Southern Serbiа or Northern/Western Bulgaria – South Pomoravlje in Felix Kanitz’s Works

Abstract

Felix Kanitz was one of the most famous foreign travel writers who journeyed the Balkan Peninsula during the 19th century, and earned him the nickname “the Columbus of the Balkans.” He devoted his most significant works to the Serbs and the Bulgarians. For that very reason, it is important to examine where Kanitz placed one of the dividing ethnical and geographical boundaries between these two people—more precisely, in this paper I am discussing what he has considered “southern Serbia” and what “northern Bulgaria,” as he titled his first travelogue when he visited the region of the Southern Morava Valley. In this paper I have examined his perception of the territory which was 1878 annexed to the Principality of Serbia. The territory Kanitz had firstly defi ned as “Bulgaria,” changed in his later works, and by that I am researching changes of his impression the ethnographic picture of the region. In his first books, Kanitz entitled the region of South Pomoravlje (the part outside the borders of Serbia before 1878) Bulgaria and considered it as an exclusively Bulgarian ethnic and culturalhistorical region. Only in his last works the ethnic and historical picture was developed somewhat more balanced, although he still considered that he was facing a “difficult ethnographic question.” His sympathies for the Bulgarians at the expense of the Serbs are visible in all his works, a fact noted by his biographer, Geza Feher. The Bulgarians were Kanitz’s “favourite” Balkan people, as Maria Todorova informs us. This is also shown by the example of South Morava, a region he travelled the most and described many times than any other. In this paper I entangled Felix Kanitz’s early and ending conclusions regarding South Pomoravlje aiming to deliver more balanced interpretation of his prejudice and political enrolment.