A Women's Religious Organization in Southern Bulgaria: From Miracle Stories to History

This paper is dedicated to a specific religious community, a women's Orthodox association founded in the early twentieth century in a southern Bulgarian town with mixed population and complex cultural history. We explore the place visions and miracles played in the establishment of the association and its present-day role in the local society. The impact of this small group of women, united in a moral community, on the religious and social life of a Balkan town is explained with attention to what might be described as “politics of divine intervention” in a world of continuous political, ethnic and religious strife. The stories of miracles, dreams narratives and other accounts of divine intervention in the broadest sense allow us to articulate the interweaving of hidden history, social order and religious life.