Macedonian Blood Wedding: Difference between revisions
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==Plot== |
==Plot== |
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The play's main topic is "the hard and unbearable position of Macedonians under the Turkish rule".<ref name="paper" /> It starts with the kidnapping of Cveta, |
The play's main topic is "the hard and unbearable position of Macedonians under the Turkish rule".<ref name="paper" /> It starts with the kidnapping of Cveta, [[ Orthodox]] girl by Osman [[bey]] while she works in the field with her family members during the harvest season. He takes her to his [[harem]] where he tries to change her ethno-religious identity. There, she is pressured by the bey, the Muslim Priest Selim and two Macedonian girls, Krsta and Petkana who had succumbed to the pressure and are now the bey's wives.<ref name="paper" /> |
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==Background and conception== |
==Background and conception== |
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Revision as of 11:37, 16 February 2020
| Macedonian Blood Wedding | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Written by | Voydan Pop Georgiev – Chernodrinski |
| Characters | Cveta Spase Osman Bey |
| Date premiered | November 7, 1900 |
| Place premiered | Sofia, Bulgaria |
Macedonian Blood Wedding (Bulgarian: Македонска кървава свадба, romanized: Makedonska Kărvava Svadba) is a play by Voydan Chernodrinski first published and shown in theaters in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1900. The drama was written in the Macedonian Struga dialect which at that time was widely considered to be part of the Bulgarian dialects.[1][2][3]
Plot
The play's main topic is "the hard and unbearable position of Macedonians under the Turkish rule".[4] It starts with the kidnapping of Cveta, Bulgarian Orthodox girl from Macedonia[5] by Osman bey while she works in the field with her family members during the harvest season. He takes her to his harem where he tries to change her ethno-religious identity. There, she is pressured by the bey, the Muslim Priest Selim and two Macedonian girls, Krsta and Petkana who had succumbed to the pressure and are now the bey's wives.[4]
Background and conception
The play takes place in the late 19th century, when the region of Macedonia was still under the rule of the Ottoman Empire. The local Slavic population was then a subject to forced Islamization and oppression. The play tells the story of a young woman Cveta who is kidnapped by the bey who is in charge of the fictional region of the village Stradalovo. It follows her resistance to be converted to Islam and renouncing her Bulgarian identity[6][7][8] along with the parallel revolt of the locals against the Ottomans. Substantiating his motifs to write the play, Chernodrinski has explained in the book's preface:
"What did I write? I [personally] did not write anything. I only copied from the still unwritten bloody history of Macedonia, that which the reader will read and the spectator will see in the theater. Of the bloodlust of our Turkish beys, the preparedness of female Macedonians to die and not to change their religion and the manhood of the Macedonian man to courageously avenge the bloodshedders who will try to taint his family honor, that is mainly what the content of the play consists of".[4]
Release
The play was written in 1900 and its premiere was scheduled for 7 November in Sofia with a performance by Chernodrinski's theater group Skrab i uteha.[4] In order to avoid exasperation of the relations with the Ottoman Empire, the government banned the premiere of the openly anti-Turkish play. However, the police sent to the theater encountered resistance from some activists of the IMRO, and the play took place.[9] Chernodrinski reworked it later to give the plot and the libretto for a new opera called Cveta that was written by composer Georgi Atanasov.[10]
Three editions were published of the play; one in 1900, one in 1907 and a last one in 1928.[4]
In the mid-1930s, Aleksandar Shoumenoff, owner of the First Bulgarian Book Store in Granite City, USA, published Chernodrinski's works.[citation needed] The text wasn't translated into English but the play became popular among the Macedonian Bulgarian emigration.[citation needed] After the death of Chernodrinski in 1951 in then SR Macedonia, the drama Macedonian Blood Wedding was transliterated into the newly codified Macedonian language, but the words "Bulgarian" in the text were replaced with "Christian" or "Macedonian".[11] The play is considered today as one of the most important works in Macedonian literature.[4]
Modern day
The play was adapted into a movie in 1967 under the direction of Macedonian director Trajče Popov.[12]
References
- ^ The Macedonian partisans established a commission to create an “official” Macedonian literary language (1945), which became the Macedonian Slavs' legal “first” language (with Serbo-Croatian a recognized “second” and Bulgarian officially proscribed). D. Hupchick, The Balkans: From Constantinople to Communism, Springer, 2002, ISBN 0312299133, p. 430.
- ^ "The obviously plagiarized historical argument of the Macedonian nationalists for a separate Macedonian ethnicity could be supported only by linguistic reality, and that worked against them until the 1940s. Until a modern Macedonian literary language was mandated by the communist-led partisan movement from Macedonia in 1944, most outside observers and linguists agreed with the Bulgarians in considering the vernacular spoken by the Macedonian Slavs as a western dialect of Bulgarian". Dennis P. Hupchick, Conflict and Chaos in Eastern Europe, Palgrave Macmillan, 1995, ISBN 0312121164, p. 143.
- ^ In one respect, however, Macedonian nationalism threw up a problem which the Communist Party could not ignore: the question of the status of the Macedonian language. If, as Dr Johnson remarked, languages are the pedigrees of nations, then the Slav inhabitants of Macedonia were by any reasonable linguistic criteria part of the Bulgarian nation... The construction and dissemination of a distinctive Macedonian language was the medium through which a sense of Macedonian identity was to be fixed... The past was systematically falsified to conceal the fact that many prominent ‘Macedonians’ had supposed themselves to be Bulgarians, and generations of students were taught the pseudo-history of the Macedonian nation. The mass media and education were the key to this process of national acculturation, speaking to people in a language that they came to regard as their Macedonian mother tongue, even if it was perfectly understood in Sofia. For more see: Michael L. Benson, Yugoslavia: A Concise History, Edition 2, Springer, 2003, ISBN 1403997209, p. 89.
- ^ a b c d e f Belčev, Tole; Mladenoski, Ranko (2006). "„Македонска крвава свадба" – нови интерпретативни аспекти" ["Macedonian Blood Wedding" - New Interpretative Aspects]. Yearbook Faculty of Philology (in Macedonian). Faculty of Philology, Goce Delčev University of Štip.
- ^ The Christian population of the bishoprics of Skopje and Ohrid voted in 1874 overwhelmingly in favour of joining the Bulgarian Exarchate (Sanjak of Skopje by 91%, Sanjak of Ohrid by 97%) For more see: Църква и църковен живот в Македония, Петър Петров, Христо Темелски, Македонски Научен Институт, София, 2003 г.
- ^ Here are some comparisons between the original and the Yugoslav edition made after the author's death: In the original (act 5, action III): Krsta: No, we were born Bulgarians, my sister. Petkana: (sad) Bulgarian, Bulgarian, we were born, my sister. In the Yugoslav version: Krsta: No, we were born Christians, my sister. Petkana: (sadly) We were born Christian, my sister. For more see: Йорданов, Ник., Случаят Войдан Чернодрински – “Македонска кървава сватба” и историите на тяхната “История”, в-к Културен форум, 25 фев. 2005, (in Bg).
- ^ "Until the late 19th century both outside observers and those Bulgaro-Macedonians who had an ethnic consciousness believed that their group, which is now two separate nationalities, comprised a single people, the Bulgarians. Thus the reader should ignore references to ethnic Macedonians in the Middle ages which appear in some modern works. In the Middle ages and into the 19th century, the term ‘Macedonian’ was used entirely in reference to a geographical region. Anyone who lived within its confines, regardless of nationality could be called a Macedonian. Nevertheless, the absence of a national consciousness in the past is no grounds to reject the Macedonians as a nationality today." "The Early Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Sixth to the Late Twelfth Century," John Van Antwerp Fine, University of Michigan Press, 1991, ISBN 0472081497, pp. 36–37.
- ^ "At the end of the World War I there were very few historians or ethnographers, who claimed that a separate Macedonian nation existed... Of those Macedonian Slavs who had developed then some sense of national identity, the majority probably considered themselves to be Bulgarians, although they were aware of differences between themselves and the inhabitants of Bulgaria... The question as of whether a Macedonian nation actually existed in the 1940s when a Communist Yugoslavia decided to recognize one is difficult to answer. Some observers argue that even at this time it was doubtful whether the Slavs from Macedonia considered themselves to be a nationality separate from the Bulgarians." The Macedonian conflict: ethnic nationalism in a transnational world, Loring M. Danforth, Princeton University Press, 1997, ISBN 0-691-04356-6, pp. 65-66.
- ^ Glenny, Misha (2012). The Balkans, 1804 - 2012: Nationalism, War and the Great Powers.
- ^ "Любомир Сагаев — Книга за операта (8); Book on opera, Lyubomir Sagaev, 1983" (in Bulgarian). bg3.chitanka.info. Retrieved 16 February 2020.
- ^ Йорданов, Ник., Случаят Войдан Чернодрински – “Македонска кървава сватба” и историите на тяхната “История”, в-к Културен форум, 25 фев. 2005, (in Bg).
- ^ Simjanoski, Gjoko (6 December 2017). "50 години на филмот "Македонска Крвава Свадба"" [50 years of the film Macedonian Blood Wedding] (in Macedonian). Publicitet.mk. Retrieved 14 February 2020.
External links
- Чернодрински, Войдан. „Македонска кървава сватба“ (трето собствено издание). 1928, София. Chernodrinski, Voydan. Macedonian Bloody Wedding (third edition). 1928, Sofia.