was shocked by the Bulgarian village priest he conversed with outside Constantinople in 1762: “His ignorance and that of all these poor people, is incredible. They do not know anything of their religion except for fasts and holidays, the sign of the cross, the cult of some image . . . and the name of a Christian. To the extent that I could discover that evening . . . they know neither the Pater Noster, nor the Credo, nor the essential mysteries of the religion.” Traveling through Wallachia almost a century later, Warington Smyth deplored in similar terms “the state of profound ignorance which prevails among the people. . . . The priesthood is scarcely raised in intelligence above the rustics, and one may see the parish ‘popa’ dressed in skins and following at the plough-tail like the lowest of his flock.” 24
What applied to the village priest was even truer of his flock. The Catholic bishop of Senj reported of his new flock in 1615 that “they believe in the Holy Roman Church but are completely ignorant of Christian doctrine.” “The farmers are religious, but not so much from belief in the deeper essence of Christianity as from fear,” noted a Greek ethnographer three centuries later. Peasants across the Balkans divided saints into “heavy” and “light” according to how much harm they caused the person who neglected them. Describing his very rudimentary training as a village priest in the late eighteenth century, the Serbian Prota Matija Nenadovic recollected how “certain old women and even some men would say to my mother: ‘Lucky for you, my sister, that you have so learned a son at home who can name the saints for you so that you do not work when you should not.’ ” 25
Yet this highlighting of doctrinal ignorance usually shed more light on the particular conception of Christianity (and indeed of religion itself ) held by the onlookers—the Western visitors, the scholars, the senior clerics on the lookout for doctrinal error, the professional heretic hunters—than it did on the ordinary peoples of the Balkans and their priests. To a French scholar of the early twentieth century, the peasants did not seem “very enlightened.” But such comments assumed that religion too should be a matter of “enlightenment,” premised upon sharply elucidated doctrine—a view that made more sense among literate, urban elites than for illiterate Orthodox country folk, for whom practice mattered far more than dogma. It assumed as well that religion was a matter of the private, reflective conscience, a question of theology rather than of collective beliefs and practices; it demarcated religion sharply from the world of science and technical knowledge on the one hand, and from that of magic and the supernatural on the other. If Orthodox priests were on the whole less literate and educated in theological niceties than their Catholic equivalents, it was because in the Balkans pietism and moral guidance mattered less than ritual and proper observance. 26
Another, more sympathetic approach to popular religion sees in it the desire to avoid life’s risks, to explain and if possible forestall its pitfalls and tragedies. It is, in other words, a form of peasant rationality: garlic keeps away the evil eye; holy soil or relics, if gathered in the right way, and collected while the priest or hodja uttered the name of a family member, could be kept for use in an emergency if that person fell ill or had an accident. At the extreme, this kind of interpretation reduces religion to a form of insurance. But it has the merit of recognizing what the peasantry themselves were free to admit, that differences of doctrine were not usually very important to them. In poorly churched rural areas, this even led to considerable slippage between what outsiders (including the Ottoman state) regarded as distinct religions. “The Mahometans here are not real Mahometans,” observed a Turkish telegraph operator in early-twentieth-century
What applied to the village priest was even truer of his flock. The Catholic bishop of Senj reported of his new flock in 1615 that “they believe in the Holy Roman Church but are completely ignorant of Christian doctrine.” “The farmers are religious, but not so much from belief in the deeper essence of Christianity as from fear,” noted a Greek ethnographer three centuries later. Peasants across the Balkans divided saints into “heavy” and “light” according to how much harm they caused the person who neglected them. Describing his very rudimentary training as a village priest in the late eighteenth century, the Serbian Prota Matija Nenadovic recollected how “certain old women and even some men would say to my mother: ‘Lucky for you, my sister, that you have so learned a son at home who can name the saints for you so that you do not work when you should not.’ ” 25
Yet this highlighting of doctrinal ignorance usually shed more light on the particular conception of Christianity (and indeed of religion itself ) held by the onlookers—the Western visitors, the scholars, the senior clerics on the lookout for doctrinal error, the professional heretic hunters—than it did on the ordinary peoples of the Balkans and their priests. To a French scholar of the early twentieth century, the peasants did not seem “very enlightened.” But such comments assumed that religion too should be a matter of “enlightenment,” premised upon sharply elucidated doctrine—a view that made more sense among literate, urban elites than for illiterate Orthodox country folk, for whom practice mattered far more than dogma. It assumed as well that religion was a matter of the private, reflective conscience, a question of theology rather than of collective beliefs and practices; it demarcated religion sharply from the world of science and technical knowledge on the one hand, and from that of magic and the supernatural on the other. If Orthodox priests were on the whole less literate and educated in theological niceties than their Catholic equivalents, it was because in the Balkans pietism and moral guidance mattered less than ritual and proper observance. 26
Another, more sympathetic approach to popular religion sees in it the desire to avoid life’s risks, to explain and if possible forestall its pitfalls and tragedies. It is, in other words, a form of peasant rationality: garlic keeps away the evil eye; holy soil or relics, if gathered in the right way, and collected while the priest or hodja uttered the name of a family member, could be kept for use in an emergency if that person fell ill or had an accident. At the extreme, this kind of interpretation reduces religion to a form of insurance. But it has the merit of recognizing what the peasantry themselves were free to admit, that differences of doctrine were not usually very important to them. In poorly churched rural areas, this even led to considerable slippage between what outsiders (including the Ottoman state) regarded as distinct religions. “The Mahometans here are not real Mahometans,” observed a Turkish telegraph operator in early-twentieth-century
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