Introduction
The town of Elena and the surrounding villages, which form a municipality with some 10,000 inhabitants while still being rural, are located in the Balkan Mountains of Northern Bulgaria. The altitudes, ranging from 300 metres in the town of Elena to 1,536 metres for the nearby Mount Choumerna, point to a terrain that, although not the most rugged, has been difficult to colonise. According to local belief, the historical objectivity of which is not discussed here, the relatively rugged terrain and low crop profitability made this microregion unattractive to the Ottoman authorities and created a relative “zone of refuge” (Scott 2009). This was evidenced, again according to local belief, by the bands of outlaws – the notorious haidouks who took refuge there – or simply by all those who wanted to escape the “valley state” to avoid taxation, conscription, epidemics, or Ottoman violence (Sirakov 1968). They could thus aspire to be Balkandzhii (singular: Balkandzhiya), free men ...




