by Elton Ligu

The Imperial and Royal Austro-Hungarian Consul in Adrianople writes:

“Explanations on the “Ethnographic Map of European Turkey and its possessions at the time of the outbreak of war in 1877”

This ethnographic map of European Turkey not only contains some corrections of the inaccurate data found in the ethnographic maps published up to now for this region, but is also conceived according to a different system. It simultaneously presents the distribution of nationalities and religious confessions.

Previous maps of this category were only linguistic maps, but even from this point of view they were not entirely accurate. Professor Heinrich Kiepert himself explained, in the introduction to his ethnographic map of the European East — which is also presented as a linguistic map — how difficult it is to determine nationality in the Levant on the basis of language.

In reality, this is not even the right way to determine the ethnographic relations of the inhabitants of the Ottoman Empire; nevertheless, it is important to know the nationality of these peoples, for which they shed their blood and disturb the world.

Language is only one of the distinguishing marks of nationality; another, equally important in the East, is religion, and another element that should not be neglected is national consciousness. These are three characteristics that must be taken together. I am not speaking at all about the history of the peoples, physical features, customs and other similar, visible but more distant elements.

It is well known that in Turkey, until recently, the inhabitants were classified only according to religious belief. The Ottoman state does not distinguish Slavs, Albanians, Vlachs etc. … but Muslims, Greeks, Latins etc. as nations. The practical importance of religion for nationality in the East can be clearly demonstrated by examples.

Near Amasya (in Asia Minor) and also in Varna (?)(*1) there are villages inhabited by Greeks who do not speak Greek, but only Turkish. Nevertheless, it is impossible to consider them Turks, because not only does no drop of Turkish blood flow in their veins, but the Muslim faith is also inseparable from being Turkish, so that a “Christian Turk” would be a contradiction.

On the other hand, the Bosnian Muslims, whose mother tongue is Serbian, have never accepted to be called Serbs, but “Turks”; yet they are certainly not Turks, but they cannot simply be counted among the Serbs, because they themselves do not consider themselves part of this nation and even place themselves in open opposition to it.

Thus, language, religion and national consciousness (or the name of the people) are the elements of which nationality in the East is in fact composed; none of them is sufficient on its own. Especially the name that peoples give themselves is often completely inaccurate, as can be seen for example with the Muslim Bosniaks mentioned above, or even with the Greeks in Turkey, who usually do not call themselves Hellenes, but Romei (i.e. Romans), just as the Vlachs, very different from them, are called Rumeni (which also means Romans).

The Constantinopolitan professor Synvet notes on his ethnographic map the following peoples: Greeks, Bulgarians, Greco-Bulgarians, Serbo-Croats, Rumanians, Albanians and Muslims, without making further distinctions within this last category.

This inconsistent mixture of national and religious designations is of course just as wrong as the grouping under the name of a single nation of all those who speak the same language, as found in other maps, or as the inconsistency present in the maps of Guillaume Lejean and August Petermann, in which the Muslim Bulgarians of Thrace are presented as Turks, while the Muslim Albanians and Bosniaks … are not distinguished from the Christian Albanians and Serbs.

This map, therefore, in order to take into account as much as possible the real concepts of nationality, makes the following distinctions:

Turanian Peoples

1. Turks (Ottomans, Yörüks and Turkmens), exclusively Muslim;
2. Tatars (of Nogai origin etc.), exclusively Muslim;

Skipetars (Albanians)

3. Muslim Albanians or Arnauts (Ghegs, Tosks and their related groups);
4. Catholic Albanians, of Gheg origin;
5. Greek-Orthodox Albanians;
6. Greco-Albanians (half-Hellenized Skipetars);

Slavic Peoples

7. Serbian tribes of the Greek-Orthodox faith (Serbs, Montenegrins, Serbs of Herzegovina and Bosniaks);*2
8. Catholic Serbo-Croats, or Latin Bosniaks and Herzegovinians;
9. Muslim Serbo-Croats or Bosniak Turks (in reality Muslim Bosniaks);
10. Serbo-Bulgarians or Bulgarians mixed with Serbs, of the Greek-Orthodox faith;
11. Bulgarians of the Greek-Orthodox faith of the Bulgarian Schismatic Church;
12. Greco-Bulgarians or half-Hellenized Bulgarians of the Greek-Orthodox Church;
13. Greco-Catholic Bulgarians or Uniates;
14. Latin-Catholic Bulgarians (also Paulicians);
15. Pomaks (Ahrijans) or Muslim Bulgarians;
16. Russians, who mostly belong to the Lipovan and Old Believer sects;

Hellenes

17. Greeks of the Christian-Orthodox (Greek-Orthodox) faith;
18. Muslim Greeks;

Notes:
*) The “Greeks” of Varna who speak Turkish are perhaps Albanians, because they are also called Gagauz, like the Albanians in Thrace.
*) In reality even these tribes, especially the Montenegrins, should have been distinguished separately; but then, for the sake of consistency, the Albanian tribes would also have to be further distinguished, and there would not be enough colors in the world for what would be needed on this map.

Two pieces of information about the author which, in my opinion, are always important for understanding and evaluating the quality of the information:

Carl von Sax (in German: Carl Ritter von Sax) was an Austro-Hungarian diplomat in the Ottoman Empire from the end of the 19th century.

He was transferred to the consulate in Ruse (Bulgaria) on 15 September 1864. On 13 November 1868 he became interpreter at the General Consulate in Sarajevo with the rank of consular chancellor and, from 4 April 1869, was consul in Sarajevo. He was transferred to the Constantinople consulate on 6 May 1871.

He was appointed consul in Durrës on 8 January 1873, but did not take up the post, as he was appointed director of the Vienna World’s Fair from April to September 1873. During this period he was editor of the “International Exhibition Gazette”, a supplement to the “Neue Freie Presse”.

He was appointed to the Cairo Consulate on 26 April 1873 and took up duty on 9 October 1873. On 3 June 1874 he married Christine Edle von Mailler. He was transferred to Edirne on 10 October 1876 and appointed on 28 December 1876.

After the Austro-Hungarian occupation of Bosnia-Herzegovina, Sachs became a government councillor in the provincial administration of Sarajevo on 26 June 1879. On 1 January 1881 he was appointed to the Bosnian service of the Imperial and Royal Ministry of Finance. On 10 January 1884 he became associate professor at the Oriental Academy.

For 17 years, Sachs collected material on the Balkan Peninsula. He published an ethnographic map in 1877–1878. The Austrian Geographical Society highly valued the reliability of his map.

Carl Sax’s Ethnographic Map of 1877: Part Two

To understand his map, we must understand where he obtained his information, which, as you will read below, is very significant and very clarifying regarding some errors and ambiguities — and above all, these sources are not only his own. It states therein:

The sources used in this work are mainly the following: the ethnographic maps of Lejean and Kiepert, the (unusable) ethnographic map attached to Synvet, the statistical register of the Greek population of Turkey, Bulgarian registrations of the population of Eastern Thrace, Kiepert’s statistical supplement to Dr. O. Blau’s work “Travels in Bosnia and Herzegovina”, together with the scheme of the Franciscans of Herzegovina, various volumes of the official schemes of the vilayets of Adrianople, Rusçuk (Ruse, Bulgaria), Thessaloniki, Monastir and Bosnia, an official Serbian register of Vlach villages in Serbia, reports sent to the Vienna World Exhibition by the Austro-Hungarian consular offices in Shkodër (Albania), Prizren, Rusçuk, Thessaloniki, Ioannina, Vlorë — especially the statistical tables prepared by Consul Lippich on the population of the Prizren vilayet and the register sent by Consul General Wassitsch on the Catholic parishes of Albania and their respective populations, as well as his other notices; notices from Vice-Consuls Major Omçikus in Bertschka, Dragomanović in Livno, v. Dembicki in Preveza, Waldhart in Sofia and v. Adelburg in Philippopolis (the last two especially on Pomak and Turkish villages), Bulgarian notices on the Pomaks in southern Thrace, Kanitz’s work “Danubian Bulgaria and the Balkans”, Hahn’s “Albanian Studies” and “Journey from Belgrade to Thessaloniki”, C. Peters’ “Basic Principles of the Geography and Geology of Dobruja”, the works of Roskiewicz and Thömmel on Bosnia, Hochstetter’s “Journey in Rumelia” (in the “Notices of the Imperial-Royal Geographical Society”), the itineraries of Ami Boué, the author’s own local studies in Bosnia, Thrace and Bulgaria, as well as the sources mentioned in his treatise “Geographical-Ethnographic Sketch of Bulgaria” (“Notices of the Imperial-Royal Geographical Society”, vol. 1869); finally, oral testimonies from the late Lejean, Catholic missionaries in Thrace, some Macedonians and Cincars, railway officials in Rumelia, and some trustworthy travelers, e.g. director Pressel and others.

It is self-evident that these sources were used with impartial criticism. For example, regarding the Bulgarians, more trust was placed in Greek sources, while regarding the Greeks, more trust was placed in Bulgarian sources — to the extent that both sides tried to present their national territories as larger than they actually were, to the detriment of the other.

Thus, where the Greeks admit the existence of Bulgarian villages, there are certainly real Bulgarians, and vice versa. The depiction of Greco-Bulgarians on the map is all the more necessary because only in this way can the statistical conflict between Greeks and Bulgarians be resolved fairly, without harming either side.

Vienna, April 1878. Carl Sax

Supplement

During the printing of the above explanations, the literary war between Greek and Slavic ethnographers flared up again with new force and brought to light several polemical treatises and new ethnographic maps — including “ethnocratic” ones, because the former term cannot be so easily misused for such cartographic fantasies. Both sides reached the maximum in exaggerations, and for this reason the scientific value of these latest publications is very small.

Nevertheless, precisely from their somewhat negative side, some confirmations and additions were gained; because where even now Greek ethnographers do not count Greeks, this nationality is certainly not present; and vice versa, where Slavic statisticians now explicitly mention the Greek nationality, the true Hellenism of the population can no longer be doubted.

Especially from a 1871 statistic of Thrace, reproduced in the Courier d’Orient on 24 April of this year, which comes from a Slavophile and anti-Hellenic source, some small corrections emerged in favor of the Greek and Turkish element. In the Russian map of Teplow on Bulgaria, Thrace and Macedonia, which presents the proportion of Christians and Muslims according to the salnames also used in my map, the settlements of the Greeks are shown quite arbitrarily — sometimes far too few, sometimes far too many.

Therefore this map gave me almost no reason to improve mine. Synvet’s statistics, the more recent ones on the Greek population of Turkey (Les Grecs de l’Empire ottoman), which classify everything under the Greek Patriarchate, except Serbs and Bosniaks — that is, Greeks, Bulgarians, Vlachs and Albanians — as Greek, offer almost nothing new. Other partisan works such as “Ethnological Map of European Turkey and Greece, prepared at Stanford’s Geographical Establishment” do not deserve serious attention. Recently, v. Gjurkovits provided in his thorough critiques (in Vienna’s “Presse”) many valuable indicators, which largely agree with my map; but as regards his remarks on the Vlachs of Kucova, I must emphasize that these not only appear as Greeks in the majority of the cities, but also usually, despite their wide distribution, constitute such a small part of the population that their depiction on the map is not always possible. (Otherwise the Armenians, Israelites and Roma would also have to be shown.)

Carl Sax.

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Editorial Note

Together with Consul C. Sax’s map, a sketch of an ethnographic map of Turkey by Court Councillor Karl Freiherr von Krauss was sent to us at the same time. Based on the best sources, it takes into account nationality and confession in the same way as the present map. A detailed comparison of the two projects showed an almost complete agreement and convinced us that Consul Sax’s map — the result of seventeen years of studies in the field — must be considered the cartographic representation closest to the real ethnographic situation of Turkey.

The system of representing the various nations of European Turkey on the present map made it desirable that, for those territories where two nationalities are mixed in a fairly equal manner, the percentage of their mixture should be made visible.

However, since taking this into account in the graphic representation (through stripes whose width would correspond to this percentage) would have made the map much more difficult to draw and would have delayed publication, we preferred to explain this ratio through numerical data.

The editorial office also received a work by Imperial and Royal Consul General Lippich on the demographic situation of the sanjaks of Shkodër, Prizren, Prishtina, Niš, Skopje, Debar and Novi Pazar, which accurately presents the ratio of the mixture of the various nations and confessions.