Кираджийството в Пиринския край
Hired Transport in the Pirin Region

Summary/Abstract: The article deals with hired transport of loads, against payment as a livelihood, widespread in the south-western parts of the country in the 19th and the early years of the 20th century. The appearance and development of this livelihood are traced and the prerequisites and reasons for it are sought. Persons engaged in it were called kiradjii. Attention is paid, above all, to the ethnographic aspect of this phenomenon, emphasis falling on the folk forms and social relations it contains. The typological signs are defined: transporting loads belonging to others, owning cart horses and payment for services. On the basis of these signs a conditional categorization of this form of livelihood is made, which changes its character at given times. A person engaged in hiring out transport kiradjia thus appears as: a producer-kiradjia a farm labourer-kiradjia, a kiradjia and a merchant-kiradjia. A division into regions is made in regard to the range of action and the kind of goods transported. The roads along which the kiradjii moved are indicated together with the trade centres with which they were connected. Kiradjiystvo (hired transport) in the Pirin region is defined as an individual form of livelihood, having the character of mobile hired labour, with certain modifications at a given period of time, approaching peddling.

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