Slava Savova, "Re-Ottomanizing modernity: domesticating balneology in early to mid-20th century Bulgaria"
This dissertation chapter examines the local intermingling of a specific type of sociomedical architectures – Ottoman and European thermal baths - and the persistent vernacular uses that bind them together.
Public baths, one of the most prominent typologies within the Ottoman architectural nomenclature, were erected in the vicinity of dozens of thermal springs across the territory of
present-day Bulgaria, simultaneously facilitating the access to the natural resource and establishing the boundaries of its uses. After Bulgaria’s liberation from Ottoman rule in 1878,
the country embarked on a course of modernization that saw the rapid elimination of the Ottoman era infrastructures. I argue that the eclectic shells of their “modern” replacements
enclosed pre-existing healing and bathing practices and the process of their building became the contested territory of political, cultural, and social conflicts. Furthermore, I will question the modern/archaic, hygienic/unclean, Western/Ottoman binaries deployed in the remaking of the civic environment and will demonstrate that the modernization of early to mid-20th century Bulgaria was a non-linear process of adaptation and absorption of preceding cultural practices, that aligned modern technology along the contours of pre-existing ecologies of care and healing.