Re-Ottomanizing Modernity: Domesticating Balneology in Early to Mid-20th-Century Bulgaria
Re-Ottomanizing Modernity: Domesticating Balneology in Early to Mid-20th-Century Bulgaria

Summary/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.

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