Родствени отношения при гагаузите в България
Kinship Relations Among the Gagauzes in Bulgaria

Summary/Abstract: There is a considerable amount of literature written about the Gagauzes, as the Turkic-language population of Eastern Orthodox faith inhabiting various regions of the Bulgarian ethnic territory, calls itself and is called. The authors show definite and lasting interest in their origin, language and the combination of the Turkic language with the Eastern Orthodox faith But there are numerous white spots in their ethnographic characteristics, including also the basic forms of social life of the Gagauzes, i.e. the family and the kin. It is the purpose of this work to present the kinship relations on the basis of part of the results obtained in ethnographic field research of the Gagauzes in Northeastern Bulgaria, carried out in 1996-1998 as a part of a collective research project, implemented thanks to the International Centre of Minorities and Cultural Interactions, Sofia. The empirical material from the village of General Kantardzjievo, Varna region, and the village of Balgarevo, Dobrich region, has been collected through interviews and authobiographical stories narrated by people aged between 45 and 80, and the data is related to the period from the beginning of the 20th century until around the 1950s. During that period, the kin existed among the Gagauzes as a genealogical group, mainly patrilinear, of blood relatives. The kin (dzjins) is a specific form of social relations of the Gagauzes, streamlining not only the structure of their blood relations, but also possessing a significant regulative social function. In the period after the 1930s and particularly in the 1940s what was observed was a noteworthy breakdown of the role of kinship relations in the economic sphere, as well as a tendency towards their dwindling importance in other spheres of social life.

• Details
• Contents