Stephanov | 267to get used to the new term and for the transition from diplomatic fiction to bu-
reaucratic reality, and then to individual outlook, to take place.
The term millet was taken up locally in financial dealings with the Ottoman
state within a few years of the Rose Chamber Decree. As Andreas Lyberatos has
shown, in 1841 the Orthodox Christian community of Filibe signed a document
of fiscal responsibility written in Greek whose title included an explicit mention
of ethnos, a literal translation of millet. Two years later, the term millet vekili
(millet agent) also gained currency, supplanting the older memleket vekili (home
district agent). This change occurred in the context of a trusteeship for the man-
agement of the community’s finances and its economic relations to the state,
which had been first set up under Mahmud II in 1833. Thus, the term millet was
beginning to strike root locally.
One after another, local non-Muslim populations began to situate them-
selves within the permissible bounds of this new discourse of the ruled vis-à-vis
the ruler. What they also embraced, enriched, and employed to their advantage
was the discourse of reform. In short, rather than a fixed, preexisting state, millet
consciousness was a fluid, novel process toward (macro) group awareness under
the aegis of the center and the heading of reform. Thus, the period of millet-ism
commenced in the mid-1840s. Naturally, sultanic celebrations played a central
facilitating role. A look back at the early songs discussed above shows that they
contain no markers of Bulgar consciousness whatsoever. If their protagonists
employ any identity markers at all, they refer to themselves in local or denomina-
tional terms. Similarly, there is no mention of a bond of belonging to Bulgaria, a
key precondition for nationalism in the modern sense. This state of affairs would
not last much longer.
An 1851 letter from the townspeople of Razgrad to a central newspaper re-
lates the visit of local dignitaries, including the subdistrict governor, the reli-
gious judge, and the chief jurist to a town school on the sultan’s birthday. Upon
the guests’ entry, the students stood up and sang a hymn, “May God Give Many
Years to the Most Peaceful, Most Serene and Most Nobly Born Tsar Sultan Abdul
Medzhid [sic].” Apparently, this hymn was sung in schools daily. Afterward, the
governor delivered a didactic speech, and the judge addressed the town notables
with words of guidance, conveying “the tsar’s burning desire for the enlighten-
ment of the peoples in all of His State.” The letter concludes that “this visit is
a sign of the prosperity of our town, and of the Bulgar kin.” Clearly, sultanic
celebrations did indeed solidify communal consciousness in unintended ways.
A change in the dominant image of the land was also under way. Until the
mid-nineteenth century, one’s place of birth and the land nearby overwhelmingly
constituted one’s patrimony (“our fatherly place where we first saw the sun,” in
the context of the 1846 sultanic speech). A few years later, however, the concept
of “fatherland” among Bulgars in particular began to take on a new, increasingly