Voyvodovo: from a forgotten and unknown village to the most widely researched colonization community (and beyond it)
Abstract
When at the end of the last century I began to study Voyvodovo – the only Czech village in Bulgaria – its history was only marginally known. In texts from the first decade of the new millennium, I often wrote about Voyvodovo (perhaps rightfully so considering the state of knowledge on the subject at the time) as an “unknown” or “forgotten” village.
Thanks to the joint effort of a handful of researchers, who soon began to study Voyvodovo and its inhabitants, this situation gradually changed over the years and has now been almost fully reversed. In 2016, Helena Bočková stated that “the village of Voyvodovo has been the topic of more academic publications than any other Czech location” (2016: 132).
Furthermore, this is not an isolated statement; the statement that “no other colonization community has been so thoroughly studied […] as this former Czech village in Bulgaria” was written in the same year by the prominent Czech expert on the history of the Balkans Václav Štěpánek (2016: 131). There have been so many works dealing with Voyvodovo in such a relatively short amount of time and the cooperation of the researchers behind them has been so close that some authors (even three years before Bočková and Štěpánek) have been writing about a whole self-reliant discourse of “Voyvodovology” (Fatková 2013: 10).