„Дуркината нива" и сватбеният дарообмен
"Dourkina Niva" and the Exchange of Wedding Gifts

Summary/Abstract: The article makes an analysis of the customary regulative practice, followed during the early half of the 20th century in the central part of the Balkan Range. According to it, at the wedding a plot of land is given as a ransom ( kind of compensation), should the bride prove not to be a virgin. This plot of land is given by the bride's father to his son-in-law, not to drive away his daughter and to keep her in his home. An attempt has been made to position that "ransom" amidst the other forms of the traditional exchange of gifts at the wedding. It has been emphasised that the Dourkina niva is not part either of the gifts, which the bride traditionally brings into her new home at the wedding - the troussau, or of the dowry in terms of real estate, which appeared at the end of the 19th century under the influence of modern legislation, or the miraz - the share which the daughter inherits from her father. That plot of land belongs to her husband. The Dourkina niva, as a compensation for the missing virginity of the bride, has been considered to be a development of the traditional requirement for virginity at marriage among the Slav and Balkan peoples and the archaic ideas and beliefs associated with it. In the traditional marital exchange among the patrilinear families among the Bulgarians, the bride's family receives an incomplete compensation {urgaluk) from the family of the bridegroom, should the bride's body be impaired in some way (if she is lame, blind, if she is not a virgin). When the marital exhanges are among patrilinear families, the Dourkina niva is impossible as a compensation; according to traditional Bulgarian law, the woman does not possess any land and real estate. That is why in the article it has been indicated that the appearance of the Dourkina niva is a sign of change in the traditional social structure of the Bulgarian village. Giving land as a compensation in cases of the bride's lost virginity is possible in case the individual families dominate that social structure. It is only in such a social medium that the receiver of the ransom from the father of the bride is the bridegroom in personal. The practice analysed is a late development in Bulgarian culture (late 19th century) and is a sign of the transformation of the social relations in the Bulgarian village along the lines of modernisation.

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