Survivors : Turkish owners of chiftliks in Bulgaria in the mid-1880s

Much of the agricultural land in Bulgaria under the Ottoman rule functioned as chiftliks – vast estates belonging to the Turkish owners (beys) that relied on the labor of Christian peasants. The first years after the creation of the Bulgarian state in 1878 brought far-reaching changes in economic situation due to the transfer of land from Muslims to Christians and reforms including the expropriation of chiftliks. However, it was a gradual process – in the mid-1880s, there were still vast landholdings owned by Turks in the Bulgarian countryside which are often not noticed in historiography. The purpose of this research is to present the Muslim owners of chiftliks (beys) who managed to retain their estates in Bulgaria after the agrarian reform of 1880 in light of the minutes of the Land Commission from the Central State Archives in Sofia. The interesting matter here is which chiftliks were liquidated as a result of the reform, which survived, and what factors may have contributed to this. Either they were territorially limited (e.g. pursuant to an individual agreement between the owner and the tenants), or they were waiting for the parcellation (which was postponed due to delays in the work of the Land Commission resulting from the boycott of its Muslim representative in 1881–1882). There were also provisions in the Land Act of 1880 and the amendment of 1885 that made it possible to maintain the chiftlik – this is about the estates that were not based on the permanent work of the tenants, but on the employment of hired mercenaries (e.g. from the nearest town) or on the basis of short contracts with the local population. It will also be discussed how the presented source material can serve as a starting point for polemics with the idealizations of Bulgarian history existing in historiography: Bulgaria as a nation-state, “agrarian revolution”, and the Turkish minority in Bulgaria as a “community without elites”.