Visual Ethnography Among

the Balkan Pomak

Asen Balikci

This is a brief description of four ethnographic films about the Pomak, Bulgarian speaking Muslims inhabiting the
Rhodopi mountains in Southern Bulgaria. The first (1994) is the result of a training workshop in visual ethnography
for local boys and girls living in a multicultural setting. The second (1995) describes the roles of Pomak women in a
traditional village while the third (1995) is a portrait of an elderly Pomak peasant after 50 years of communist rule.
The last production (2004) is a statement about the complex ideological pressures felt by the Pomak stemming from
Islamic fundamentalism, peripheral pan-Turkism, Bulgarian school nationalism, American style mass culture, etc.
[Key words: Bulgaria, Muslims, ethnic identity, visual pedagogy, ethnographic film]

The Pomak, Past and Present ceived the mandate to spread the communist message.
At the same time, the communist government embarked

T
he Pomak are Bulgarian speaking Muslims inhabit-
ing mainly the Rhodope mountain valleys in South-
ern Bulgaria and Northern Greece. Serious scholars
generally admit that the Pomak are peasants of Slavic
stock converted to Islam under Ottoman rule at various
periods during the 16th and 17th centuries. National-
ist Balkan ideologues however have suggested different
explanations for Pomak ethnic origin. Some Turkish au-
thors claim Anatolian Turkish or Chagatay Turkish roots
for the Pomak (Memisoglu 1991) while some Greek au-
thors assert that the Pomak were originally “pure” Greeks
who underwent first a process of slavicisation followed
by a process of Islamization (Kiriakides 1980). Bulgarians
often admit that the Pomak are “pure” Bulgarians who
were forcibly converted to Islam (Balikci 1999).
Today the Pomak number about 250,000 in Bul-
garia and 25,000 in Northern Greece. Characteristically
they inhabit remote mountain villages far from the main
roads or fertile flatlands. Traditionally, they are subsis-
tence farmers and small stockbreeders for whom tobacco
was an important 20th century cash crop.
In the context of communist rule in Bulgaria (1945–
1989), the Pomak were subjected to various political,
economic and ideological pressures. The collectivization
of agriculture brought an end to private land ownership
and, generally, private initiative. Education was heavily
ideologized and a number of cultural institutions re-
on a vigorous nationalist program with the aim of sup-
pressing local Turkish-Muslim beliefs and forcibly pro-
moting the new Bulgarian-socialist identity. This led to
a compulsory change of personal names: Muslim names
were replaced by Bulgarian ones. Further, women were
not allowed to wear their characteristic traditional dress-
es and Muslim religious practices were frowned upon.
The collapse of communist rule in 1989 brought an
end to state-sponsored, political-ideological oppression.
Suddenly, Muslim practices were enthusiastically resur-
rected, Turkish identity was triumphantly proclaimed,
and Slavic-communist oppression publicly cursed. In
this context of newly-found freedom a number of lo-
cal Pomak families immigrated to Turkey. Concomitant
with this ideological delirium emerged the harsh reali-
ties of the transition period: economic disintegration,
widespread poverty, and increasing isolation from main-
stream Bulgarian culture. Yet the period also witnessed
the massive influence of the new, entertainment oriented
cable television.
In this transition context I organized four visual
ethnography projects in the village of Breznitsa, south-
west Bulgaria. It is a large mountain village of 3,500 Po-
mak inhabitants that included relatively small Bulgarian
and Roma minorities. The Breznitsa Pomak traditionally
believe that the historic roots of their ancestors are to be
found in the Anatolian city of Konya, the ancient capital

Visual Anthropology Review, Vol. 23, Issue 1, pp. 92-96, ISSN 1053-7147, online ISSN 1548-7458. © 2007 by the American Anthropological Association. All rights reserved. Please direct all requests for
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VAR 2301.indb 92 5/18/07 1:05:14 PM

 93 VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 23 Number 1 Spring 2007
of the Seldjukid Turks. This belief establishes the local
Pomak as pure Turks with no other ethnic admixture.
They further assert that their native language is Turkish
despite the fact that they speak no Turkish whatsoever.
And they declare themselves to be of Turkish faith rather
than Muslim.
A Visual Ethnography Seminar
The first project in the village of Breznitsa, conducted
in the summer of 1994, was a visual ethnography train-
ing seminar in a multicultural setting (Balikci 1994).
This initiative was patterned after a training seminar
we organized in Western Siberia for the native peoples
of the region (Balikci and Badger 1995). In Breznitsa,
six young trainees (three Pomak, two Bulgarians and
one Roma) were selected on the basis of their involve-
ment in community affairs or interest in local folklore.
They were taught, first, some ethnographic field meth-
ods (including systematic note taking), and, second,
ethnovideographic techniques and strategies; they were
also shown a number of ethnographic films. At the end
of the instruction period trainees were invited to make a
short video on a subject of their own choosingwith the
help of Jatsek Todorow, a video instructor. My aim was
to empower both the Bulgarian majority and the Pomak
and Roma minority trainees, and to create an opportu-
nity for the expression of their particular point of view
before a potentially wide audience.
Since this seminar took place in the heart of the
Balkans, a historically turbulent region subjected to
many wars, revolutions and violent conflicts, I ex-
pected at least some of this ideological turbulence to
find expression in the trainees’ productions. I expected
to see, moreover, reference to several important local
problems which preoccupied villagers at the time (in-
cluding growing poverty and unemployment, rising Is-
lamic fundamentalism and Bulgarian nationalism, and
the general rejection of the Roma). Astonishingly, no
trainee tackled any of these problems or the inter-eth-
nic prejudices and hatreds the trainees often expressed.
Instead, the videos illustrated traditional, stable fam-
ily activities and routines, some ritualized religious
practices or strictly professional work as performed by
Roma blacksmiths.
Asen Balikci is a cultural anthropologist and ethnographic filmmaker, first known for his pathbreaking Netsilik Eskimo Series
recently acclaimed in the film Through These Eyes. He has filmed in many parts of the world, creating works that have earned
many honors and prizes. Dr. Balikci retired from his Professorship of Anthropology at the University of Montreal, and has since
continued publishing, teaching and making films, most recently in Bulgaria.
VAR 2301.indb 93
The trainees were generally satisfied with the pre-
sentations of their own stable cultural forms. To the
trainees, however, these ethnographic portraits con-
tained an ideological message: they expressed opinions
which may be described as: “We, the Pomak, can be seen
on the screen as we are. We are here in Breznitsa. We
are alive and active. We have survived communism and
its oppressions.” At the same time, these films contained
no criticism of neighboring ethnic groups and expressed
no inter-ethnic tension. Consistently, trainees showed
no interest in other ethnic units. The films suggest that
the trainees perceived regional society as consisting of
ethnic units which live close together, interact daily, and
yet remain separate. One gathers from the films that
members of the different ethnic groups get along very
well together and feel no hatred for their neighbors. In
the context of friendly conversations, trainees proposed
that political and inter-ethnic hatreds were generated by
other people from outside their region, or by powerful
people like kings, presidents and dictators.
The trainees received pedagogical help in editing
their programs into ten minute segments. These were
later edited together and given a detailed introduction
on visual ethnography instruction methodology. The
unified work constituted a one hour video titled Balkan
Portraits (1994) and distributed by the Association for
Balkan Anthropology, Sofia. The project was funded by
UNESCO and Canadian Foreign Aid.
Unanticipated Consequence of the Seminar
One student in our 1994 training seminar was Junin. He
acquired a video camera and began filming weddings
and other public ceremonies. Soon his position as of-
ficial village cameraman had become so established that
no wedding could take place without his participation.
Junin also helped introduce cable television in the vil-
lage, with stunning results. Today there is practically no
house in Breznitsa without a television set in the kitchen,
a space that is also the family living room and very often
the principal bedroom as well. The television set is con-
tinuously kept turned on, all day long. Every few seconds
the people in the room, whether doing some work or
conversing among themselves, will look at the screen to
see what is going on. If they find it interesting they will
5/18/07 1:05:15 PM
 Visual Ethnography Among the Balkan Pomak
stop their activities and watch the screen continuously.
The television set is turned off before going to bed and
turned on as early as possible in the morning. This view-
ing pattern prevails in practically all households.
Three kinds of programs remain largely preferred.
The first kind consists primarily of Bulgarian folk music
tunes with strong oriental variations, Turkish or Arabic.
This genre is called chalga and is performed by beauti-
ful young women in provocative erotic costumes. Chalga
with its oriental elements signifies to the Pomak viewer
that there exists a (fantasy) world of intense erotic plea-
sure; this world is nearby, not very far from us; we can
understand and identify with its oriental melodies; since
they are ours, we can almost reach this delightful world.
The second kind is Latin American soap operas which run
continuously and are greatly admired by the villagers. The
third are the local weddings shot and presented by Junin.
In the past a wedding concerned mainly the lineages of
the bride and bridegroom. Now, through cable television,
the whole village participates in each ceremony.
Extensive research in the village leads me to believe
that the continuous presence of television programming
in people’s houses has had an important impact on the
worldview held by the villagers. They readily admit that
they are “opening up.” They have become receptive to
global and Balkan-wide foreign cultural influences, a
fact that provokes endless complaints by local clerics in
the mosque. The advent of cable television is a part of
a widespread challenges to tradition, which as I will de-
scribe, our later films depict in the village of Breznitsa.
The Pomak on German Television
Very soon after the end of the seminar I was invited by
a consortium of three institutions, NDR (North German
Television), Bertelsmann Media Berlin and the Institut
fuer den Wissenschaftlichen Film (Göettingen) to produce
a film on the Pomak for German television. NDR had tried
in the past to organize a documentary film project on the
Pomak of Northern Greece, but without success. It was
thought that the new project among the Bulgarian Pomak
would meet no religious opposition from the villagers. It
became clear to me that the German public was interested
in the Pomak as a mysterious Muslim tribe, practically
unknown and somewhat lost in the Balkan wilderness. In
this context it was considered appropriate for a Western
anthropologist to demonstrate for the European public
just who these strange Pomak people were!
The portrayal of an ethnic group within the format
of an ethnographic documentary entails many respon-
sibilities and difficulties. Whole cultural patterns have
to be described whether in subsistence activities, fam-
VAR 2301.indb 94
Balikci 94
ily organization or religion. Recent political changes
should loom as very important. Moreover, a principal
protagonist has to be discovered. From the beginning,
I decided to concentrate on women. All married Pomak
women wear the colorful traditional dress consisting of
very large pants, bright shirts and a white, embroidered
head scarf. Men wear ordinary European style clothes,
as do men of all the ethnic groups in the area. In a sense
it is the women whose traditional dress immediately de-
fines Pomak identity to the foreign observer. I decided to
use woman’s dress as an objet temoin, defined by French
museologists as an artifact illustrative of a culture as a
whole. Further, female protagonists would facilitate my
description of domestic activities. We decided also that
traditional ways and modernity (socialist or post-social-
ist) should be portrayed by two different protagonists.
Following my field research I established a list of
the major cultural or social elements to be included in
the film and I selected the protagonists. Zeyneb was a
traditional Muslim mother of three daughters. She was
working hard in tobacco fields and a vegetable garden
and was efficiently training her daughters in kitchen ac-
tivities and the loom. Fidanka was the village librarian,
a young woman raised in the Komsomol (a communist
youth organization) and fascinated presently by capital-
ist modernity. At the time, she was not interested in rais-
ing a family, but was searching for ways to immigrate to
Germany where she believed she would at last be able
to enjoy the good life.
Although in the edited film emphasis was put on
traditional Pomak forms, the opposition Traditionalism-
Modernity/Zeyneb-Fidanka worked well: through it, the
German television audience was able to perceive and
evaluate the modernizing influence of state socialism.
The program, originally titled Allah Bulgarische Tochter,
was broadcast with high ratings by both NDR and WDR.
Shot by Wojcieh Todorow, with the English title The
Women of Breznitsa (1997), this film was produced by
Rolf Husmann and distributed by IWF, Göettingen.
To my surprise, a few Bulgarian journalists in Ger-
many saw the program and immediately published re-
views in the Bulgarian press that were sharply negative.
They claimed that the Pomak had been portrayed in the
film as an extremely primitive ethnic group and that this
would make an impossibility of Bulgaria’s admission to
the European Union! Civilized Europe would never accept
the presence of primitive peoples within its boundaries!
A Film on Pomak Men
Our third project concerned a film on Pomak men. We
decided this to be a portrait of our old friend Ibrahim,
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 95 VISUAL ANTHROPOLOGY REVIEW Volume 23 Number 1 Spring 2007
a local peasant in his 70s living in a small house with
his wife, five goats and a donkey. Ibrahim was supposed
to give us a perspective on local affairs and particularly
religious. “Why do only a few elder men pray at the
mosque?” I asked. Ibrahim answered, “There is hardly
any paid work here in the village beside agriculture. The
young men need money for their families and they are
obliged to leave the village in search of employment.
That is why the mosque is empty.” Ibrahim complains
about the moral effects of modernity: in the past the
young respected the elders and submitted to their will;
nowadays this is no longer the case. Ibrahim’s statements
reveal a society undergoing profound transformation. He
secretly laments the past glory of the Ottoman Empire.
At the end of our work, Ibrahim asked us to take him to
an historical exhibit in the city of Pleven which depicted
the 1877 battles between Russian and Ottoman armies.
We filmed Ibrahim’s emotional reaction as the exhibit
brought him back to the times of Muslim power in the
Balkans. The film, with Wojcieh Todorow as cameraman,
is called Old Ibrahim’s World (1997), and was produced
by Rolf Husmann and distributed by IWF, Göettingen.
Ideological Confusion Among the Pomak
Our last film on the Pomak is Muslim Labyrinths, pro-
duced for Studio Vreme, Sofia. In a sense this work is
a summary and culmination of our prolonged research
and filming in the village of Breznitsa. Muslim Laby-
rinths explores the many ideological pressures felt in
the villages as a result of broad socio-political and cul-
tural change. This new film is entirely devoted to these
ideological changes which are often expressed in parox-
ysmic form. Among protagonists, ideological pressures
can provoke very frank and often brutal reactions.
Adile and Hanife are two village girls about to fin-
ish high school. Adile adopts a hard ideological line as
a vigorous traditionalist. She has constructed a web site
on Islam in the Bulgarian language. Further, she as-
sumes that modern (Western) people customarily ignore
or reject their elderly parents, and she cites the lack of
care or concern for the elderly as typical of Americans
and Europeans. Adile abhors such an inhuman attitude.
She is studying Arabic and would like to go to Iraq or
Iran, beautiful countries, very close to her heart! (After
the completion of the film, Adile adopted the Islamic
headscarf and moved to Jordanya to study the Q’uran).
Hanife adopts an opposite position. For her, the vil-
lage is like a concentration camp, a cultural and ideo-
logical prison in which she is a prisoner with no hope
for survival. She admires the freedom enjoyed by the
young people in the West and would like to participate
VAR 2301.indb 95
in the Love Parade in Berlin. She wants to escape at any
cost. Hanife’s rejection of Islamic mores seems defini-
tive. I assume that modern entertainment television had
something to do with her extreme attitude.
Junin, who helped introduce cable to the village, was
cameraman on this film. As a village native he brought a
deeper understanding of cultural conflicts. Antonii Don-
chev was the film’s director. As with the other films, I as
anthropologist was mainly responsible for content.
Muslim Labyrinths (2004) received the Grand Prix
at the Belgrade International Film Festival and was
shown at many ethnographic film festivals in Europe. It
is distributed by IWF, Göettingen.
Limitations of the Observational Strategy
Looking back at these four films I am astonished by
some of the messages they convey. These messages,
expressive of relative social harmony, contradict my
original expectations. I had believed that the familiar
ethnographic strategy of observational filming would
naturally reveal the deep level of interethnic tensions in
our Balkan village. I was convinced that latent conflicts
and various prejudices did exist. Our ethnographic cam-
era however failed to reveal any such tensions. In order
to explain this failure I have to first describe my own
personal reasons for studying and filming the Pomak.
I was born in Istanbul in a Macedonian-Levantine
family. The city environment where I grew up was Mus-
lim-Turkish. My Christian family never mixed socially
with the Muslim people in our neighborhood. Muslims
and Christians did interact freely in the bazaars and in
the cafés but rarely did they visit each other’s homes. I
don’t remember ever having played with Turkish chil-
dren. Interethnic suspicions and covert hostilities used
to run deep and had a very, very long history. Yet they
never received open expression, for this could have been
very dangerous. As a teenager I was sent to study in
Switzerland and later in the US where I became an an-
thropologist with interest in visual recordings, mainly
among the Netsilik Eskimos. I retired from the Univer-
sity of Montreal in 1994 and decided to settle in the
Balkans and start new research and filming work. Rather
spontaneously I decided to look for a social environ-
ment similar to the one I knew during my childhood.
And that is how I selected the Pomak who represent a
mixture of Bulgarian and Turkish cultural traditions.
As a native speaker of Bulgarian I had no difficulty
communicating with the Pomak. Initially, they were
suspicious of me, assuming that I might be a spy or a
drug dealer running from police in America. In time I
was accepted in the community as a Canadian of Istan-
5/18/07 1:05:16 PM
 Visual Ethnography Among the Balkan Pomak
bul-Ottoman ancestry and a good friend to the people
of Breznitsa.
During my long career I always believed in the ca-
thartic capabilities of the camera. I assumed that, al-
though protagonists may initially be shy and restrained,
after time they would open up and inevitably express a
deep, more hidden level of social reality. In the case of
the Pomak, I believed that this would be the level of in-
terethnic tensions. Yet no such development took place!
During the training seminar in 1994, all film sub-
jects selected by the trainees were openly and freely
discussed, often with the participation of village ob-
servers. No feelings of hatred directed against one an-
other were ever expressed. Yet at the time there was
fear in the air. In 1994, the war in Bosnia provoked
significant comments in Breznitsa: “Here,” one person
told me, speaking of the Balkans, “anything can happen,
any time. Look at what Milosevic is doing in Bosnia!” I
knew with certainty that some contempt was expressed
for the Roma, by both Pomak and Bulgarians, although
in a jocular way and without aggressiveness. Moreover,
the many references to past wars and violent conflicts in
the region were made in a calm and matter-of-fact tone,
as if these were inevitable and “normal” events. Looking
back at the 1994 seminar, then, I can say for certain that
under the overtly peaceful nature of inter-ethnic rela-
tions was a very strong tension.
I was staying at the time in Breznitsa, in the house
of an ethnic Bulgarian family. One evening I found the
people in the house shaking with fear. They obviously felt
terrorized. The daughter of the family, a school teacher,
admitted to having been told that the Muslims will come
and massacre the Christians that very night! I asked,
“You mean your Pomak neighbors from up the hill will
come and kill you?” She answered, “No, Muslims from
some other villages will come here!” This conversation,
expressed deep, historic hostility and fear, which were
still alive. Yet the conversation took place in the vicinity
of a large police station.
The important point here is that I did not record this
or other critical conflict situations. I sensed that people
were afraid to speak in front of the camera; they were
afraid of succumbing to some provocation, for perhaps
I was an agent provocateur. In this context, the ethno-
graphic camera, with its potential for eliciting a cathartic
response, proved of very limited use. I concluded at the
time that the observational strategy is primarily suited
for the recording of stable, traditional cultural forms.
Similar comments can be made in regard to the other
three films. Zeyneb at one point said that she didn’t care
much for the Gypsies who came begging at her door, but
she felt obliged to give them some food, obviously for
the sake of Islamic compassion. On St. George’s day the
VAR 2301.indb 96
Balikci 96
same Zeyneb would go to the nearby Christian Orthodox
monastery of the Holy Virgin and spend a whole night
there with her daughters, lighting candles, praying or
sleeping in front of the altar. This action is believed
to be a cure for several specific diseases. Obviously, in
both cases she was adhering to old, traditional patterns
of inter-ethnic respect and collaboration. These visible
patterns the camera could easily capture and present to
the viewer for evaluation, practically without need for a
commentary. However, when it came to the deeper lev-
els of social belief, the observational recording strategy
proved to be a failure.
In light of this fact, for our next project among the
Pomak we intend to draw inspiration from Jean Rouch’s
early participatory filming style. We shall select local
actors, assign roles and prepare scenarios. All this we
will do in a traditional ethnographic setting with the
intention of overcoming the limitations of the observa-
tional genre.
References
Balikci, Asen
1994 A Visual Anthropology Project in a Multicultural
Setting. Balkanmedia 3(4):37–38.
1999 Pomak Identity: National Prescriptions and Native
Assumptions. Ethnologia Balkanica 3:52–57.
Balikci, Asen and Mark Badger
1995 A Visual Anthropology Seminar for the Native Peo-
ples of Siberia and Alaska. In Intervention—Nordic
Papers in Critical Anthropology 1. Hans Henrik Phil-
ipsen and Birgitte Markussen, eds. Pp. 39–54. Hojb-
jerg: Intervention Press.
Kiriakides, Stilpou
1980 The Northern Ethnological Boundaries of Hellenism.
Amsterdam: Hakkert Publishers.
Memisoglu, Husein
1991 Data from the History of Pomak Turks [in Turkish,
used in Bulgarian translation]. Ankara.
Filmography
Balikci, Asen, dir.
1994 Balkan Portraits. (65 min.) Steps video. Sofia: As-
sociation for Balkan Anthropology.
1995a The Women of Breznitsa. ( 43 min.) Steps video.
Göettingen: Institut fuer den Wissenschaftlichen
Film.
1995b Old Ibrahim’s World. (41 min.) Steps video. Göet-
tingen: Institut fuer den Wissenschaftlichen Film.
Donchev, Antonii, dir.
2004 Muslim Labyrinths. (55 min.) Steps video. Sofia:
Studio Vreme.
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