There were many forms and ways through which information was transmitted inside the Ottoman Empire as a whole and specifically throughout the Balkans. In the present paper we will concentrate our attention on only two of the existing modes of transmission of information, namely the pilgrim and commercial activities in which the Ottoman subjects were engaged.

An important occasion in the life of every Christian and Muslim in the Balkans was the accomplishment of a journey to the Holy Cities - Jerusalem, Mecca and Medina. In spite of the fact that the religions of the two main ethno-confessional groups had different prescriptions and requirements concerning pilgrimage, it was a spiritual and a physical journey (of the body and the soul) which everybody longed for. For the people who could afford it, it would become the most exciting undertaking in their lives. After their return home the pilgrims would be accepted among the most respectable members of the micro-society of the Balkan town or village. The research done on the city of Sarajevo shows that in the second half of the 18th century annually 8 Muslim inhabitants in average started the pilgrimage to Mecca. As a whole, the people who succeeded in completing the journey represented approximately 12 per cent of Sarajevo’s population. During the same period due to increased financial potential there was a rise in the number of Christian pilgrims as well. One of the important results of these travels to distant lands is connected with the exchange and transmission of information. This exchange was done on different levels and underwent different stages.

There were also various ways and mechanisms employed in this process.

I. First of all we will look at the oral transmission of information.

1. This was done at the meetings and conversations that the pilgrims had among themselves while traveling in caravans; in the exchange between the pilgrims and other people - at inns, markets and fairs and while passing by towns and villages. In the travel stories of the pilgrims we can trace how contacts were being established among fellow travelers, how groups of people with similar interests were being formed, and how they were sharing their impressions about things seen and heard during the journey. For example, in his travel notes on a trip to Jerusalem (1745-1746), the Serbian monk and icon-painter Silvester Popovich mentions that in Belgrade their caravan was joined by the Bulgarian icon-painter Christofor Zhefarovich. Moreover, upon arrival at Thessaloniki, the two artists visited the captain of a certain Venetian ship and later on they looked around at the Thessaloniki churches.

During the journey as well as during the actual pilgrimage at the Holy Places the travelers were in contact with representatives of different ethnic and religious groups and were naturally exchanging information about the things they have seen, heard or experienced, as well as about prices, goods, market places, roads, local customs, festivals and others. In this regard a very good example are the notes (1803) in the diary of the Bulgarian merchant hadji Todoraki Tsenov from the town of Vratsa. He has written down the names and places of residence of the people he had got acquainted with while staying in Jerusalem. Thus, merchant Tsenov had met pilgrims from more than 20 towns from the Bulgarian lands in addition to people from Istanbul, Edirne, towns in Anatolia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Damascus, the islands of Crete and Tenedos, Wallachia, Russia and others. These notes document an enormous amount of established contacts and, undoubtedly, of information being exchanged.

2. The culminating point in the transmission of information collected during the pilgrimage was the return of the pilgrim to his native place. This was an occasion for celebration, in which all the local population took part. After the necessary religious ceremonies had taken place, the house of the pilgrim (for instance a Bulgarian) would be kept open for endless visits of relatives, neighbors, the local elite, representatives of various professional groups like merchants, artisans, etc. Apart from paying respect to the pilgrim, the purpose of these visits was to hear exciting stories from the journey. The telling of stories was often accompanied by the presentation sacred objects brought from the Holy Places. In his memoirs about his pilgrimage to Jerusalem, Mihail Madjarov describes the following scene: “ I have not been present in my native place at a welcome ceremony for a kniaz or a tsar but I do not believe that there could have been more welcoming people than during our ceremonial arrival in Koprivshtitsa in the spring of 1869!...The spacious courtyard and the house have filled with guests, some of which wanted to express their joy about our safe return from such a long journey, others to satisfy their curiosity, and a third group were expecting to receive a gift from the Holy Places...On the day following the church service, the priests from both churches (around 8-9 people) came to our house. They were asking questions about the Holy City, Egypt and our sea voyage. After that the priests, the local elite, the artisans, etc. began visiting us. These visits continued for a whole month ”.

The rich information brought by the pilgrims would gradually be transformed into memories which for a long time after the completion of the pilgrimage were kept and transmitted in the family or in the circle of friends.

II. As a second main point we will pay attention to the different forms and ways used by the pilgrims for the spread of written information.

1. We will start with the texts whose authors are the pilgrims themselves and in which they are personally involved in the described events.

A/ The shortest literary forms are the so called pripiski- notes on the margins of the books bought, read, copied or presented to the pilgrims. Usually they consisted of a brief mentioning of the dates of the travel, the names of the travel companions, the author’s emotional state after everything seen and experienced, occasional political event that had taken place during the journey, natural disasters (earthquake, flood, heavy sea storm) or natural phenomena (solar eclipse, comet), etc. Usually the books on which these short notes were written did not belong to the family library but were rather used during church service and were often given as a gift, exchanged, put in pledge as security for loans, bought back and again given as a gift for the churches. With the change of the book’s owner the information written down on its margins was transmitted as well.

B/ As a second way of spreading of written information, we should mention the family chronicles kept by some of the pilgrims. In these chronicles alongside the family information and important political events, facts about the journey to the Holy Places were included as well. In one of the few preserved chronicles of this type - The Chronicle (1771-1811) of hadji Veliko from Shoumen- we can see that the major part of the family diary is dedicated to the journey to Jerusalem taken by the author in 1798. The story includes the list of fellow travelers; the visited markets, towns, monasteries and other sacred places on the way to and in Palestine. In addition, the travelogue includes information about military operations, e.g. the conquering of Egypt and Palestine by the French troops led by Napoleon Bonaparte, and the siege of Jerusalem experienced by the author himself, etc. In his capacity of a witness and unwilling participant in world conflicts hadji Velko shares the gained experience and his impressions with his kin and reserves the biggest part of the family chronicle for the pilgrimage memoirs. We can only guess for how long these events from the life of the pilgrim and his family had served as a main topic in the conversations and commentaries among friends, neighbors and relatives.

C/ At this point, it is worth noting that information about pilgrims can be found in chronicles and diaries written by people who themselves had not visited the Holy Places. A good example in this regard is the Chronicle (1746-1804) of Mula Mustafa Basheskija from Sarajevo. This extremely rich source depicts not only the life of the author and his family, but the urban life in Sarajevo in its various aspects. In his diary, Mula Mustafa Basheskija has included information concerning the Muslims leaving for Mecca, the pilgrims who had died during the journey and sometimes the circumstances under which this had happened. In relation with almost all the people mentioned, the author adds details from their lives or about their characters - like origin, occupation, education, good and bad features, etc. In this way, Mula Mustafa Basheskija had actually written a chronicle of the pilgrims from Sarajevo and consequently had preserved and transmitted information about people and lives details of which were largely unknown even to their descendants.

We find accounts, that are very similar in nature although shorter in length, in the Family chronicle (1680-1869) written by the Bulgarian priest Jovcho from Triavna and his sons.

All the examples discussed so far prove the great importance that pilgrimage played in the life of Christians and Muslims in the Balkans. This event had influenced the thoughts and the feelings of the people of the time to such an extent that it was even described in family diaries belonging to people who had never initiated a journey of their own. In such a way, the family chronicle had been transformed into a chronicle of the life of the local town or village micro-society. This was a way of transmitting information not only about events and facts but about the values in the life of the past generations as well.

D/ Another way of spreading of written information is through the travel notes of the pilgrims. The amount and the content of the notes vary according to the interests and the character of a particular author. Generally speaking, the travel diaries consist of notes on certain points and stages of the journey, a brief or more detailed description of the Holy Cities and of the rituals during the culmination of the pilgrimage. In this regard, the ceremonies accompanying the departure and the return of the pilgrimage caravans as they are depicted by the Ottoman traveler Evliya Chelebi who went on a pilgrimage in 1672, are particularly interesting

Apart from these main elements, the texts in question offer extremely interesting information about various aspects of life. As an example, we can cite the travel notes taken by hadji Todoraki Tsenov who was a Bulgarian merchant from Vratsa. Among other things, the author has written down prices and quantity of the food he was buying during the journey, the transportation expanses, the amount of money paid for rent of houses and inns and the money left as donations in churches and monasteries, the money spent for buying presents from Jerusalem, etc. The cited details illuminate the financial side of the pilgrimage expedition, at least as far as well-off pilgrims were concerned.

Given the fact that travel notes present only the short version of the pilgrimage story, we can only imagine how interesting and rich in detail was the actual story telling and how many times the travel notes had been retold and reinterpreted.

E/ Few of the educated pilgrims had written descriptions of and guide books to the Holy Places. As these texts were written in accordance with the literary canons, they were full of information about the monuments and their history, but the authors would not reveal their personal experience, or thoughts and feelings. This type of texts had been repeatedly copied, translated and printed.

2. The second large category of ways and forms of transmission of information is characterized by the fact that the people spreading the information were not the authors themselves. In other words, we will concentrate on the literary activities in which some of the pilgrims engaged while reading at the libraries of the Jerusalem monasteries. Their work consisted of finding, copying and translating Descriptions or Guides to the Holy Places written at different times by various authors and in different languages. These texts, in printed form or as manuscripts, were in circulation among literate people. A very telling example in this sense is the work done by the Bulgarian monk Visarion. In the middle of the 18th century, he compiles in Jerusalem A Description of the Holy Places in Church-Slavonic. This book represents a translation and a compilation of several Greek texts. In 1746, again in Jerusalem, the Serbian pilgrim Silvester Popovich translates Visarion’s compilation into Serbian and adds it to his travel notes. Two years later (in 1748), the Bulgarian writer and icon-painter Christofor Zhefarovich publishes in Vienna the same Description of Jerusalem for “those who want to hear, read and understand”. In addition, Zhefarovich appends 70 drawings to the text. The twelve reprints of this book, as well as the numerous hand-written copies in Church-Slavonic, Serbian, Russian and Greek in the following decades, prove the popularity of Zhefarovich’s edition. Also, they illustrates the existing great need for information that books like this one were supposed to satisfy.

Some of the pilgrims were buying books on their way to the Holy Places and in Jerusalem. From the travel notes (1803) of merchant hadji Todokari Tsenov from Vratsa, we learn that on the island of Hios he bought for 6 gurush several books for his children, in Revna one book for the family for 46 gurush, another book for 178 gurush from Jerusalem, in addition to more small and cheap Greek and Bulgarian books. These books were to be used for the education of the children and for reading at home. Sometimes, such books were presented as gifts to churches and monasteries and as a result of this a larger number of literate people were gaining access to the information they contained. In this way the journeys of the pilgrims were facilitating the spread and exchange of books, knowledge and ideas.

Judging from the above mentioned sources, it becomes evident that the flow of pilgrims from the Balkans to the Holy Places represented a powerful channel for transmission of various kinds of information. As this type of traveling was becoming more widespread, it was contributing to the more steady flow of information about distant and unknown lands. Moreover, it was satisfying the curiosity and the need of the Balkan society to be informed and knowledgeable. This in turn was making the people more open to the world and more receptive and tolerant towards differences and foreign customs. Not least, it was challenging their imagination and initiative to undertake a journey themselves.

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Another principal channel for transmission of information was established through the commercial activities of the peoples in the Ottoman Empire and in the Balkans. Merchant caravans, inns, markets, fairs, shops- all these were places for exchange of not only commercial but of all other kinds of information. The information received by the traders would then travel all around the empire with the caravans of goods and with the commercial correspondence. In order to illustrate with figures the scope of the commercial activities, as well as the remote origin of the transmitted information, we will provide two examples from Ottoman sources.

Two Sultan decrees sent in 1637 to the local authorities in Bitolia (a center of a kaza) and in 1657 to the authorities of Nikopol and Silistra (both centers of sancaks), contain references to the fiscal obligations of the Armenian and Greek merchants from Anatolia who have been temporary staying or passing by these regions on their way to Wallachia, Serbia, Transilvania; or of other traders who were arriving from the Wallachian principalities, Austria, Hungary and Poland.

The significance of the steady traffic of merchants for the demographic picture in one of the above mentioned towns, Nikopol, is demonstrated in one Ottoman register dating from 1693 and enlisting the non-Muslim population paying the poll-tax. According to the data from the source, 44 per cent of the town’s population were immigrants who had settled down in Nikopol for various periods of time or permanently. The group of the merchants who were coming from different regions in the Balkans and Anatolia, accounted for 16,5 per cent of all immigrants.

Having in mind these figures which testify for the high level of migration activity in the Ottoman Empire, we would like to point at two specific channels used by the merchants for distribution of information.

I. Firstly, we will discuss the spread of information through the judicial institutions. As an example will be taken the functioning of the rabbi court inside the Jewish community in the Ottoman Empire. The court registers or rabbi books contain rich information that helps to reconstruct the mechanisms for the flow and exchange of information. This type of documents consist of two parts- the first (the question) is the description of the case and the second (the response) presents the ruling given by the rabbi.

In the light of the discussed problem, it is especially useful to look at the court meetings acknowledging and certifying the death of a Jewish man. The certification was needed in order to provide permission for the widow to re-marry. Usually the deceased was a merchant who had died during one of his travels. In such kind of cases the majority of the people summoned to give evidence were merchants themselves. Sometimes, they would testify about facts and events that they had witnessed during their commercial trips and which were related to the death of the person in question. In other times, however, the witnesses had not seen the events themselves and were just communicating information they had received from third persons, usually traders with whom they had business relations, or whom they had simply met while traveling. Thus, the testimonies were full of stories about military activities, people killed or being taken hostage, epidemics and natural disasters, crimes and banditry on the road and contacts with and among the different ethnic and religious groups in the Balkans and beyond the borders of the Ottoman Empire.

In this regard, one characteristic example is provided by the court case for establishing the fact of the death of merchant Josef Soares. This case was heard on the 24^th of November, 1689, in Thessaloniki and the key witness was Josef Mosachi, also a Jewish merchant who had known the victim and had information about the murder. The rabbi received from J. Mosachi an account of a meeting with J. Soares near Belgrade at the time when everybody was fleeing the city because of the approaching Austrian army. Then the merchants boarded different ships and parted during the journey. When the witness arrived in Nikopol, he heard from the travel companions of J. Soares that he had been kidnapped by bandits. Also, he learned that afterwards some Turkish women had accurately described Soares’s clothes as belonging to a man killed by the robbers. Some time later, while still in Nikopol, J. Mosachi was visited by a Christian who used to trade with both Jewish merchants. The Christian, who had been present at the time of the attack but had managed to hide and escape unhurt, claimed that he had witnessed the murder of J. Soares. As a proof of his words, he had added some biographical details about J. Soares.

This is only the short version of the testimony of Josef Mosachi in front of the rabbi court. It is an evidence how information was transmitted by means of oral communication among members of the different ethnic and religious groups, how its accuracy was verified, and how this information was used to fulfill a specific function.

Other interesting court cases were the ones settling disputes among Jewish merchants. The facts and events made known during the court hearings often included information about prices, goods, markets, shop rents, conditions for commercial activities, like road situation, means of land and sea transportation, inns, warehouses and others throughout the Ottoman Empire and in Europe.

It is important to note that descriptions of similar cases can be found the registers of the Muslim court to which not only Jews, but representatives of all the Balkan peoples were summoned.

That is how, given the level of development of communications at the time, it was possible for the oral information to be transmitted from one person to the other and to be announced formally in front of the institutions and informally in professional, friendly and family circles, to reach most distant locations, to cross borders and to arrive, sooner or later, to the people that needed or have been expecting it.

II. The second specific way of transmission of information in which the merchants were involved was the book trade. The Balkan peoples in the Ottoman Empire did not have state-like mechanisms that would stimulate and subsidize their cultural institutions. Instead this function was performed by the churches and monasteries. Furthermore, a significant role in the process of spreading the written knowledge and ideas was played also by the markets and fairs. At such places books were among the many items exchanged. All around the Imperial markets, merchants were selling printed and hand-written books in Serbian, Bulgarian, Greek and other languages. They were offering them in the inns and were leaving the books with trusted people who would later on find buyers for them. The fresh book supplies were provided from Balkan and European printing houses, from monastery scriptoria, from individual copyists and from other persons. Gradually a distinctive group of book traders was formed. But they continued to trade in the old manner, because the opening of a book shop in a small town could not become a profitable business. What is more, the book trade at fairs would not make somebody rich either and according to contemporaries this was the least profitable type of commerce. Nevertheless, it was due to the activities of the book merchants that this main channel for spread of information throughout the Balkans was operating.