The Albanians of Bulgaria
From the Arbanasi village in Bulgaria (1919-1940). Villages like Arbanasi in Bulgaria were founded by Albanian refugees.
The earliest written document that marks the beginning of Arbanasi’s history is a royal decree by the Ottoman sultan Suleiman the Magnificent from 1538, according to which the sultan offered the lands of the modern localities of Arbanasi, Leskovca, Gorna Oryahovitsa and Dolna Oryahovitsa to his son-in-law Grand Vizier Rustem Pasha as a gift. The four villages are united under the name Arnaud Kariyeleri (“the Albanian villages”) in the document, and the first settlers were Albanians and Greeks from Epirus;
The tax registers of 1541–1544 describe Arnavud köy (also Darı ova) as a village of 63 households and 72 unmarried men. In 1579–1580, it already numbered 271 households and 277 unmarried men, or a quadruple increase for forty years, indicating an influx of settlers. The village preserved its purely Christian character and prospered in the 17th century.
The Roman Catholic bishop, Anton Stefanov, refers to Arbanasi in 1685 as a village of Greeks and Albanians which ranks first in Dacia. According to his account, there were Arbanasi merchants trading in Italy, Hungary, Poland and particularly in Muscovy.
There is considerably richer documentary material, such as correspondence and chronicler’s notes on religious books, preserved from the 17th and 18th century, that evidences that Arbanasi reached its economic blossoming between the second half of the 17th and the end of the 18th century. The settlement had over 1,000 houses at the time, its population consisting mostly of eminent merchant families who traded in Transylvania (mostly Sibiu and Braşov), the Danubian Principalities, Russia and Poland. Handicrafts were well-developed, with copper- and goldsmithing, vine-growing and silk production playing an important part. The homes of the rich merchants, as well as the five churches built in the years of progress, bear record of the economic upsurge and prosperity.
As a result of well-organized brigand raids in 1792, 1798 ad 1810, the settlement was pillaged and burnt down. The plague and cholera epidemics further damaged the town’s well-being. The richest merchants fled to Wallachia and Russia. A new settlement of Bulgarians began after 1810, when people came down from the Elena and Teteven parts of the Balkan Mountains, but Arbanasi could never again reach its former heyday. An Ottoman royal decree of 1839 deprived the town of its former privileges and the development of handicraftsmanship after the Crimean War almost ceased.
Arbanasi residents took part in the organized armed struggle of Bulgarians that ultimately led to the Liberation of Bulgaria from Ottoman rule as a consequence of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877-78
