On Ethnic Indifference in Northwest Bulgaria in the First Half of the Twentieth Century or A Discourse on why so many Voyvodovo Protestants intermarried with Catholics from Bărdarski Geran
Abstrakt
The text deals with the relationship between inhabitants of two villages - Voyvodovo, inhabited by Czechs, and Bardarski Geran, whose inhabitants were Banat Bulgarians and Swabians - in the Northwest Bulgaria in the first half of the 20th century. On the one side the villages in question differed by confession - Voyvodovo was Protestant and Bardarski Geran Catholic - on the other they shared an ideal of confessional endogamy.
Despite this the inhabitants of the two villages entered repeatedly and purposefully in marriages. To explain this paradox is the main aim of the article.
The author sees the reason for this marriage strategy in the fact that inhabitants of Voyvodovo and Bardarski Geran were ethnically indifferent; i.e. in the case of these groups, the us-them dichotomy did not take place in the sphere of ethnicity. Instead, the domain that was constitutive and defining for them was religiosity.
In both communities religiosity was the dominant organizational principle and the main factor for the construction of identity of its members. So, on the one side people from Voyvodovo and Bardarski Geran shared faith (though not confession), on the other they were not separated by different ethnicity and by intermarriage they did not cross the ethnic border.
The case was thus not that Czechs married Germans or Bulgarians, but believers married other believers.