how far modern perspectives have helped to frame the notion of cultural,
political, and economic separation.The historiography of economies
in the east Balkan landmassWhen Velizar Velkov started the series of symposia on‘Settlement life in
Thrace’in the late 1970s, his aim was to refocus attention on a key aspect
of antiquity that had become opaque as a result of the increasing trend in
Bulgarian historiography, in the post Second World War period, to
develop an abstract discourse about the Thracians. Whilst Michael
Rostovtzeff’s oeuvre on the Hellenistic world (SEHHW)had attempted
to integrate the‘fringe’areas of the Mediterranean into his main narra-
tive about classical antiquity, a new generation of post-war Bulgarian
scholars was consciously drawing a boundary on the one hand between
the Thracians as a cultural and historical phenomenon, and the Greco-
Roman world on the other. Among the leading proponents of this new
trend was Alexander Fol, who was inspired, initially at least, by the
Marxist concept of the‘Asian mode of production’, and whose concep-
tion of ancient Thracian society consisted of a tight, hierarchical ruling
class, epitomized by Thucydides’description of Odrysian princes and
paradynasts, whilst the population at large was in essence a cipher, a
shadowy presence, whose relevance did not really feature in a theory
preoccupied by the ritual dominance of priest-kings. It is one of the
strange ironies of the Communist era in Bulgaria that the ordinary
people of the ancient world were in practice ignored by contemporary
scholarship. In parallel with this trend was the comparative lack of
interest in the nature of citizenship, or of the collective status in general,
of the inhabitants of Macedonia, who were dismissed as‘sub-citizens’or
‘serfs’. This assumption is still active.‘It seems inherently unlikely that
rural egalitarianism would prevail in a society where hierarchy was so
much in evidence elsewhere’.^42
Central to the ideas propounded by Fol, and adopted by a large
number of sympathizers, was the inalienability of land. In Fol’s view,
the Thracian kings owned all land, so the concept of private ownership
did not exist in Thracian territory. Fol’s ideas were sketched out in
a number of papers that examined the terminology of Thracian settle-
ments in Greek and Latin authors; but the underlying theoretical
(^42) ‘Sub-citizens’: Ellis 1976, 27; serfs: Billows 1995, 9–10, 136–7; cf. Millett 2010, 478, for
the citation and further refs n.21.
Regionalism and regional economies 211