Abandoned Land: Muslim Refugees’ Property in the Post-Ottoman Balkans

Abstract This article examines what happened to the ‘abandoned land’ of Muslim refugees in Bulgaria, Serbia, and Romania after the end of Ottoman rule in 1878. Several hundred thousand Muslims in the Balkans became refugees during the Russo-Ottoman War of 1877–8. Circassians and Crimean Tatars from Russia, whom the Ottoman government had previously settled in the Balkans, were among them. As they evacuated for the safety of Ottoman Anatolia and Syria, never to return to the Balkans, they left behind their fields, pastures, and houses. The newly independent Romania and Serbia and autonomous Bulgaria built their land legislation upon the Ottoman land regime, asserting state ownership over large swathes of agricultural land. Local Christian populations and Muslim refugees laid claims to that land, contesting the government’s appropriation. The ‘abandoned land’ became a primary vehicle for ethno-religious homogenization in the post-Ottoman Balkans. The governments in Sofia, Bucharest, and Belgrade passed immigration laws to reassign the vacant land to Bulgarian, Romanian, and Serb immigrants arriving from the Ottoman, Russian, and Habsburg empires. Based on documents in Bulgarian, Serbian, Romanian, and Turkish archives, this study reveals legal mechanisms of land appropriation and redistribution as part of state-building in the modern Balkans.