Muslims and Christians in the Bulgarian Rhodopes.

4 “Adat Orthodox Christianity”

When asked why they cultivated certain rites, my Orthodox Christian respondents often replied that those were adet (Turkish: adet, Arabic: sing. ‘adah, pl. ‘adat)²¹⁴ meaning tradition, an attitude in where, to borrow a phrase from Ludwik Stomma, a Polish ethnologist, customs are observed in order to “keep things as they are, which is as they should be” (Stomma 1986, p. 82). Although the Bulgarian word “tradition” [Bulgarian: traditsiya] is sometimes used as well, the Turkish word adet²¹⁵ prevails, indicating strong Ottoman influence²¹⁶ in the studied region. Accordingly, I refer to the local model of Orthodox Christianity as “Adat Christianity”, a term I prefer to the existing categories describing the unofficial ...