Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Bolgrad in the 1860s and 1870s, Rumiana Radkova draws a parallel between
the organization and management of the Bulgarian schools within the borders
of the Ottoman empire and those founded by Bulgarian emigrants in
Bessarabia. Orlin Sabev focuses on nineteenth-century Ottoman Turkish doc-
uments dealing with four cases of book theft. According to the author, the
infringement of the law because of books proves in an unusual way not only
their high material value at the time but also their importance as a source of
knowledge, ideas and information. The petitions written by victims of such
illegal acts as well as the decisions taken by the Ottoman authorities to put an
end to, to prevent, to investigate these acts and to punish the offenders reveal
interesting aspects of Ottoman daily life. Ahmed Šerif ’s article, based on pub-
lished and secondary sources, is dedicated to the development of the vakıf
institution in Macedonia during Ottoman rule. The author points out that in
Macedonia the initial establishment and the diffusion of vakıfs was contempo-
rary to the development of the Ottoman timar-sipahi system, together with
the colonization and Islamization of Macedonian towns and that the ones
which persisted in time were those with important economic activity. Elizabeta
Koneska gives an overview of the different stages in the development of the
Bektaşi order in Macedonia: since its emergence in the Balkans, preceding the
Ottoman conquest, through its flourishing and institutionalization around
the middle of the sixteenth century, when several tekkes were opened up, its
drastic decline after the janissary corps was abolished in 1826 and up to its
contemporary revival since the 1990s. In the second half of the nineteenth
century many ethnic Albanians joined the order and when Mustafa Kemal
Atatürk prohibited the tarikat communities in Turkey, the centre of the
Bektaşis was moved to Tirana (1925). According to the author, the Ottoman
Turks’ withdrawal from the Balkans and the period of the two world wars were
marked by a gradual dying out of several Bektaşi communities and a more
drastic decline took place in the middle of the twentieth century, when many
disciples of the Bektaşilik turned to the Sunni Islam. From the beginning of
the 1990s a revival and gradual revitalization of Bektaşi communities set in,
with several active Bektaşi tekkes such as Arabati tekke in Tetovo, Hıdır Baba
tekke in Kichevo, and Dikmen Baba tekke in Kanatlartsi. The article by Nadia
Danova deals with the role of Protestant ethics in the formation of the modern
ethical codex of Bulgarians. On the basis of numerous primary sources and
secondary literature she delineates the activities of the Protestant missionaries
in the Ottoman empire, mainly in the Balkans, during the nineteenth century,
the compromises they made and the failures they sometimes faced. The bril-
liant analysis of the sources, using the history of mentalities’ approaches and
methodology, allows the author to argue that, despite numerous obstacles, the
Book Reviews / Turkish Historical Review 2 (2011) 79–93 89
Svetla Ianeva
New Bulgarian University, Res. Quarter Ovcha Kupel
21, Montevideo Street, Sofia 1618, Bulgaria
svianeva@yahoo.com
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