Slava Savova, PhD Candidate
Researcher, „Medical Anthropology” Unit,
Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with Ethnographic
Museum, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences
[slava.savova@iefem.bas.bg], ORCID: 0009-0001-8883-3511
Re-Ottomanizing Modernity: Domesticating
Balneology in Early to Mid-20th-Century Bulgaria
Abstract: The decades after Bulgaria’s liberation from Ottoman rule (a continuous process beginning in 1878) were marked by the construction of a new national identity across multiple terrains: the state apparatus, political alliances, the social and cultural realms, and most visibly – the built environment. Bulgaria’s transformation during this period is described as simultaneously de-Ottomanization and Europeanisation (Lory, 2015), connoting the erasure or replacement of one system of governance by another. By looking at two important instruments of the modernizing state – healthcare and hygiene, I demonstrate that rather than abrupt replacement of the “Oriental” by the “Western”, a gradual adaptation took place, with resilient cultural practices often persisting in less visible ways. I focus on several case studies of Ottoman public baths and the tensions emerging around the control over thermal waters. While this natural resource was seen by authorities and citizens as a catalyst for urban renewal, such aspirations often clashed with the perceived symbolic dissonance of existing infrastructures dating from the Ottoman period. I argue that the heterogeneous solutions produced by this friction blur the modern/archaic, hygienic/unclean, Western/Oriental binaries and illustrate how Bulgaria’s modernization was a non-linear process of adaptation and absorption of preceding cultural practices, which aligned modern technology along the contours of pre-existing ecologies of care and healing.
Keywords: architecture; Balkan nationalisms; Balkans; balneology; de-Ottomanization; Europeanization; healthcare; hygiene; modernization; public baths; water.
- Declaration by Authors
- Ethical Approval: Approved
- Source of Funding: The research is within the ERC Project “Taming the European Leviathan: The Legacy of Post-War Medicine and the Common Good” (LEVIATHAN). The project has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 854503).
- Conflict of Interest: The authors declare no conflict of interest.