Research on the English récit de voyage used to cover mainly the geographical regions of Italy, North America and the Orient, as well as certain types of journeys like the Grand Tour or exploratory expeditions. Recently, however, some studies have appeared on unexplored or little investigated areas like Australia, South America and Africa.
Writings about the Balkan peoples in the nineteenth century are few. In an article about Slavic cultures at this time Myl' nikov points out that there is only a small number of papers on the topic and they concern particular and isolated aspects. As an explanation he points to the fact that the published and unpublished primary materials in the archives of the different countries are not conveniently organised and to a great extent not even bibliographically classified. (Myl' nikov, 143.)
Among the ' Near East' (in eightenth and nineteenth centuries one understood by "Near East" ' that part of south-eastern Europe that was then still under Turkish rule' , (Lewis, 10.)) countries the Bulgarian territory was probably one of the less visited. The reasons for that were several. Until the end of the Napoleonic wars accessibility of the European part of the Ottoman Empire was a problem for the English. Later the Ottoman Empire was in constant war. South-eastern Europe did not have anything to offer to an occasional traveller. Apart from a few Roman roads and the ruins of the Trajan wall, which were in themselves not exquisite sites, there were no places of interest. Last but not least, there existed the danger that the visitor might be robbed or even killed. These regions were notorious for brigands. Travellers who wanted to reach Asia Minor preferred the route by boat through Gibraltar and Malta to the one through Central Europe and the Balkans (Schiffer, 6).
Interest in the European territories of the Ottoman Empire increased, however, throughout the nineteenth century -- for political reasons. Thomas Holland writes in 1885 that ' it is now more than half a century since the condition of the Ottoman Empire was recognised as of concern not merely to its immediate neighbours, Austria and Russia, but also to Europe generally' (Holland, 1.). Correspondingly, during that period information about Bulgaria increased proportionately to its ' fame' . In 1836 The Penny Cyclopædia marked Bulgaria' s existence with only one sentence. Six years later the Encyclopaedia Britannica devoted almost two pages to the topic, which had doubled by 1876.
Still, the English preferred to observe their object of political interest from afar. Because of all these circumstances a major part of the texts created in the nineteenth century was written by politically engaged people who treated the Eastern Question without having been there.
Holland, T. E., The European Concert in the Eastern Question(Oxford: Clarendon, 1885).
Lewis, Bernard, The Middle East and West (New York: Hrper & Row, 1966).
Myl' nikov, A. S., "Die Slawischen Kulturen in den Beschreibungen Ausländischer Beobachter im 18. und zu Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts", in: Krasnobaev, B. I., Robel, G., (edd.) Reisen und Reisebeschreibungen im 18. und 19. Jahrhundert als Quellen der Kulturbeziehungsforschung (Berlin: Ulrich Camen, 1980), pp. 143-64.
Schiffer, Reinhold, Turkey Romanticised. Images of the Turks in Early Nineteenth Century English Travel Literature (Bochum: Brockmeyer, 1982).
Last modified 2001