Етнодемографският облик на Североизточна България през погледа на провинциалната администрация в края на ХІХ век
Ethnicity and Demographics in North-eastern Bulgaria through the Lens of the Provincial Administration at the End of the Nineteenth Century

Summary/Abstract: The paper offers an analysis of the ethno-demographic data found in a corpus of handwritten documents related to the Province of Varna in North-eastern Bulgaria and compiled in 1888 as a result of a state-wide initiative for collecting information on the traditional clothes of the population. The related data is explored in the context of other contemporary sources in order to trace tendencies and specificities in the approach of the local administration – which was responsible for carrying out of the survey – towards the ethnicity as a concept and a means of population mapping,as well as towards the represented ethnic groups in particular. The paper highlights the meanings of the term ‘ethnicity’ (narodnost) as applied in the sources under consideration, and discusses the (in)visibility of certain communities, including the ethnographic groups that form them. Moreover, an attempt is made to set the discussion against the background of imperial legacy and the social structures and concepts that functioned in the nineteenth-century Ottoman state as opposed to those developing in the newly founded Bulgarian national state.

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