„Черните арапи“, реални и въобразени, през османската епоха
‘The Black Araps’, Real and Imagined, in Ottoman Era

Summary/Abstract: In spite of the relative scarcity of sources this study tries to shed some light on the murky history of the black (arap) slaves and ex-slaves who were once part of the human presence in the Bulgarian provinces of the Ottoman Empire. After an overview of some of the racially biased views connecting blackness and slavery, which emerged in the Islamic countries throughout the centuries, as well as of the origins of the black-slave trade in the Middle East, and of the peculiarities in the organization of black slaves and ex-slaves’ socio-religious life in the Ottoman domains, this study turns to tracking the footprints of the black slavery in what is nowadays Bulgaria and its’ border lands. On the basis mainly of documents recorded in the kadi sicils for the cities of Sofia, Ruschuk and Vidin from the 17th to the first half of 18th c., a conclusion was reached that the Sub-Saharan slaves there formed quite a small proportion of the slave population. Besides, no traces of sizable black slave and ex-slave communities led by their own elders (a phenomenon known from the Anatolian and Aegean parts of the Ottoman Empire) were detected in the region. Nevertheless, until the beginning of the 19th c. the documents studied show no apparent signs of any discrimination from the masters based on the slaves’ skin color. In the last Ottoman century however, due to various factors, racial prejudices became more and more evident. This article provides a number of examples of the negative, sometimes highly distorted image of the blacks as reflected in Bulgarian texts from that epoch and seeks an explanation for such stereotypes.

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