Belinci: "zapomenutá" osada na Balkáně, v níž se hovořilo česky

The Belinci is a small village located in north-eastern Bulgaria. This essay covers the 1930s and 1940s - the period when Czech-speaking Protestants lived there - and aims at describing the Czech-speaking settlement in the village from its beginning in the middle of the 1930s. At that time this group of people moved in because of land shortage in their former place of residency (Bulgarian village called Vojvodovo) and lived there up to the late 1940s when they left to resettle the Czechoslovak border regions after the expulsion of Sudeten Germans. The author doesn't approach the Czech-speaking settlement of the Belinci village in the traditional way and thus doesn't regard them as subjects of the Czech nation (this is why he doesn't call them 'Czechs'). The descendants of the first Czech settlers have lived outside The Lands of the Czech Crown for many generations and did not in any way participate in the process of building the modern Czech nation in the 19th century. He understands their collective identity as primarily religious: they were strict Protestants with a strong sense for religious ascetism and Protestant work ethics. The essay is based mainly on the biographical method in anthropology, namely narrative interviews.