The Balkans: A Short History (11 page)

Separate but parallel religious institutions were fundamental to the Ottoman governing machine. The Sultan’s subjects were divided into communities on the basis of belief and ruled largely by their own ecclesiastical hierarchy, with rabbis, bishops and
cadis
presiding over courts, supervising civil affairs and assuming responsibility for collecting taxes from their own flock as well as other economic matters. But while religion thus acted to demarcate communities and individuals from one another, and even to divide them, it also constituted a shared outlook upon life’s problems and dilemmas. This was especially true under a system of rule that, compared with those current elsewhere in Europe, offered an unparalleled degree of religious tolerance—“there being a Free Liberty of Conscience, for all kinds of Religion, through all his Dominions,” in Lithgow’s words.
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Religious power was a common resource that was feared, respected and consulted by peoples of all faiths. Christians availed themselves of Muslim wisdom, gathering charms or holy ground from mosques or
tekkes
(holy shrines). In the legend of one Christian martyr, we also read how a Muslim woman was cured by the Patriarch: having initially refused to see her, on the grounds that “it is not proper for us to accept those who are foreign to our faith,” the Patriarch relented, saying: “Him that cometh to me will I in no wise cast out.” And just as Muslims visited Christian priests, so too they visited Jewish rabbis. We read, for example, of a sixteenth-century Istanbul man who vowed in the midst of a dangerous fever that if he recovered he would give up his taste in young boys. Cured, he thought better of it, but hesitated to break his vow. Having been advised by the ulema of Istanbul that he could not wriggle out of an oath once made, he sought the advice of the rabbis of Salonika to see if they could find a loophole. (They suggested he try women.)
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People who faced special dangers, such as seafarers, often displayed an ecumenical piety. “When [the Turks’] preparations for a voyage have been made,” noted de Busbecq, “they come to the Greeks and ask whether the waters have been blessed; and if they say that they have not been blessed, they put off their sailing, but if they are told that the ceremony has been performed, they embark and set sail.” Sailors of all faiths—especially pirates and corsairs—revered icons of the Virgin Mary. Caught in a storm, a Frenchman was urged by a Turkish sailor to pray for the Virgin’s help, since he had heard, while a captive in Vienna, that her intercession was helpful. In this world one needed help from whatever quarter: impiety was far more grievous than belonging to a different faith. An English slave on a Turkish warship recounted how

at their first coming on board, they had been asked of what religion they were, and upon declaring themselves Catholic Christians, some mild endeavors had been used to persuade them to renounce their faith, and to become Mohametans; but upon their steady denial, they were told that, since they refused to embrace the true faith, they must as the next best chance for salvation, serve God in their own way; and immediately a small cabin was alloted them, which they were desired to fit up as a chapel, and in which they were compelled to pray daily and regularly.
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Plagues, droughts, floods, earthquakes, pirates, wars and fires—all the afflictions and hazards of ordinary life in the Ottoman Balkans—compelled a respect for heavenly powers and for wisdom and knowledge of the divine among humans that ran across religious boundaries. Specific saints, for instance, were known for their protection of particular cities; their ability to ward off danger was recognized by Christians and Muslims alike. “Both the Christians and the Turks were ecstatic” when the relics of St. Nikolaos of Metsovon eased the plague in the town of Tríkala and averted locusts. Another plague of locusts—“like a dark cloud through which the sun’s rays could scarcely pierce”—was defeated on Cyprus by the use of the right hand of Saint Michael, again to general relief. Muslims as well as Christians were said to recognize the signs of sanctity—the sweet “indescribable” fragrance emanating from the corpse, the unearthly radiance, the failure of the corpse to decompose—when a martyr of the Orthodox faith was executed. And religion was no barrier to the panic that could grip towns visited by vampires, as happened in Agia, where they were seen “gliding about with large lanterns in their hands”; in Edirne in 1872, a Muslim
hodja
and a Christian priest both failed to exorcise the town of vampires, and the alarm abated only after a Turkish sorcerer was called in and did the job properly.
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The Ottoman Balkans was thus a world densely populated by invisible spirits, both malicious and benign. Some families were dreaded because they were known to be vampires in human form. There were even reports of men with tails hidden by their undergarments. Charms were employed against the evil eye by devout members of all religions, as were garlic, rope with knots tied in it, animal horn such as boar’s tusks and certain berries. Priests were kept busy writing messages on amulets in response to their flock’s demands, and when Christians found their own amulets did not work, they would go and borrow Muslim ones. Many of these beliefs linger on today, though they are rarely expressed publicly for fear of ridicule.
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Ridicule was, however, precisely what they attracted from many outside observers who looked at what they regarded as a display of superstitious ignorance with a blend of fascination, amusement, ethnographic detachment and horror. Catholic observers, resenting the almost unshakable grip of the Orthodox village clergy upon their flock, were particularly inclined to highlight priestly ignorance. The highly educated Jesuit scholar Ruggiero Giuseppe Boscovich, born into the Slav-Italian culture of Dubrovnik, was shocked by the Bulgarian village priest he conversed with outside Constantinople in 1762: “His ignorance and that of all these poor people, is incredible. They do not know anything of their religion except for fasts and holidays, the sign of the cross, the cult of some image . . . and the name of a Christian. To the extent that I could discover that evening . . . they know neither the Pater Noster, nor the Credo, nor the essential mysteries of the religion.” Traveling through Wallachia almost a century later, Warington Smyth deplored in similar terms “the state of profound ignorance which prevails among the people. . . . The priesthood is scarcely raised in intelligence above the rustics, and one may see the parish ‘popa’ dressed in skins and following at the plough-tail like the lowest of his flock.”
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What applied to the village priest was even truer of his flock. The Catholic bishop of Senj reported of his new flock in 1615 that “they believe in the Holy Roman Church but are completely ignorant of Christian doctrine.” “The farmers are religious, but not so much from belief in the deeper essence of Christianity as from fear,” noted a Greek ethnographer three centuries later. Peasants across the Balkans divided saints into “heavy” and “light” according to how much harm they caused the person who neglected them. Describing his very rudimentary training as a village priest in the late eighteenth century, the Serbian Prota Matija Nenadovic recollected how “certain old women and even some men would say to my mother: ‘Lucky for you, my sister, that you have so learned a son at home who can name the saints for you so that you do not work when you should not.’ ”
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Yet this highlighting of doctrinal ignorance usually shed more light on the particular conception of Christianity (and indeed of religion itself ) held by the onlookers—the Western visitors, the scholars, the senior clerics on the lookout for doctrinal error, the professional heretic hunters—than it did on the ordinary peoples of the Balkans and their priests. To a French scholar of the early twentieth century, the peasants did not seem “very enlightened.” But such comments assumed that religion too should be a matter of “enlightenment,” premised upon sharply elucidated doctrine—a view that made more sense among literate, urban elites than for illiterate Orthodox country folk, for whom practice mattered far more than dogma. It assumed as well that religion was a matter of the private, reflective conscience, a question of theology rather than of collective beliefs and practices; it demarcated religion sharply from the world of science and technical knowledge on the one hand, and from that of magic and the supernatural on the other. If Orthodox priests were on the whole less literate and educated in theological niceties than their Catholic equivalents, it was because in the Balkans pietism and moral guidance mattered less than ritual and proper observance.
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Another, more sympathetic approach to popular religion sees in it the desire to avoid life’s risks, to explain and if possible forestall its pitfalls and tragedies. It is, in other words, a form of peasant rationality: garlic keeps away the evil eye; holy soil or relics, if gathered in the right way, and collected while the priest or
hodja
uttered the name of a family member, could be kept for use in an emergency if that person fell ill or had an accident. At the extreme, this kind of interpretation reduces religion to a form of insurance. But it has the merit of recognizing what the peasantry themselves were free to admit, that differences of doctrine were not usually very important to them. In poorly churched rural areas, this even led to considerable slippage between what outsiders (including the Ottoman state) regarded as distinct religions. “The Mahometans here are not real Mahometans,” observed a Turkish telegraph operator in early-twentieth-century Albania, “and the Christians are not real Christians.” Lady Mary Wortley Montagu noted: “The people who live among Christians and Muslims and are not versed in controversy, declare themselves absolutely incapable of judging which is the better religion: but to be certain of not rejecting the truth, with very great prudence they observe both and go to mosque on Friday and church on Sunday.” Asked what religion they were, the cautious peasants of western Macedonia would cross themselves and say, “We are Muslims, but of the Virgin Mary.” Centuries earlier, struck by the presence of Turks at Greek rites on the island of Lemnos, Busbecq had heard similar sentiments: “If you ask them why they do this, they reply that many customs have survived from antiquity the utility of which has been proved by long experience; the ancients, they say, knew and could see more than we can, and custom which they approved ought not to be wantonly disturbed.”
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In this shared world, devotional practice cut across theological divides not only in the realm of the supernatural but also in the daily, mundane life of the Ottoman world. Islamic courts and Turkish administration, for instance, were available for non-Muslims as well as for Muslims. The former could use them as a court of appeal, but also on occasions as a means of bypassing their own religious authorities or customary courts. Thus Muslim officials helped Christians and Jews settle tax, commercial and land affairs in accordance with Islamic law. Local Ottoman governors in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries sometimes even intervened to settle local disputes over episcopal appointments within their Christian communities. Muslims, Christians and Jews were members of the guilds that borrowed from the Byzantine practice of putting themselves under the protection of a protecting saint, sheik or holy man. Orthodox men and women sometimes used the
sharia
courts even when no Muslims were involved. “I sold my son a cow,” ran the complaint of one Christian peasant from Cyprus before an Islamic judge. “I want the money. He is stalling. I want it in accordance with the sharia.”
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The most intimate areas of personal life were shaped by this coexistence of religions. Christian church attitudes toward marriage, for instance, faced unexpected competition. Under Islam, both polygamy and forms of temporary marriage contracts were available, divorce was easier to obtain (especially for women), and sex was neither confined to marriage nor validated solely by procreation. There was little question which religion possessed the more intrinsically attractive possibilities. The church hierarchy appears to have held the line on polygamy (which was, in any event, not common among Balkan Muslims); but temporary marriages were a different matter. The practice of contracting a liaison with a woman for a specified sum over a limited period, noted as early as 1600 by William Biddulph, had a natural appeal to Christians as well as Muslims. Eventually the church was forced to acquiesce in this practice, which became fairly widespread during the eighteenth century. In some areas, it turned into a means of earning a dowry, a kind of legitimized prostitution: “If a stranger should wish to enjoy anyone of the young unmarried women,” noted a bemused Lord Charlemont in the Cyclades,

he addresses himself immediately to her parents, and demands the girl in marriage. The bargain is presently struck, and the couple are brought before a magistrate, where they swear mutual fidelity during the man’s residence on the island, the bridegroom engaging to pay at his departure a great sum of money, as well as a present advance. . . . This money is set apart in the girl’s portion, and with this, upon the departure of her consort, she soon procures herself a real husband among her countrymen, who esteem her not a whit the less for this previous connection, deeming her a widow to all intents and purposes.

This was the adaptation of Islamic practice by Christian islanders for their own convenience, ratified by Turkish officials and tolerated by village priests.
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Aside from this specific device, marriages took place between Muslim men and Christian women in the Balkans as long as the Ottoman empire survived. The result was that many Muslims had Christian mothers, and hence a private familiarity with, and sometimes attachment to, the maternal religion. The Serbian despot George Brankovic married his daughter, Mara, to the Sultan Murad II in 1435, probably in a vain attempt to gain the latter’s favor. Ali Pasha of Jannina had a Greek Christian wife, for whom he was reputed to have built a chapel. Later still, the Albanian-born Ottoman official Ismail Kemal Bey would marry a Greek woman, abducting her (with her consent) in order to overcome the objections of her step-mother. And below the level of the elite, there were numerous other instances of Christian–Muslim relationships.
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