that fertility may stay in the house”.

The household head consecrated the feast table with incense and embers from the hearth,

reading the Lord’s Prayer; the other guests would take off their hats and cross themselves,

repeating: “God bless!” At more recent times the prayer was sometimes read by some boy

in the house while the eldest man performed the consecration. The head of household

would take the ritual bread (kolach), raise it over his head while saying blessings for heath

and fertility, and then make a cross-shaped cut on the underside, pouring red wine in the

cut. He would first cut it up vertically, saying “May God give us good harvest!”, then

horizontally from left to right, saying “May God give health to the people so they can reap

the harvest!” While pouring the wine, other blessings were said as well: “May our house

overflow with children, our barns with wheat, our pens with sheep and cattle” and so on,

making wishes for fertility and success for the home, the land and the cattle9. The kolach

was broken upwards in two by the household head and the eldest of the male relatives, and

after that in two again – with the eldest son or the housewife. Afterwards, everybody in the

house including the svechari had to take some of the kolach and wheat (or corn). When a

person took a piece of the kolach, he or she had to kiss it and say blessings for health and

fertility in the household. After the celebration ritual was over, the members of the

household stayed at the table while the eldest man (in more recent times – along with his

wife) joined the svechari and visited the next kin house in the neighbourhood.

Celebratory ritual activities on svetac most often ended late at night, when all kin

family houses had been visited; according to respondents, it was often the case that

“svechari would sing along with the roosters”. In my opinion, the routes of these ritual

tours by men on svetac clearly mark the kin exogamous circle for every individual in the

village; often the marriage restrictions far surpassed the “official” norms of the Orthodox

church (cf. also Hristov, 2001, p. 199).

The feast svetac in the village of Nasalevtsi is a typical example of how shared

participation in a food feast functions as a common ritual means for defining and

reaffirming the full extent of the human and sacred community (Bell, 1997, p. 123) of the

kindred family groups. The families which migrated to the big city after the

collectivisation in the 1950s and the accelerated socialist industrialisation gradually

neglected the traditional celebration of svetac and the kinship ties transform into the

proverbial social networks of fellow countrymen giving mutual aid in the capital.

3.2. Slava in Osljane village

In North-Eastern Serbia, in the so called ‘Torlak’ villages on the border with Bulgaria,

every household had two slava celebrations (in the past also referred to as svetac); one in

the winter calendar period, when the ritual was carried out at the home, and the other in the

summer period, when the feast was carried out in the field, near the family’s stone cross

(zapis) dedicated to the respective saint. For example, in Osljane village (Timok region):

Djurdjevdan (St. George’s day in the summer – 6 May10) and Sveti Djordja Zimski (St.

George’s day in the winter – 16 November), Sveti Nikola Letnji (St. Nicholas’s day in the

summer – 22 May) and Sveti Nikola Zimski (St. Nicholas’s day in the winter – 19

December), Sveti Jovan Biljober (7 July) and Sveti Jovan Krstitelj (20 January), Sveti Vrac

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Letnji (14 July) and Sveti Vrac Zimski (14 November), Sveti Randjel Letnji (26 July) and

Sveti Randjel Zimski (21 November) and so on. Every village was divided in several large

groups of related households – for example svetidjordjinci, who worshipped St. George

(Zimski and Letnji), svetinikolinci, who worshipped St. Nicholas (Zimski and Letnji) and so

on. Such folk ‘classification’ according to the home’s sluzhbawas also recorded during the

1970s in the village of Gramada in the Vidin region (Bulgaria) where the population is

divided – according to the family svetac – into varvarchane (those who worship St.

Barbara) and nikulchane (those who worship St. Nicholas)11. In the villages of Stakevtsi,

Krachimir and Prauzhda in the Belogradchik region (Bulgaria), the population of which

also calls itself ‘Torlak’, every family-kin group (vamilija) in the village also has two

celebrations: winter svetac in the home, and summer svetac/obrok near the stone cross

dedicated to the same patron saint in the field, on the kin’s plot of land12. Due to

insignificant differences in ritual activities on svetac on the two sides of the border, I will

give a more thorough description of the ritual in Osljane village in Serbia, focusing on

what has been described as the ‘standard model’ of krsna slava among Serbians (for the

description, cf. Kaser, 2002, pp. 217–218, after Schneeweiss, 1935, pp. 205–208).

Ritual activities – including pouring wine, raising and breaking up/giving ritual bread

(kolac) and cooked wheat (kolivo) – were repeated twice every year: during winter,

separately in each household, and during summer, collectively near the stone cross (zapis)

in turn for each household (whether related or not)13. The svetac/slava celebration here

was closely related to the common family home and the patrilineally inherited land

(bastinija) or the land which a bride in the family brought at her wedding as dowry (miraz).

Hence the saying: “One honours the svetac on a property” (Krstic, 2001, p. 88); the bread,

wine and kolivo ritual was carried in the household the same number of times as the

number of plots of land inherited with it. Svetacwas feasted for property inherited from the

father (land and the house), but a kolac would be poured over with wine and broken up for

wedding dowry (miraz), as well as for land inherited from non-relatives (i.e. in exchange

for taking care during old age). If the same household had two inherited plots of lands with

different origin, but the slava honoured the same saints, then at the home feast two kolac

breads would be poured over and broken up, i.e. the ritual was carried out as many times as

necessary to honour all the plots of lands with identical slava (Krstic, 2001, p. 88). Thus it

turned out that during the 1930s and 1940s a single household could hold three or four

svetac/slava feasts. The transition after the First World War from equal inheritance among

brothers to equal inheritance among the sexes (cf. Kaser, 2000), as well as from ‘buying’

the bride to giving dowry (miraz) at the wedding (cf. Hristov, 2002, pp. 25–38) obviously

deepened the agrarian aspects of the slava/svetac celebration.

Here is what the slava ritual process carried out by family-kin groups at the home and

in the field looked like in the village that we studied – Osljane, in the Timok district. The

svetac feast lasted four days, with ritual activities beginning the evening before the patron

saint’s day – povecerje. Four ritual breads were prepared for the ritual activities during the

next days – vecernjac, kolac, leturdjija and ljubenko, decorated with five ‘flowers’ in a

cross shape (or with five Christian stamps in a cross shape). Boiled wheat (zito) was also

prepared for svetac – in a dish, sprinkled with sugar in a cross shape. In the middle of this

dish, a candle was lit that burned throughout the ritual of pouring wine and breaking the

kolac. If the celebration fell on a feasting day (when meat was to be eaten), then a lamb

(or a sheep) was also slaughtered for the meal, even though it was not a required ritual dish.

Separate invitations were made for the saint’s feast, as well as for the remaining days.

The principle observed was that if the invited person was unable to attend the first day of

the slava, they would attend the second or the third. On each of the feast days, the ritual

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included several main moments: arrival of the guests who said blessings when greeting the

hosts, gathering around the feast table and ritual activities for pouring wine over the

respective bread for that day and breaking it up: vecernjaca (the evening before), kolac

(the first day of the feast) and leturdjija and ljubenko – on the second ( paterica or okrilje)

or third ( panickin dan or rasturnica) day of the slava/svetac. The ritual was carried out by

the household head; only in rarer cases, if one of the guests was good at saying blessings,

he was ‘appointed’ as ‘pop’ (‘priest’) and given the task of pouring the wine. The

household head would first consecrate with incense three times, cross himself, and then

make a cross-shaped cut on the upper side of the kolac, put some wheat in the cuts and pour

some wine in. Afterwards, he would break up the kolac with one of the guests (or with the

‘pop’ – ‘priest’) in half, then in quarters. At the end, the men would raise and bring

together the quarters of the bread, while the host would say: “Ristos posredonos” (“Christ

among us”) and the others would reply: “Jes i da budet pomedju nama” (“And may He be

among us”). It was observed that the central ‘flower’ stayed with the head of household:

whoever got the quarter with the central ‘flower’ would be the ‘lucky ploughman’ and

bring fertility to the home (Krstic, 2001, p. 150). The connection with fertility in the home

and the family land was clearly visible, in both the blessings (after each breaking, the

halves were raised with the blessing “May the wheat be this tall!”) and the magical

activities: ritual breads were given around the table, but always one quarter was put high

on a shelf “so that the wheat may grow tall”.

Similar to breaking the kolac were ritual activities with boiled wheat (kolivo). The

household head (or the ‘priest’) would pour wine over the wheat in a cross shape, giving

the candle to a male child to hold. All men at the table would carefully lift the plate with

the wheat and say the blessing “May the wheat grow as tall as this”; after this, everybody

present had to eat from the wheat. It is easy to see the patrilineal side of the ritual activities:

those men and boys who could not reach the plate during its ritual raising would grab the

shoulders of one of the men sitting at the table. Thus, everybody was involved in the ritual

activity.

In Osljane village, apart from the svetac rituals of pouring wine and breaking up the

kolac, carried out by each household head of the family-kin community in his home (at

the winter version of slava), a collective version of the same ritual was carried out at the

saint’s stone cross in the kin (or village) plot of land at the summer feast. In Staro selo

neighbourhood, for example, at the St. George Day’s celebrations (6 May) a gathering

would be held for households from the Topolovci kin (svetidjordjinci); svetinikolinci

(several kins) would gather at the cross of St. Nicholas (on 22 May) and so on.

All households with identical family slava/svetac (not always relatives in modern times)

would gather at the ritual place in the kin plot of land, marked by a stone cross (zapis) and

slava tree (one or several), dedicated to the respective saint, and carry out the ritual

activities described above: pouring wine, raising and breaking the kolac and giving wheat

– as many times as the number of households gathered at the cross. Ritual activities were

carried for all households in turn by the eldest men (or the one who was best at saying

blessings), and each time breaking the kolac was done with its respective household head.

In the contemporary version of the ritual – as witnessed in May 2001 – the main

leader of the ritual activities (the so-called ‘pop’) changed every year by passing a quarter

of the kolac to another household head. The interesting thing is that whereas each house

prepared their own kolac, the wine poured over the breads was collected from all houses;

same with the wheat, from which the zito was prepared – a handful was taken from each

house. After the Second World War, the new Socialist authorities prohibited the collective

cutting of ritual breads, while policemen removed the cross and chopped down the trees

Ideological dimensions of the “Balkan Family Pattern” 229

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(near the St. George zapis). During the socialist period, every household did the kolac

ritual for the summer slava for svetac at home – until the 1990s, when collective ritual

activities near the cross (zapis) were renewed. However, in Eastern Serbia the mass

migration towards the towns also sets its mark on the feast – the ritual actions are reduced

to only one day and are performed by the kinship families which come back from the town

especially for the slava.

A similar picture is witnessed in neighbouring Bulgarian villages ‘beyond the border’,

in North-Western Bulgaria, along the Stakevska river. Here, too, every patrilineal/

patronymic family has its svetac during winter, passed on from the father to his sons after

they divide, as well as a “sluzhba at the cross” (obrok), placed near the arable land or the

pens (turlo) of each respective family-kin group. Winter feasts (sluzhba) begin on St.

Petka’s Day and continue until Christmas (Bozic), while summer rituals mandatorily

involve blood sacrifice (kurban) near the family’s stone crosses (obrok) and are held after

Gjurdjovdan (St. George’s Day).

The rituals described above, related to the worship of the patron saint of the family, the

household and its land, show clear indications of how patrilineal ideological unity was

kept, even after the separation of kin families in separate households. It becomes clear that,

through the ritual of svetac/slava, this patriarchal ideology was preserved decades after the

breakup of the social system of complex family households, in which a number of authors

would recognise the ‘mysterious’ zadruga.

4. Conclusions

Contrary to the various different interpretations of the family-kin celebrations slava and

sluzhba, which were discussed in the beginning, collective rituals near the family stone

crosses during the spring and summer calendar cycle – carried out even today on both

sides of the Bulgarian–Serbian border – did not become a subject of research attention

until recent years (cf. a thorough description in Hristov, 2004, pp. 119–167).

All researchers agree that the integrative functions of this type of ritual for patrilineal

family-kin groups are beyond any doubt. To these existing interpretations I would add the

evident agrarian characteristics of the ritual activities that have magical practices clearly

aimed at producing fertility. The analysis of the ritual practices performed by the agnatic

group of kindred families both during the winter in their home and during the summer in

the field shows a sacred connection between the agnatic community and its home and land,

passed on patrilineally as the father’s heritage (bashtinija) and their patron saint (svetac).

This turns this peculiarity of the annual ritual cycle into a very important part of the

cultural memory of these agnatic groups and, most importantly, into an integral element of

the family ideology in this part of the Balkans.

What is more, if we view this phenomenon from the perspective of the common village

feast calendar and ritual year, we would recognise in the feast rituals carried out on family-

kin slava/sluzhba and obrok/zavetina a ritual matrix that is multiplied and reproduced in

different places in the village space (at home and at the plot of land of each family-kin

group) and time (in honour of the primary saints of the Christian liturgical cycle). This

gives me grounds to think that this is not only a question of descent thinking (which is true

from the point of view of the historical-ethnological analysis), in which “dead and alive

are one fictional community”, but also of a ritual process (and its respective ideology) that

is typical for the traditional Christian calendar cycle in this part of the peninsula, carried

out in the home during fall and winter and in the field during spring and summer, with

clearly notable agrarian features (producing and preserving fertility for land, people,

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cattle). This is particularly true for regions in which in the past there was no strong

presence of the Bulgarian or the Serbian Orthodox church; this allowed for folk

Christianity and the study of the cultural memory of the local communities on both sides of

the border.

My study on the festivals in honour of the patron-saints of the family-kin households in

the villages of the Bulgarian–Serbian borderland shows that the family ideology which is

directly related to the ideal of the living-together patrilineage groups considerably outlives

the actual existence of the joint family households in the social structure of the village. The

ritual practices performed on svetac show the vitality of this family ideology, which gives

a meaning to the preservation in time of the patrilineal cultural identity. It is precisely by

the collectiveness and the personal participation in the ritual activities of the festival that

the particular family couples and individuals are incorporated into what Jan Assmann calls

“cultural memory of the group” (Assmann, 2001, p. 55), or in our case of the families

derived from the joint family-kin household.

Of course, the reference to the ritual activities of these festivals in order to give proof

of a unique “Balkan Family Pattern”, different from the European one, as well as the

speculations about the archaic character of the Southern Slavic zadruga, have no place in

such a study. The description of the svetac celebration in Nasalevtsi (Bulgaria) and slava

in Osljane in the second part of my study shows the inaccuracy of the attempts to

‘archaise’ the social structure based on the patron-saint feast, as I showed in the first part.

We can only agree that “the ritual repetition ensures the temporal and spatial cohesion of

the group” (Assmann, 2001, p. 55) and thus the reproduction of its kinship identity.

According to the ‘internal’ perspective of analysis that was chosen, the search for

pagan origins of these festivals is also only a speculation. Ritual practices of slava and

sluzhba, done at home and near the stone cross in the field – related to family-kin sacrifice

of a Eucharist nature (with or without blood sacrifice) in honour of the patron saint – are

viewed as ‘Christian’ by my respondents, part of ‘their folk religion’. The connection

between individual and saints – basic for Christianity – has been simplified through the

ritual mediation of the intimate community to which the individual belongs: family-kin,

and most often also territorial, in the mountainous parts of the peninsula. This is what

made agnatic ideology in the mountainous regions I studied on both sides of the

Bulgarian–Serbian border so vital – despite migrations, resettlements, repressions by

socialist authorities and atheist ideology. Even when the actual ties had been lost, the

common feast of the saint-patron and family protector continue to function as a remainder

of the (now) distant kinship and family unity, as a memory of the lost family ideology.

Notes

1. The majority of the villages of the Bulgarian–Serbian borderland were depopulated in thesecond half of the twentieth century as a result of the mass migration towards the big cities.My research covered three villages in the district of Timok in Serbia and five villages in thedistrict of Tran in Bulgaria. I conducted interviews with five elderly respondents (one man andfour women) from the village of Nasalevtsi, and five respondents (three men and two women)of different generations from the village of Osljane.

2. In his day Jovan Cvijic delineated the outline of the so-called “Patriarchal Civilisation” in theBalkans, the marker of which (along with patrilineality and pastoralism) is the family feastslava. According to a number of contemporary researchers from the “Balkan family” project,the work by Cvijic was “pioneering” in the study of patriarchal social structures in the Balkans(Halpern et al., 1996, p. 429).

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3. Existing analytical research of the patron saint feasts in families and kin groups, such as that byDavid Rheubottom (Rheubottom, 1976) on Skopska Crna Gora in Macedonia can be countedon the fingers of one hand.

4. According to the first official census in the Principality of Bulgaria conducted in 1888, the sizeof the households in the village of Nasalevtsi was as follows: 27 households consisted of morethan 10 people, 18 households had five to 10 members, 10 households consisted of one to fivepeople and only one consisted of one person. The second census conducted in 1893 shows asimilar picture: 28 households with more than 10 members, 21 households with five to 10members, 12 households with one to five members and two one-man households; or 531inhabitants distributed in 63 households in total (Резултати от преброяване на населението вКняжество България на 1 януарий 1893. Кн. XIX. Трънский окръг. София, 1893/ [Resultsfrom the census of population in the Kingdom of Bulgaria on 1 of January 1893]).

5. Respondent Lenka Peycheva, born 1919 in Nasalevtsi village, of the Tsonkini kin.6. All quoted dates for Christian celebrations in Bulgaria are in accordance with the so-called

Revised Julian calendar (so-called “new style”), adopted by the Bulgarian Orthodox Church atthe end of 1969 and coinciding with the Gregorian calendar in cases when there are fixed datesfor the festivals.

7. These are also the main celebrations for worshipping a home svetac in other villages in theTran region (for Vukan and Staychovtsi, cf. description of Rayna Pesheva in the Archive of theEthnographic Institute with Museum, ~ 450-II, п. 2, c.138, 142).

8. Cf. Archive of the Ethnographic Institute with Museum, ~ 450-II, п. 2, c.142.9. Respondent Milko Simov, born 1924 in Nasalevtsi, from the Madzhgarovi kin. Author’s

recording in 1997.10. All quoted dates of Christian celebrations in Serbia are according to the Julian calendar,

officially adopted by the Serbian Orthodox Church (so called ‘old style’).11. Records by the renowned Bulgarian ethnographer Tatyana Koleva (cf. Archive of the

Ethnographic Institute with Museum, ~ 452-II, c. 23).12. Fieldwork research in the villages of Stakevtsi, Prauzhda and Krachimir in Bulgaria and in

Osljane village in Serbia was conducted in 2001 together with my colleague from Serbia DejanKrstic (cf. Archive of the Ethnographic Institute with Museum, ~ 573-III).

13. The joining of a non-related family at the feast near a family/kin cross (zapis) was done bypersonal zavet, i.e. by pledging.

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