The Title Hajji and The Ottoman Vocabula

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VALENTINA IZMIRLIEVA
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THE TITLE HAJJI AND THE OTTOMAN

VOCABULARY OF PILGRIMAGE
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MODERN GREEK STUDIES YEARBOOK

A PUBLICATION OF MEDITERRANEAN, SLAVIC
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Volume 28/29, 2012/2013
THE TITLE HAJJI AND THE OTTOMAN
VOCABULARY OF PILGRIMAGE
by
Valentina Izmirlieva
Columbia University
EVERY educated person in the West knows that hajjis are Muslim. We might
even say that they are exemplary Muslims. As people who have fulfilled the
Quranic injunction (2:196) for going on a Hajj (pilgrimage) to Mecca (or
hacılık, as the Ottomans called it), they have demonstrated their religious
commitment in an extraordinary way and stand out as model representatives of
their entire confessional community. In fact, the correlation between hajjis
and Muslims is so strong in the public mind that it has engendered racial and
religious slur: over the last decade, American soldiers in Iraq have used “hajjis”
as a derogatory term for Arabs—real or apparent Muslims alike.1
This common knowledge, however, cannot prepare a Western reader
for the following text posted on the website of the Orthodox Monastery of the
Pantocrator in Melissochori near Thessaloniki:
It is a very ancient reverend practice of the Christians, the pilgrimage to the

All Holy Tomb of Christ and the Holy Land. From desire and piety with great
toil, sacrifices and dangers, many went, even once in their life time, to worship
the places that Christ lived and walked.
They would go there prepared as much as possible, cleansed and con-
fessed. Some would make a sacrifice by walking there. Others transferred
money and blessings to the shrines as builders and workers. They worshiped
at all the all holy shrines, were baptized in the river Jordan and would take
with them the Holy Light and different blessed articles such as small crosses,
shrouds, candles etc.
When they returned to their village, all the inhabitants with their
priest would receive them at the outskirts of the village, peal the bells and with
a procession they would accompany them to the Church. For the blessing of
being found worthy to worship at the Holy Land, they would be accorded re-
spect and would even change their name by adding to it the name “Hadgis.”
For example, John Hadgis. The rest of the family would also receive this
name. The wife of Hadgis was called “Hadgerska” or “Hadgina.”2
137
138 Valentina Izmirlieva
The title hajji applies in this text to a very different kind of pilgrim: not
a Muslim who has been to Mecca, but an Eastern Orthodox Christian who has
been to Jerusalem. Moreover, the title appears to be Christian through and
through, without a hint of its Islamic origin.
Such Christian appropriation of the Muslim honorific, surprising as it
may appear to a Western observer, is very much the norm in Greece and
elsewhere in the Balkan Orthodox world. In all other Balkan countries with a
predominantly Eastern Orthodox population—Serbia, Montenegro, Bulgaria,
Romania, the Republic of Macedonia—the Christian meaning of the title is
often its only meaning, and many people are genuinely surprised to learn that
“Muslims have their hajjis as well.”3
This split existence of the term hajji has not received much scholarly
reflection, perhaps because one half of it is usually obscured wherever one
stands. The present essay is an attempt to fill in this scholarly gap. It draws
attention to the Christian hajjis, still conspicuously absent from Western stud-
ies of pilgrimage.4 It also challenges Balkan scholars of Eastern Orthodoxy and
sacred travels to take the title hajji seriously, and not simply shrug off its evi-
dent Islamic valences, as is the usual practice in Balkan societies. Moreover, it
will become clear later in this essay that many of the pilgrims who acquired the
title hajji subsequently emerged as visible actors in different spheres of Balkan
and eastern Mediterranean life. Thus, it is not only scholars of pilgrimage who
encounter them. Yet, the lack of a clear framework for making sense of the
title often leads scholars to gloss over it, misinterpret the hajjis’ identity, or ig-
nore them altogether.
The focus of this study is what I call the vocabulary of pilgrimage, es-
pecially the Muslim and Christian vocabularies of pilgrimages to the “holy cen-
ter.”5 I am interested in how various Balkan communities designate their pil-
grims to Jerusalem and to Mecca, and how (when, why, and with what socio-
cultural effects) a pilgrim term with specific religious identity, such as hajji,
could be transmitted across linguistic and confessional boundaries. Three
groups of questions guide me in this inquiry. First, when did the title hajji be-
gin to be used for non-Muslim pilgrims, and what were the geographic and his-
torical parameters of this expansion? Second, how, where, when, and for
whom did the original meaning of the title change as a result of this expansion,
and did the meaning continue to shift over time? Finally, whose interests
drove the dissemination of this term outside its original Islamic context? Was
its use by non-Muslims a deliberate manipulation, a verbal masquerade where
the term served as a confessional fig leaf to obfuscate religious legibility? Or
was the term itself a symptom of a cross-religious transfer, as a result of which
the very concept of pilgrimage was transformed—and possibly not merely for
non-Muslims, who acquired their own “hajjis,” but for Muslims as well? The
first two groups of questions provide the backbone of my analysis. I will ad-
dress the third only in the conclusion of the essay, offering some preliminary
observations about the use of the term hajji as a pan-Ottoman honorific and
touching on its most recent transmutations in contemporary Balkan societies.6
The Title Hajji and the Ottoman Vocabulary of Pilgrimage 139
From a Muslim to a Christian Honorific
The great Hajj to Mecca is a divinely instituted seasonal rite with a

highly normative program.7 As such, it is distinguished from all other forms of
Islamic pilgrimage: umra, the “lesser pilgrimage” to Mecca which can be per-
formed throughout the year, except during the three days allotted for the Hajj;
and ziyaret, or the “visitation” of shrines, including Mohammad’s tomb in
Medina and the Haram al-Sharif in Jerusalem. In accord with the extraordi-
nary place of the Hajj in the Islamic ritual system, Muslim religious vocabulary
designates a special term for its ritual participants. “Hajji” (feminine “hajja”) is
reserved only for those who participate in the Hajj, while people undertaking
the umra are called ma’tamir instead.
In its early Islamic use, hajji was merely a descriptive, albeit respectful,
designation for a Mecca pilgrim. By the turn of the fourteenth century, how-
ever, the term appears to have undergone a significant transformation. It was
already functioning as an Islamic honorific—a title of distinction and respect,
permanently attached to the name of everyone who had fulfilled the Quranic
injunction for performing the Hajj.8 Having been purified by the pilgrim ritu-
als at Mecca and immediate contact with the sacred center, the hajjis are
thought to be not only wiser and more spiritual, but also conduits of blessing
for the entire Muslim community. While the exact timeframe of the title’s
transformation into an honorific has not been established with certainty, we do
know without a doubt that, in the culture of the Ottoman Empire, using hajji as
part of a person’s official name and biography became an established practice.
The prestige of the title hinged on its relative rarity. While the Hajj is
prescribed as obligatory to those who are physically and financially able to
afford it, relatively few Muslims perform it even today. During the classical
Ottoman period, the hajjis constituted no more than 6 percent of the Muslims
in the empire, and the numbers reportedly dropped in the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries.9 The trip was perilous, arduous, often long, and painfully
costly, despite the complex Ottoman system of religious endowments that
helped make a visit to Mecca affordable to the poor. All these factors made the
Hajj an ideal attainable to few and rendered its completion an even more sig-
nificant achievement. It is, therefore, hardly surprising that those who have
successfully completed the Hajj acquire a higher social status in their home
communities, one that accords them significant honor and prestige in the eyes
of their fellow Muslims.10
Traditionally, Christian culture—both East and West—offers no com-
parable valorization of pilgrims to the Holy Land, no parallel to the social dis-
tinction hajjis enjoy in Islamic societies. The chief reason is that, unlike Islam,
Christianity makes no demand for pilgrimage to the holy center. Pilgrims are
driven to Jerusalem only by personal initiative and see it as a purely spiritual
pursuit of piety and penance, with no visible earthly reward.11 Put in another
way, there is no established link between pilgrimage to Jerusalem and social
status. Moreover, the official theological position on Holy Land pilgrimage in
Eastern Orthodoxy is notoriously ambiguous, some authoritative voices openly
criticizing it as a spiritually unnecessary, even dangerous practice.12 All these
factors contributed to the relatively peripheral status of Orthodox pilgrimage to

Jerusalem which remained, unlike its post-Crusade Western Christian counter-
part, an amorphous and largely untheorized religious practice.
Since Eastern Orthodox pilgrimage to Jerusalem was not singled out as
a specific pilgrim category comparable to the Muslim Hajj, no separate term
set it apart from other pilgrimages. The pilgrim terms used by Balkan
Orthodox communities, both the Greek !"#$%&'()(*! and its Church Slavonic
calque, poklonnik (literally, ‘one who bows down in veneration’), have no
specific connection to the Holy Land, just like the English term “pilgrim,” de-
rived from the Latin peregrnus (“alien”). More importantly, they denote only
a temporary ritual identity that is not related to any permanent change of sta-
tus.13 A pilgrim ceases to be a pilgrim once the pilgrimage is done. By con-
trast, a hajji, once endowed with the title, is a hajji forever. The honorific,
permanently affixed to the name of returned pilgrims, represents a new status
that is an inseparable part of the person’s identity.
It was only when Christian groups found themselves living under
Muslim rule and in societies dominated by Islamic values that they felt com-
pelled to set aside a term for their pilgrims to the holy center. The Oriental
Christians—first the Syrian Jacobites and the Egyptian Copts, then, following
their models, their fellow non-Chalcedonians, the Armenians—all coined a
new pilgrim term derived from one of the Islamic names for Jerusalem: Bayt
al-Maqdis (or Bayt al-Muqaddas).14 This term (Syrian maqdšaya, Coptic
maqdisi, Armenian mahtesi), meaning “Jerusalemite” or “Jerusalem pilgrim,”
was deliberately juxtaposed to the Islamic term hajji, highlighting the religious
difference. By contrast, Eastern Orthodox communities opted instead to bor-
row the title hajji from their Muslim rulers, highlighting the analogy between
the two ritual pilgrimages to the holy center. Reportedly, the term first ap-
peared as a Christian title among the Melkites, the Arab-speaking Eastern
Orthodox population of Syria-Palestine who, since the Muslim conquest of
their territories in the seventh century, had adopted Arabic as their ritual lan-
guage.15 Yet, the extant Orthodox evidence goes no further back than 1500,
and a substantial share of it comes from non-Arabic, predominantly Balkan
Orthodox sources—from the Balkan territories which, at that time, were al-
ready subsumed within the Ottoman Empire.
All contemporary Balkan languages that were spoken by Orthodox
Christians in the Ottoman Empire register an expanded meaning of the
Turkish term hacı (from Arabic and Persian hajji): in addition to the term’s tra-
ditional use as a Muslim honorific, they use it to designate a Christian pilgrim
to Jerusalem. Greeks call such pilgrims hatzis, Bulgarians hadzhiia, Serbs,
Montenegrins, and Bosnians hadžija, Macedonians adžija, Albanians haxhi,
and Romanians, Aromanians, and Meglenoromanians hagiu.16 Only Croatian—
a language that has eschewed an “Ottoman memory”—uses the term exclu-
sively in its original Muslim meaning, thus indirectly pointing to the Ottoman
origin of the term’s Christian extension.17
Since Christian names in the Balkan peninsula traditionally included a
patronymic (a component based on the personal name of one’s father), the
hajji title, once adopted in these communities, became in effect hereditary.
Thus, if Georgis had earned the title hajji, his son, Stephanaki, would be
named “Stephanaki Hadzigeorgiu.” In a similar manner, Dobri would not only
be titled “Hajji Dobri” upon his return from Jerusalem, but his son Ivan would
become “Ivan Hajji Dobrev.” In sum, the status linked to the title was effec-
tively transformed from attained to ascribed, its rewards being extended to en-
compass the open future of the family line.
This reorientation of Holy Land pilgrimage toward the family and the
future is radically new in Christian practice. Christian pilgrims are traditionally
driven to Jerusalem by repentance and the desire for spiritual cleansing, often
as a preparation for death. Their ultimate goal is to die in the Holy Land and
be buried there, which is considered both a great blessing and a distinct escha-
tological advantage, since Jerusalem is believed to be the site of Christ’s second
coming and the resurrection of the dead for the Last Judgment. The ideal pil-
grim goal, therefore, is not so much the Jerusalem below as the Jerusalem
above, or, as Christians call it, “the New Jerusalem” (Rev. 3:12, 21:2). While
the Christian hajjis are no less invested in the eschatological benefits of their
pilgrimage, their desire for salvation in the world to come is deferred by more
pressing concerns here on earth. In contrast with the traditional Christian
pilgrims, they dream for the New Jerusalem the way the young Saint Augustine
prays for chastity: absolutely, “but not yet” (Confessions 7, 17). Jerusalem rep-
resents for them above all the Lord’s blessing to Abraham—the promise for
fecundity and prosperity, for progeny and a family future (cf. Gen. 12: 1-3).
That is why a hajji’s immediate goal is not to die in the Holy Land but to return
home as a conduit of blessing for all who live there.18 Oscar Wilde once fa-
mously claimed that every saint had a past and every sinner a future. We may
conclude the same for pilgrims and hajjis: if pilgrims long to unburden them-
selves from their (sinful) past and from time altogether, hajjis are all invested in
the future—their individual future, and the future of their family line.
Early Balkan Sources:

Pilgrim Guides, Sacred Maps, and Jerusalem Icons
The title hajji made its Balkan Christian debut soon after Jerusalem—
following the Balkan Peninsula—came under Ottoman rule in 1516.19 As early
as the sixteenth century, mentions of Balkan Christian hajjis began to appear in
registers and books in Jerusalem. To my knowledge, the earliest mention dates
from 1536, only twenty years into Jerusalem’s Ottoman history. It comes from
a marginal note in a thirteenth-century manuscript copy of Cyril of
Scythopolis’s Vita of St. Sabbas in a Slavonic translation. The note attests that a
Christian pilgrim from the Danubian town of Svishtov (today in Northwest
Bulgaria), who had visited the biggest Eastern Orthodox monastic community
in Palestine, Mar Saba, proudly titled himself a hajji: “I, the great sinner Hajji
Nikola, the servant of God from Svishtov, read this book in the year 1536, in
the month of January.”20
Over the next several centuries, the number and the territorial scope of
such mentions grew by leaps and bounds. Christian hajjis were documented in
donor inscriptions and bede-rolls of Balkan churches and monasteries, in local

chronicles, legal documents, letters, book marginalia, folk songs and tales, fic-
tional works, newspaper articles, frontispieces of printed books, and tombstone
epitaphs. Among these hajji traces, the more revealing sources are those di-
rectly linked to the hajjis’ pilgrimages. Records written by the pilgrims them-
selves, whether simple statements on the margins of manuscripts and books in
the Holy Land or longer hajji narratives are, no doubt, the most valuable, but
they are also exceedingly rare, and the most informative among them are rela-
tively recent. The same is true also of reflections on the nature and meaning of
the Christian hacılık. More oblique access to the pilgrim experience is offered
by pilgrimage-related artifacts—narrative guides, maps, or icons of the holy
sites—that often attest not only to the popularity of Jerusalem pilgrimages in
the early Ottoman period, but also to the early appropriation of the title hajji
among the Christian pilgrims and their communities back home.
Chronologically first among such sources are Greek manuscript pilgrim
guides of Palestine (proskynetaria)—often richly illustrated with miniatures—
which came into vogue soon after Jerusalem became part of the Ottoman
Empire.21 One such guide, compiled in 1693 at the Greek monastery of the
Archangel in Jerusalem (fig. 1), identifies the name of its calligrapher and min-
iaturist as Hajji (Hadzi) Ioanni from Thessaloniki.22 The same bibliographic
note, contemporary with the manuscript and placed at its end, also registers the
name of the book’s owner: Hajji (Hadzi) Ilia Anaplioti.23
Pilgrim guides are closely related to another budding industry meant to
stimulate Holy Land pilgrimage: the production of sacred printed maps. In-
cidentally, the monk Akakios, the author of the earliest extant illustrated pil-
grim guide to Jerusalem and Sinai from 1634, also created the first sacred map
of the Sinai Peninsula in 1665, thus laying the foundation stone of a long car-
tographic tradition.24 The key figure of this tradition was Hajji Kyriakis
(Hadzikyriakis), a rich merchant from Vourla in Asia Minor (Turkish Urla),
who came to represent the interests of the Monastery of St. Catherine on Mt.
Sinai in Wallachia and then on the Island of Chios. Thanks to his efforts, elab-
orate map-like representations of the monastery were printed from woodcuts
and reproduced across a large European territory: from Lviv, Venice, and
Walachia to Chios, Crete, and Istanbul.25 According to Dory Papastratos, Hajji
Kyriakis sold nearly twenty thousand woodcuts in the twenty-year period be-
tween 1688 and 1709 (fig. 2), some deluxe prints making their way as far afield
as the court of the Polish king Jan Sobieski, and the seraglio of the Cossack het-
man Mazepa.26
Significantly, Hajji Kyriakis wrote his name, complete with the hajji
title, on all but one of the extant prints issued under his management.27 In his
correspondence, even the Greek patriarch of Jerusalem used the title hajji
when officially addressing Kyriakis, and the Great Ban of Wallachia, Mihail
Cantacuzinu, addressed him directly with the title alone: “Sir Hajji” (kir
Hadzi).28 Letters from the first decade of the eighteenth century further reveal
a larger “hajji circle” around him involved in the sacred-map industry, in-
cluding his long-term business partner Hajji Paraskeva from Vourla, and two
other representatives of the Sinai Monastery in Chios, Hajji Loukis Sgoutas and
Hajji Stamatis.29
Closely related to sacred maps are the pictorial proskynetaria: portable

canvas icons of the sacred sites in the Holy Land which the art historians Van
Aalst and Immerzeel aptly describe as “postcards avant la lettre” (fig. 3).30
These large icons31—which, in the Balkans, are often called simply “Jerusa-
lems”—began to appear in workshops near the Holy City at the end of the sev-
enteenth century and were produced by local Armenian and Palestinian artists
specifically as pilgrim souvenirs.32 Most of the icons featured a medallion with
a standard dedicatory inscription (in Greek, Arabic, or Slavonic): “Hajji _____
pilgrim to the Holy Life-Giving Tomb in [the year] _____.” The pilgrimage
year was part of the prefabricated inscription, since the icons were produced in
yearly batches, while the pilgrim’s name was usually added at the time of pur-
chase.33 The pilgrim title, however, was not only a permanent part of the in-
scription, but always its initial—and therefore prominent—word. In the nine-
teenth century, when the hajji traffic reached its peak and the title had become
familiar Christian currency across the empire, it was often abbreviated to
“X.”—the first letter of hajji in both Greek and Church Slavonic and, thus,
convenient rum millet shorthand.34 We may infer from these inscriptions that
the proskynetaria icons were not merely valuable pilgrim souvenirs but also
served as public proof of a hajji’s legitimacy, or what I have called elsewhere
“hajji certificates.”35
However sparse and badly preserved these sources are, the dedication
rubrics on the proskynetaria uniquely open the history of the Christian hacılık,
shedding light on the names of individual hajjis and the geography and chro-
nology of their journeys. They are also among the few extant sources that save
from obscurity women in the Christian hajji group. Since very few of the
women were literate, male hajjis were generally more likely to leave traces.
Incomparably more visible in the public sphere, men were generally far better
documented in public records. To make matters worse, female names were
often hidden behind the names of their husbands: just as Mary Smith, the wife
of John, all but disappears into Mrs. John Smith, Maria, the wife of Hajji Ivan,
would often be addressed as Hajji Ivanitsa, even if she was a hajja in her own
right. As a result, the record of her own pilgrimage was erased from her name,
and thus, effectively, from historical memory.36
The icon proskynetaria help recover part of this record. As early as
1738/39 (if we trust the reading of the inscription date as A. H. 1151) a Hajja
Magdalena was documented on an icon from the Monastery of Saydnay in
Syria.37 Nineteenth-century icons speak of the Christian female hajj in a grad-
ual but audible crescendo: initially, their names are documented in conjunction
with male relatives; toward the end of the century, they emerge already as in-
dependent hajjis. The large proskynetarion from the Ethnographic Museum
in Plovdiv mentioned above lists five pilgrims in the dedicatory medallion, two
of which—Hajja Maria and Hajja Sofia—are women (fig. 4). It testifies to the
phenomenon of the family hacılık, which became fashionable in the Balkans
when travel conditions improved in the nineteenth century. Wealthy mer-
chants could now afford to take not only their wives but also their mothers,
and, on occasion, even their unmarried daughters.38 By the 1870s, women
hajjis were documented as sole dedicatees of pilgrim icons. In 1879, the name
of Hajja Despina from Varna appears alone in the pilgrim rubric of a more
modest icon,39 and so do the names of Hajja Antusa Dimitriu in 1895 and Hajja
Anastasia Dimitrova in 1907.40 These sources also testify that (at least some)
Christian pilgrims continued to use the hajji title even after their lands gained
independence from the Ottoman Empire.
Excursus: The Perils of Misreading the Title Hajji
A close acquaintance with the sources offers a good opportunity to il-

lustrate a claim I made in the opening of this article. I suggested that the ab-
sence of a clear conceptual framework in which to place the Christian hajjis is
often an obstacle for scholars in many disciplines who depend on Ottoman
sources that leads to varying degrees of confusion, neglect, and misunderstand-
ing. Marta Nagy’s discussion of a proskynetarion from 1796, found in the
Hungarian town of Jászberény, serves as a good case in point.41
The proskynetarion features a cartouche with the following inscription:
!"#$%& '[()(#*(]+[,]& -*+,./0(#%[,]& #+/& -"0"1(+/& .["(]&
$+2'+!+/& #"3+/& 4567 (Hajji Dimitrios was a pilgrim to the all-holy and
life-giving tomb [of Christ] in 1796).42 As was the custom with many
proskynetaria, the name of the pilgrim, written in a darker color than the rest
of the inscription, was probably added at the time of purchase.
Nagy begins with a false assumption, misconstruing the honorific hajji
as the pilgrim’s last name (Hadzi).43 It presumably follows that the first and
last names are inverted in the inscription (which is normal in Hungarian, but
not in Greek), and, more troubling, that only the first name of the pilgrim was
inserted when the icon was bought, while the presumed last name had been
included in the boilerplate inscription!
Having mistaken “Hajji Dimitrios” for “Dimitrios Hadzi,” she then
searches for further sources about the latter and—quite serendipitously—finds
them. She connects the proskynetarion to sources that document a Greek
family, the Hadzsis, in Jászberény—a town with a vibrant Greek diaspora in the
eighteenth century. According to these sources, László Hadzsi, a widowed
Greek merchant who traded in Viennese goods, took an oath of allegiance to
the Austro-Hungarian Empire in 1773, when his two sons, Antal and Demeter
(Dimitrios), were twenty-one and seventeen, respectively.44 Nagy provides
further documentary evidence that Demeter Hadzsi applied to take the oath
when he was twenty-two. The document gives additional information: he was
born in the Macedonian town of Kozani (probably being of Macedo-Vlach
origin, Nagy conjectures, like the majority of Greeks in Hungary who were
born in that region). He appears to have followed his father to Hungary in
1771. At the time of his application, he was still single and identified himself as
Orthodox. Nothing more is known about him. His father and brother, on the
contrary, are well-attested in extant documents: the father lived to be ninety,
Antal joined his father’s business and then took it over and expanded it,
accummulating a good fortune; they even became Habsburg citizens, a rarity at
the time, and their tombstones are preserved.
According to Nagy’s interpretation, the proskynetarion fills a gap in

this narrative with information about Demeter after 1781, the last mention of
his name in the documentary evidence. It “proves” that he went to the Holy
Land in 1796, when he was thirty-seven years old, thus “[keeping] the family
tradition and [following] his father’s example, who also must have completed a
pilgrimage to the Holy land, since, as it turns out from the documents, he bore
the name Hadzi (Hadji).” Then he brought the proskynetarion back to
Jászberény.45 This claim supports her broader assumption that the Jászberény
proskynetarion documents how expatriate Greeks in Hungary fought
assimilation by maintaining their Eastern Orthodox faith, including the
tradition of Holy Land pilgrimage.
If we look critically at this artifact, all we can infer from it is that,
sometime after 1796, a proskynetarion documenting the Holy Land pilgrimage
of a man named Dimitrios was brought to Jászberény. The title “hadzi” in the
inscription was awarded to the pilgrim for his pilgrimage. It thus cannot in any
way be interpreted to indicate a possible family connection. We also know that
a family with the last name Hadzsi resided in this town, which indicates only
that someone among Laszló’s ancestors had been to Jerusalem on pilgrimage—
there is no real proof that Laszló hismelf was ever a pilgrim. As for his son
Demeter (whose disappearance from the documents after 1781 might suggest
that he died soon after), his chances of being the proskynetarion’s dedicatee
are no greater than those of any other well-to-do Demeter from the Greek
diaspora in town. Certainly, there is nothing to disprove the possibility, but
there is nothing to corroborate it either. And the probability is rather low,
given the picture of assimilation that Nagy herself paints in the beginning of
her article (note that Laszló took the oath of allegiance before it became the
law, which might be read to suggest eagerness to belong in the West). Given
the scant evidence, it is not even certain that the hajji came from among the
Greeks in Jászberény—the proskynetarion could have found its way to that
town much later, and along unknown channels that might have nothing to do
with pilgrimage.
Thus, Nagy’s study offers interesting information about a proskyne-
tarion inscription from the end of the eigtheenth century, apropos of valuable
data about Greek Orthodox life in Jászberény. But it also illustrates the various
ways in which what is not commonly known about the Christian hajjis,
especially about the way the title was acquired and borne by Ottoman subjects,
not only puzzles the imagination of scholars but also prompts them to piece
together circumstancial evidence in rather fanstastic ways.
Hajji as an Ottoman Title
By the nineteenth century, the Muslim honorific hajji had become a

permanent fixture of mainstream Ottoman Christian culture and Balkan every-
day life, and the Eastern Orthodox hajjis enjoyed not merely high visibility in
Ottoman Balkan society, but also prominence and virtual ubiquity. The fres-
coes from the main church (The Dormition of the Theotokos) in the Troian
Monastery (Central Bulgaria) eloquently illustrate this point. In 1848, the

church was richly decorated with frescoes inside and out, all executed by the
renowned master-iconographer Zakhari Zograf. One of the most original com-
positions in the church is a group portrait of the monastery’s brotherhood at
the time, painted on the southern altar wall. Among the twenty-seven broth-
ers, all identified by inscriptions in their tall black hats, six are hajjis: the hi-
eromonks Hajji Makarii, Hajji David, Hajji Maksim, Hajji Filotei, and Hajji
Panteleimon, and the monk Hajji Danail. The abbot (hegoumenos) is depicted
separately on the western wall of the window in the southern concha, next to a
self-portrait of the iconographer. The inscription above the abbot’s head reads,
“Hajji Filotei Hieromonk, the hegumenos of this cloister.” Two other
compositions, painted on shutters in the northern and southern conchas, depict
the church’s donors. The first group includes “Hajji Petûr with his wife”; the
second represents three young men facing an older woman, identified as
“donors Hajji Vasilii, Dimitûr, and Bocho with their mother, Hajja Teodora”
(fig. 5).46 The abundance of hajji portraits displayed within the small interior
space of a church is itself telling; yet, even more remarkable is the diversity that
these portraits reflect: the hajjis are old and young, men and women, celibate
monks and lay married folks.
While the group of the “Christian hajjis” emerges from the available
sources as a heterogeneous category cutting across gender, age, linguistic, eth-
nic, and economic boundaries, they all had one feature in common. They were
all Eastern Orthodox Christians—not only in terms of their legal identity, as
belonging to the Ottoman religious category of the rum millet, but also of their
personal loyalties and spiritual commitments. They insisted on this Orthodox
identity, and thought of their pilgrimage as a quintessentially Christian en-
deavor. They were neither apostates nor Christian impostors in Mecca a la Sir
Richard Burton.47 Their distinct Christian names and the title hajji they
boasted created no tension, but were seen, in fact, as mutually reinforcing one
another, the Christian ethos of their pilgrimage being the source of the special
prestige they enjoyed as hajjis in their native communities.
The adoption of the title hajji by members of the Orthodox eccle-
siastical elite is particularly noteworthy in this respect. At the time when
Zakhari Zograf painted the church in the Troian Monastery, the practice had
been around for centuries. A register of the Hilandar Monastery on Mount
Athos, compiled between 1527 and 1728, mentioned one Gavrila the Hajji
among the Hilandar monks, and the colophon of a minei for February from the
Zograf Monastery stated that the book was written in the Rila Monastery under
the supervision of the hegoumenos, hieromonk Hajji Athanasios in the year
1653.48 A curious note from 1666, handwritten in a Slavonic Psalter from the
same Zograph Monastery, elucidates this practice. It declares that the monas-
tery’s prior, the monk-priest Miletii, was “a pilgrim [poklonnik] to Jerusalem, or
as we say, a hajji,” documenting that, in the second half of the seventeenth
century, hajji was already an inner monastic term on Mount Athos, attributed
by monks to their most distinguished brothers. Notably, the standard
Orthodox pilgrim term (poklonnik = proskynetes) was used here as a generic
term for any kind of pilgrimage, hajji explicitly glossed not as “pilgrim” but as
“pilgrim to Jerusalem.”49
Later sources reveal habitual use of the hajji title for religious actors up
and down the hierarchical ladder. According to Nikola Nachov, the prominent
Karlovo merchant Hajji Ivan went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem with his
mother and three brothers in 1837. His brother Totio remained in Jerusalem
as a monk under the name Hajji Simeon and later became an archimandrite,
supervising all Greek monasteries on Mt. Sinai.50 Other high-profile clergy
who proudly wore the title include Hajji Gerasim (d. 1761), archimandrite in
the Hilandar Monastery and donor of the Pokrovski Tower in the Zograph
Monastery on Mt. Athos, and Hajji Pavel Bozhigrobski (c. 1828–71), who
served as a protosyngelos (a monastic priest, one step below archimandrite)
directly under Patriarch Cyril II of Jerusalem and became, as an archimandrite,
the abbot of the Lesnovo Monastery in Kratovo (1867–70). Hajji Partenii of
the Zograph Monastery (c. 1820–75) was elevated to the rank of archimandrite
of the Russian Church in 1842, while studying at the Moscow Theological
Academy, and later became a bishop of the Kukush Metropolitanate in the late
1840s, before being consecrated as the Metropolitan of Nishava (1869–72).51
The metropolitan of Belgrade, Hajji Simeon II Ljubobrati (1682–90), went on
a pilgrimage to Palestine in 1681, while he was metropolitan of Herzegovina.52
The use of the hajji title next to Christian ecclesiastic titles of distinc-
tion engendered striking double honorifics, as potent as they were potentially
subversive, given the weight of the hajji title in Islamic societies. Consider, for
example, the effect of having none other than an Orthodox patriarch accepting
the title hajji as part of his official titulature. At least two patriarchs did:
Patriarch Hajii Maksim Skopljanac (1655–80)53 and Hajji Kallinik, the metro-
politan of Belgrade (1759–c.1761), who served as Patriarch Hajji Kallinik II of
Pe from 1765 to 1766.54 Even saints bear the title. Saint Hajji Georgis (1809–
86) is one of the most venerated local saints on Mt. Athos, his title of saintly
distinction coexisting without any apparent tension with his hajji name in his
vita and on his icon (fig. 6).55
Gradually, official Ottoman Turkish documents also came to ac-
knowledge the title hajji as part of a Christian name. A number of Ottoman
legal documents from the archives of the Rila Monastery in Bulgaria testify that
Ottoman officials had been using the title at least since the eighteenth century
in conjunction with Christian names, often right next to the names of Muslim
hajjis. Thus, a Muslim court decision (hüccet) dated 5 December 1751 attests
that Hajji Ivan from the village of Rila (today in southwest Bulgaria) acted as
plenipotentiary for the victim’s family in an apparent suicide case. The late
Hajji Semko from Etropole is mentioned in a deed dated 3 June 1776; and
Hajji Georgi Çorbaci is one of the signed witnesses in a deed dated 3 May 1798
issued by the kadi of the Tatar-Pazardzhik kaza. Even more to the point, a le-
gal contract that mortgaged properties of the Rila Monastery for unpaid debts
in 1769 lists as witnesses both the Muslim El-Hajji Ahmed and the Christian
Hajji Nedo. Similarly, the witnesses in a deed dated 3 May 1823 include both
the Muslims Hajji Oglu Molla Ahmed and Hajji Lutfullah, and the Christians
Hajji Kole and Hajji Khristo.56
The fact that both Muslim and Christian authorities in the empire used
the title hajji for Christian pilgrims to Jerusalem suggests by itself that the term
cannot possibly point to a hypothetical religious “hybridity,” as we might be in-

clined to assume. It certainly would not be possible for an Orthodox patriarch
to accept this title if it were meant to suggest any “Islamic” admixture to his
Orthodox identity. It would be even more unthinkable for Ottoman bureau-
crats to call a non-Muslim hajji, if they were using the title in its strict Islamic
meaning.57 The only plausible explanation for such odd usage is that the title
had gained wide currency in official Ottoman discourses neither as a “Muslim”
nor as a “Christian” honorific, but as a trans-confessional Ottoman title of dis-
tinction and respect. Thus, it could be legitimately attributed to Orthodox
Christians, referring not to their specific religious identity but to common
Ottoman values symbolized by the Hajj.58 And, in fact, extant sources reveal
that the use of the title for non-Muslim pilgrims extended beyond the Eastern
Orthodox communities: Ladino-speakers in the empire appropriated the term
for Jewish pilgrims who had prayed at the Wailing Wall, and many Armenian
pilgrims to Jerusalem also bore the title hajji (instead of the traditional
mahdesi), especially when they came from the Balkan peninsula.59
A cluster of factors conditioned this transformation of the title’s mean-
ing and function. First, the extraordinary place of the Hajj in the symbolic
imagination of Islamic societies compelled non-Muslims to reconsider their
own pilgrim traditions. The Great Hajj is a model spiritual achievement for
ordinary Muslims. It tests the faith, dedication, and endurance of all who at-
tempt to complete it, and stands as a measure for the seriousness of spiritual
commitment. Christianity has no comparable equivalent, but if any Christian
practice could be a cultural analogue, it would be pilgrimage to Jerusalem, for
it, too, is a trip to the holy center. The shared belief among Christians and
Muslims in the “blessings” derived from such a trip, and the exalted place of
Jerusalem in the Muslim sacred geography as the third holiest place after
Mecca and Medina, could help deepen the analogy.
The potential malleability of the Orthodox ritual was an added advan-
tage. As I pointed out earlier, pilgrimage to Jerusalem has always remained a
relatively flexible practice in the Christian East, being both non-normative and
lacking sufficient doctrinal reflection. That made it potentially open to re-
interpretation, especially in the general climate of relaxed doctrinal norms that
became the official policy of the Greek Patriarchate of Constantinople under
the Ottomans.60 Furthermore, reinterpreting the trip to Jerusalem as a privi-
leged form of pilgrimage, set aside from other religious accomplishments on
the model of the Muslim Hajj,61 had practical utility for the leaders of the rum
millet. It built up Jerusalem as an Orthodox pilgrim center which favorably
affected the revenue of the Greek Patriarchate of Jerusalem and buttressed the
overall position of the Orthodox in the never-ending competition with the
Latins and the Armenians within the Holy City.62
If the Orthodox establishment had its own specific stakes in upgrading
the pilgrimage to Jerusalem to an exemplary religious accomplishment, trans-
lating this spiritual achievement into the language of the ruling Muslim class
yielded further benefits. It made this religious “feat” immediately recognizable
and intelligible across the polyglot multi-confessional empire, where every eth-
nic and religious group had native terms for sacred travels. Most of all, it could
easily be perceived as a gesture of Ottoman loyalty, as an acknowledgement
that Muslim values were the true Ottoman values, and that Ottoman Christians
had embraced them as their own. Certainly, as Braude and Lewis remind us,
the empire’s Orthodox establishment “had reasons to be pro-Ottoman,” and
they were known on occasion to participate eagerly in the forging of a common
Ottoman identity.63
The Ottoman ruling class, on the other hand, had its own reasons to
play along with the hajji game. Symbolic encouragement of Christian pilgrims
to Jerusalem was attractive to the Porte, since the Sultanate had both fiscal and
political interests in maintaining a pilgrim flow to the Holy Sepulcher.64 And
lending the incentive of a Muslim honorific to Christians for their journey was
not a bad tradeoff: it cost nothing, and the Islamic position on Christians (along
with Jews) as “People of the Book” who already worshiped—however imper-
fectly—the True God, made the symbolic transfer acceptable in Muslim eyes.
This scriptural and spiritual affinity between Islam and Christianity has been
the basis of the Muslims’ attitude toward Christians within the “Abode of
Islam” since the beginning of their political expansion in the eighth century,
and it is crucial for understanding how it was possible for the Ottoman ruling
class to accept the Christian pilgrimage to Jerusalem as a religious accomplish-
ment analogous to the Muslim hajj.65
In light of this fragmentary evidence, it is plausible to assume that the
transformation of the title hajji into a trans-confessional Ottoman honorific was
spearheaded by the process of upgrading the Christian pilgrimage to the Holy
Land on the model of the Muslim Hajj.66 Accepting the title hajji as a legiti-
mate Ottoman distinction for Christians who had completed the exemplary
journey to the holy center was a key element in this process. As I noted above,
the relative openness of the Orthodox pilgrim ritual and the general climate of
Orthodox doctrinal laxity under the Ottomans facilitated this transformation. I
want to emphasize, however, that the real driving forces behind it were institu-
tional interests in promoting the Christian pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Both the
Orthodox patriarchates and the Ottoman Sultanate had distinct political and
financial advantages in seeing more Christian pilgrims flock to the Holy City
and, apparently, had no qualms about using the title hajji as an incentive.
While the question of agency cannot be given full consideration in this essay, it
will suffice to suggest that the available evidence points to the Orthodox estab-
lishment—and particularly the Greek Patriarchate of Jerusalem—as the most
likely actors to use the title strategically in their effort to promote the pilgrim-
age to Jerusalem among the members of the rum millet.
In any case, the title hajji emerged in the official discourses of the
Ottoman Empire as valuable pan-Ottoman currency, accessible to all Ottoman
subjects across religious divides, in recognition of their successful pilgrimage to
the holy center. It is precisely the pan-Ottoman status of this honorific that
made it such a pivotal tool for upward mobility among the empire’s Christians.
Jerusalem pilgrimage, distinguished by this prestigious title, offered a way not
merely for producing local—and in perspective national—elites, a sui generis
“Christian nobility,” but also for earning recognition from the ruling class, for,
as sources suggest, the Muslim officials actually respected the Christian “hajjis”
and preferred to do business with them.67 Thus, a traditional religious form of
geographic mobility became a vehicle for escaping the social immobility that
many members of the religious minorities (dhimmis) faced in the Ottoman

Empire. In the end, the evolution of the hajji title presents a history of ac-
ceptable compromise for redistributing power in a society where status derived
from religious distinctions. A host of different players—both corporate and
individual—brought their political and personal interests to bear on Jerusalem
and derived power from joining or supporting the flow of Christian pilgrims to
the Holy City.
Postscript: The Recent Transmutations of the Title
As Balkan Christian territories began to splinter away from the

Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century, producing a series of nation states,
the use of the title hajji for non-Muslims gradually went out of fashion; the un-
wanted reminder of the Ottoman past and its legacy was replaced by the tradi-
tional Christian term proskynetes/poklonnik. In the mid-twentieth century,
with the establishment of Communist regimes in Bulgaria, Romania, and for-
mer Yugoslavia, hajji was all but erased from history books and public
discourse—this time not so much because of its Ottoman legacy as for its
religious implications. Yet, these multiple erasures never entirely obscured the
term’s relation to Jerusalem pilgrimage or the respect it had commanded in the
past as a title of “nobility.” Well-known historical and literary “hajjis” helped
maintain the Christian legacy of the term, and so did family names in the nu-
merous languages across the Balkan region: Hatziioanou, Hadžibegovi,
Khadzhikonstantinov.68
It is hardly surprising that some segments of Balkan post-Communist
societies—in their enthusiasm for rediscovering Eastern Orthodoxy as part of
their “national” heritage—have attempted to resurrect the title for popular use.
On the surface, there are many—often half-jocular—media references to
“modern-day hajjis” among politicians and celebrities.69 More seriously, some
people who have returned from a trip to Jerusalem (even if the trip was not ex-
plicitly a religious pilgrimage) contemplate changing their names legally to in-
corporate the title, and some—like the Serbian writer Hajji Dragan Popovi—
apparently do.70 In a fearful symmetry, the title is embraced by the newly
democratic societies in the Balkans to push against the atheist culture of their
Communist past, just as the erasure of the title at the end of the “Turkish
Yoke” was used by the newly liberated Balkan nations to resist their Ottoman
heritage. Significantly, however, enough time has passed for the Ottoman con-
tent of the term and its Islamic origins to fade from collective memory; the
term was ready to be rediscovered by Balkan societies as a distinctly
“Orthodox” title—a symbol of a half-forgotten religious tradition, and a symp-
tom of the collective nostalgia for a lost national elite.
The old Ottoman sense of the term may be illegible in these new titles,
yet traces still linger, ready to pop up in unlikely places. Two Hamburg busi-
nessmen, Gregor vom Endt and Ali Eghbal, recently launched a new line of
soft drinks with the brand name “Haji Cola” [sic]. Under the rubric “philoso-
phy” on the company’s website, they strategically summarize the term’s trans-
confessional Ottoman meaning and values, now spelled out, however, as a mar-
ket pitch in the service of globalized commerce:
What is behind this mysterious name haji? In its original form, Haji is a
courtesy title for a Muslim who has fulfilled his religious duty and made the
pilgrimage to Mecca. Haji also stands for a person who is honest and good-
tempered and whose company is highly sought after. The term Haji is used in
many countries—whether a person is Muslim or has completed his pilgrimage
to Mecca or not. It is often found as part of someone’s name, conveying
friendship with and respect for that person. The word Haji can also be found
in the West. In Ancient [sic!] Greece and Bulgaria, Christian pilgrims to
Jerusalem were given the title Haji. In Iran, the Jewish minority also call[s]
members who have completed a pilgrimage to Jerusalem Haji. In this respect,
the name evokes togetherness and transcends national and religious
differences. Visually, the name connects Orient and Occident and is thus the
perfect symbol to represent a blending of cultures and nations.71
Fig. 1. Proskynetarion of Hajji Ioanni, 1693, Oxford cod. canon. gr. 127, fol.
10r, with a miniature of the Holy of Holies in Jerusalem (after Kadas 1998)
Fig. 2. Sacred map of Sinai by Hajji Kyriakis of Vurla, 1699, print (after
Papastratos 1981)
Fig. 3. Proskynetarion, 1886, tempera on canvas, 106" x 128", from the

Ethnographic Museum of Plovdiv (Bulgaria) (photograph courtesy of Sonia
Semerdzhieva)
Fig. 4. Medallion with a dedicatory inscription featuring the names of Hajji

Stancho, Hajji Konstantin, Hajja Maria, Hajji Aleksander, and Hajja Sophia,
from Proskynetarion, 1886, Ethnographic Museum of Plovdiv (Bulgaria)
(photograph courtesy of Sonia Semerdzhieva)
Fig. 5. Fresco by Zahkari Zograf depicting the donors Hajji Vasilii, Dimitûr,
and Bocho with their mother, Hajja Teodora; the Church of Dormition, Troian
Monastery, Bulgaria, 1848 (image curtesy of the Troian Monastery)
Fig. 6. Contemporary icon of Hajji Georgis from Mt. Athos (at http://
ahdoni.blogspot.com/2013/08/blog-post_8.html; accessed 1 September 2013)
!
NOTES
I wrote this article during my fellowship at the New York Public Library’s
Center for Scholars and Writers and presented part of it at the center’s lecture series.
It is my pleasure to gratefully acknowledge the numerous ways in which my fellows and
hosts at the Cullman Center have inspired, supported, and enriched this work. I am no
less grateful to Victor Friedman, Richard Wortman, and Christine Philliou for their
comments and suggestions on earlier drafts.
1. See, for example, Captain Daniel Dieckhaus, “Put ‘Haji’ to Rest,” Marine
Corps Gazette, www.mca-marines.org/gazette/article/put-‘haji’-rest (accessed 1 May
2013). It might be useful to recall F. E. Peters’ reminder that, contrary to popular
misconception, neither are all Muslims Arabs nor all Arabs Muslim—in fact, many
Arabs are Christian; see F. E. Peters, The Monotheists: Jews, Christians, and Muslims
in Conflict and Competition (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2003), 1:xxiii.
2. At http://www.impantokratoros.gr/Pilgrims-Holytomb.en.aspx (accessed 1 May
2013).
3. A Serbian website even offers a false etymology of haci and hacılık, deriving it
from the Greek word agios (holy). See http://game.maksnet.net/forum/index.php?topic
=4907.0 (accessed 1 May 2013). An installment from 18 May 2011, 02:52:56, reads (in
my translation): “When we say hajji or hacılık, we immediately wonder: But aren’t
these Turkish or Arabic words? It appears so, because they [the Arabs and the Turks]
have actually corrupted these words, but their root is in Greek, more precisely in the
Greek term agios, which in Serbian means ‘holy.’” Note also that the recent pioneer
study of the (Muslim) Hajj from the Bulgarian lands during the Ottoman period is
tellingly titled “The Other Hacılık”: Olga Todorova, “Drugiiat khadzhilûk: Kûm
istoriiata na miusiulmanskiia hadzh ot bülgarskite zemi prez XV–XVII vek” (The other
Hajj: Toward the history of the Muslim Hajj from the Bulgarian lands during the
fifteenth-seventeenth centuries), Istorichesko bûdeshte 1-2 (2006): 220-77, emphasis
added.
4. While Christian pilgrimage to Jerusalem is among the best-studied religious
phenomena, scholars have traditionally paid much less attention to Eastern Orthodox
pilgrims than to their Western counterparts. It is thus hardly surprising—though no
less regrettable—that Christian pilgrim practices within the Ottoman Empire, where,
for over four centuries the largest body of Eastern Orthodox communities lived under
circumstances that profoundly altered their religious traditions, still remain largely
unexamined; see Valentina Izmirlieva, “Christian Hajjis—the Other Orthodox Pilgrims
to Jerusalem,” Slavic Review (forthcoming).
5. The extraordinary place that Jerusalem holds in the religious practice and
symbolic imagination of Christian communities is comparable in its singularity to that
of Mecca in Islamic culture. Each is a “holy center,” and not merely because central
(foundational) events of sacred history are anchored in it, but because each city is
thought to be the physical center of the created world—a “navel” of the earth where
numinous presence is thought to abide in abundance. For the notion of the “holy
center,” see Mircea Eliade, Images and Symbols: Studies in Religious Symbolism
!
(Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1991), 42-47; specifically for Jerusalem
and Mecca as holy centers, see A. J. Wensinck, The Ideas of the Western Semites
concerning the Navel of the Earth (Amsterdam: J. Müller, 1916); Robert Wilken, The
Land Called Holy: Palestine in Christian History and Thought (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1992), esp. 11, 30, 230; and A. V. Podosinov, “‘Eto Ierusalim! Ia
postavil ego sredi narodov…’: O meste Ierusalima na srednevekovykh kartakh” (“This is
Jerusalem! I have set her in the center of the nations…”: About the place of Jerusalem
on medieval maps), in Novye Ierusalimy: Perenesenie sakral’nykh prostranstv v
khristianskoi kul’ture (The new Jerusalems: Transmission of sacred spaces in Christian
culture), ed. A. M. Lidov (Moscow: Indrik, 2006), 30-34. Both places boast the pre-
sence of a sacrum that surpasses all others in importance and allure, granting special
“blessing” (Greek eulogia, Arabic barakah) to pilgrims who come in ritual contact with
them; see F. E. Peters, Jerusalem and Mecca: The Typology of the Holy City in the
Near East (New York: New York University Press, 1986), 3, 41.
6. I leave the more comprehensive analysis of the tangled—and often
contradictory—interests behind the non-Muslim “hajj” to Jerusalem for my longer
study of the Christian hajjis, of which this article is only a part.
7. About the Quranic origins of the Hajj as a central Islamic ritual, see F. E.
Peters, The Hajj: The Muslim Pilgrimage to Mecca and the Holy Places (Princeton,
N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1994), 3-59. A general overview of the rite is S.
Coleman and J. Elsner, Pilgrimage Past and Present in the World Religions (Cam-
bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995), 52-73. Specifically for the Ottoman
hajj, see Suraiya Faroqhi, “Anatolian Townsmen as Pilgrims to Mecca: Some Evidence
from the Sixteenth-Seventeenth Centuries,” in Soliman le Magnifique et son temps:
Actes du Colloque de Paris, Galeries nationales du Grand Palais, 7–10 mars 1990
(Suleiman the Magnificent and his time: Proceedings from the Paris colloquium, The
National Galleries of the Grand Palace, March 7–10, 1990), ed. Gilles Veinstein (Paris:
Documentation française, 1992), 13-31. Eickelman and Piscatori place this rite in the
more general context of Muslim travel: Dale Eickelman and James Piscatori, eds.,
Muslim Travelers: Pilgrimage, Migration, and the Religious Imagination (London:
Routledge, 1990). For general bibliography on the hajj, see Zianddin Sardar, “The
Hajj: A Select Bibliography,” Muslim World Book Review 3 (1982) 1:57-66.
8. See H. Kaufhold, “Der Ehrentitle ‘Jerusalempilger’ (syrisch maqdšaya,
arabisch maqdisi, armenisch mahtesi)” (The honorific “pilgrim to Jerusalem” [Syrian
maqdšaya, Arabic maqdisi, Armenian mahtesi]), Oriens Christianus 75 (1991): 47; cf.
Richard Bulliet, Cotton, Climate, and Camels in Early Islamic Iran: A Moment in
World History (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009) 19.
9. Faroqhi, “Anatolian Townsmen,” 310.
10. However prestigious spiritually, the hajji title was not directly linked to social
and political power in Ottoman society. It was not recognized as part of an official
career—many high-level officials never went on a Hajj, and even those who did, like
Evliya Çelebi, did not display their title in a prominent fashion. It was valued more in
the peripheral Ottoman provinces of Anatolia and Rumelia, and by those to whom the
real machinery of power in the empire remained completely out of reach; see ibid.,
322. Significantly for my discussion, however, the Christian hajjis were most visible
precisely in the provincial context of Rumelia.
!
11. See, for example, Ora Limor, “‘Holy Journey’: Pilgrimage and Christian
Sacred Landscape,” in Christians and Christianity in the Holy Land: From Origins to
the Latin Kingdoms, ed. Ora Limor and Guy G. Stroumsa (Jerusalem and Turnhout,
Belgium: Brepols, 2006), 321-54.
12. The locus classicus of Orthodox theological critique is Gregory of Nyssa’s
“Letter to Kensitor on Those Who Make Pilgrimage to Jerusalem.” St. Gregory
reminds his readers that “when the Lord invites the blessed to their inheritance in the
kingdom of heaven, journeying to Jerusalem is not listed among their good deeds” (3)
and, after claiming that such a journey is more dangerous than profitable to the soul,
asserts that “the changing of one’s place does not bring about any greater nearness to
God” (16); see the text of the letter in Gregory of Nyssa: The Letters, ed. Anna M.
Silvas (Leiden: E. T. Brill, 2007), 117-22. His position, however, was hardly isolated;
for context, see Silvas’s commentaries, ibid. 115-16. It is significant to point out also
that, unlike Roman Catholic practice since the time of the Crusades, Eastern
Orthodoxy did not develop a political doctrine of the Holy Land—at least not until the
Russians attempted to integrate it into their imperial ideology in the second half of the
nineteenth century; for the latter, see, for example, Nikolai N. Lisovoi, Russkoe
dukhovnoe i politicheskoe prisutstvie v Sviatoi Zemle i na Blizhnem Vostoke v XIX –
nachale XX v. (The Russian spiritual and political presence in the Holy Land and the
Near East in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries) (Moscow: Indrik, 2006). K.
A. Vakh, Smysl palomnichestva (The meaning of pilgrimage) (Moscow: Indrik, 2007)
republishes Russian ideological texts on Orthodox pilgrimage to Jerusalem dating from
the late nineteenth century.
13. The same is true even for those Christian terms that have an etymological and
functional connection to Jerusalem, such as the English palmer or the Russian
palomnik (both derived from Med. Lat. palmrius to designate a person who carried
palm leaves as a sign of Holy Land pilgrimage): none of them becomes a permanent
part of the person’s identity, as does the Muslim title hajji.
14. The name literally means “The House of the Holy” and is used in a number of
commentaries (Hadiths) on Muhammad’s Night Journey to “the Farthest Mosque”
(Quran 17:1). About the use of this honorific among Oriental Christians, see Kaufhold,
“Der Ehrentitle ‘Jerusalempilger,’” 44-61. Note that Kaufhold specifically claims that
the terms are Oriental analogues to the Muslim term hajji. A succinct introduction to
the Oriental Christian Communities, also known as “Monophysites” or “Non-
Calchedonians,” can be found in Ammon Linder, “Christian Communities in
Jerusalem,” in The History of Jerusalem: The Early Muslim Period 638–1099, ed.
Joshua Prawer and Haggai Ben-Shammai (Jerusalem: Yad Izhak Ben-Zvi; New York:
New York University Press, 1996), 152-59.
15. Kaufhold, “Der Ehrentitle ‘Jerusalempilger,’” 54-55.
16. Following the rules of Arabic usage, the term is used in these languages both
as a common name and—in a contracted form—as a pre-nominal title. Hereafter, I
will use the forms hajji (sing. masc.), hajja (sing. fem.), and hajjis (pl.) generalized in
English usage as the representative forms of the term.
17. Unlike the territories of the other languages, some parts of Croatia were never
under Ottoman rule. For the use of the Croatian word hadžija exclusively as a term for
Muslim pilgrims, see W. Moskovich, “Sema ‘palomnichestvo’ v sovremennykh
!
slavianskikh iazykakh” (The semantic unit “pilgrimage” in the contemporary Slavic lan-
guages), in Jews and Slavs, vol. 10, ed. W. Moskovich and S. Schwarzband (Jerusalem:
The Hebrew University, 2003), 9.
18. For details, see Izmirlieva, “Christian Hajjis.”
19. By 1516, after absorbing the Mamluk sultanate, the Ottoman state had
established political control over both Mecca and Jerusalem. It should be emphasized
that Jerusalem is the third sacred Islamic center after Mecca and Medina and an
important pilgrimage destination in its own right, although completing this pilgrimage
(ziyara)—often tucked into the return leg of the Hajj— does not accrue on its own any
special status for a Muslim traveler. Still, the Moldovan prince Dmitrie Cantemir
(1673–1723), who spent half his life as a hostage in Istanbul, claims that a hajji who had
not paid his respect to Jerusalem was titled “el-hajji bi-l Quds” (a hajji without
Jerusalem); see Dimitrie Cantemir, Kniga systima, ili sostoianie mukhammedanskiia
religii (A systematic book, or the present condition of the Muslim religion) (St.
Petersburg: Tipografiia tsarstvuiushchago [Petra Velikago], 1722), 193. For the
Muslim pilgrimage to Jerusalem, see Amikam Elad, Medieval Jerusalem and Islamic
Worship: Holy Places, Ceremonies and Pilgrimages (Leiden and New York: E. T. Brill,
1995); and Angelika Neuwirth, “The Spiritual Meaning of Jerusalem in Islam,” in City
of the Great King: Jerusalem from David to the Present, ed. Nitza Rosovsku
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996): 93-116; cf. Harry B. Partin,
“Pilgrimage to Jerusalem: Jewish, Christian, Muslim,” Encounter 46, no. 1 (1985): 15-
35, who reviews Muslim ziyaret to Jerusalem in the context of both Jewish and
Christian pilgrimages to the city.
20. *!"!&!$)!)!'!$(!(sic!)!!)!"#! !!
()! !)! # ! "# "+#%! ! (fols. 64v-65r); E. E. Granstrem, Opisanie
russkikh i slavianskikh pergamennykh rukopisei: Rukopisi russkie, bolgarskie, moldov-
lakhiiskie, serbskie (Description of Russian and Slavic parchment manuscripts: Manu-
scripts Russian, Bulgarian, Moldo-Wallachians, Serbian) (Leningrad: Gosudarstvennaia
Publichnaia biblioteka imeni M. E. Saltykova-Shchedrina, 1953), 27. On the same
page, another marginal note, but written this time in Greek, documents that the tradi-
tion persisted into the eighteenth century: “In the year 1737, I, Hajji Dimitrakis, came
to the Holy [city of] Jerusalem as a pilgrim to the all-holy and life-giving Tomb. May
God protect us from every trouble and sorrow.” Curiously, the manuscript, now kept
in the St. Petersburg Public Library in Russia, is itself a pilgrim souvenir. Prince Pavel
Viazemskii (1820–88) obtained it as a gift at the Monastery of St. Sabbas while on pil-
grimage to the Holy Land in 1884, and brought it to Russia as a tribute to the Society
of the Lovers of Ancient Writings (which he had co-founded in 1877) “in memory of
his father and his own remembrance.”
21. Despite their small size (either 21x16 or 16x11 cm), the books offer a compre-
hensive guided tour to the holy sites in Jerusalem and its environs. Many are the work
of copyists from a common original, but each copy offers variations. Of these monu-
ments, the illustrated proskynetaria, dating from the middle of the seventeenth and the
first half of the eighteenth centuries, are of superior quality. Kadas has studied twenty
such mss, all richly illustrated with a great number of miniatures, apart from several
larger illustrations depicting sites of major significance. Although the depiction of the
monuments is conventional, often there are details, such as precise architectural forms,
!
suggesting first-hand familiarity with the sites on the part of the painters (miniaturists).
The language is Greek vernacular, while the script is calligraphic, so that the text could
be easily read. See Sot. N. Kadas, !"#$ %&'"("$ )(*+(",$ -"./(0('123456*02$ +1(7-
/80492*1"2$ :;(8–:<(8$ 2"= (The Holy Sites: Illustrated pilgrim guides from the
seventeenth-eighteenth centuries) (Athens: Kapov, 1998), 208-9.
22. Oxford cod. canon. gr. 127, Bodleian Library, (42 folios and 56 miniatures;
color); Kadas, !"#$%&'"("$)(*+(", 69-75.
23. “This present work has been completed by hand by me, the sinner Hadzi
Ioannou [sic!] of Thessaloniki, in Jerusalem at the monastery of [the] Archangel, 1693,
month of March 17 and it belongs to Hadzi Ilia Anaplioti”; see Sot. N. Kadas, “!"#
$%"&'()*+,-%."# +/)# 01.-/)# !"-$/)# +"(# ',22.1%,-3"(# ',.# 4.'%"1%,-3"(# 5,+6*-
7/,-))*#,$"-# +*#89&&,2").-'* (cod. canon. gr. 127)” (The illustrated pilgrim guide of
the Holy Sites by the calligrapher and miniaturist Hadjiioannis of Thessaloniki),
>6772?(0"*/4 2 (1990): 198.
24. George Tolias, “Maps Printed in Greek during the Age of Enlightenment
1665–1820,” e-Perimetron 5, no. 1 (2010): 3. The guide from 1634 is now kept in the
Munich State Library, cod. Gr. 346; about it, see Kadas, !"#$%&'"("$)(*+(", 43.
25. Waldemar Deluga, “Views of the Sinai from Leopolis,” Print Quarterly 14, no.
4 (1997): 381-93; Dory Papastratos, @!$A"02"B94!$C29D4/81"2*/4!$6#/$CE*12!$F(81?2G,$
H12*55292-I8?('123"*6!J$:K<<–:;LM (Hadjikyriakis Sinaitis!of Vourla: Woodcuts, 1688–
1709) (Athens: Hermes, 1981). Although the famous master Nikodem Zubrzycki and
his pupil Dionysios carved the woodcuts for most of Hajji Kyriakis’s prints in Polish
Ukraine, the merchant, while residing in Lviv, had learned how to print and had ac-
quired the necessary equipment (see Tolias, “Maps Printed in Greek,” 10). Thus, he
emerged also as a producer of sacred maps, being able to print wherever he lived,
whether in Wallachia or on the island of Chios.
26. Dory Papastratos, Paper Icons: Greek Orthodox Religious Engravings 1665–
1899 (Athens: Papastratos; Recklinghausen: A. Bongers, 1990), 1:19-20; cf. Zuzana
Skalova, “A Holy Map to Christian Tradition: Preliminary Notes on Painted
Proskynetaria of Jerusalem in the Ottoman Era,” Eastern Christian Art in Its Late
Antique and Islamic Contexts 2 (2005): 97-99.
27. Papastratos, @!$A"02"B94!$C29D4/81"2*/4!, 180, plate 1.
28. See letter from 10 January 1701, ibid., 75. It is worth noting that Mihail
Cantacuzinu founded the Wallachian Monastery of Sinai in 1695, after his pilgrimage
to the Great Lavra of Sinai. The patriarch of Jerusalem, Dositheos, addressed Hajji
Kyriakis in a letter dated 15 July 1701 in the following way: “+.4./-+,+9# ',.-# :%*-
&.4/-+,+9# ,;%:/)# '(-%# :,+6*<# =(%.,'9-” (most honorable and most blessed dignitary,
Sir Hajji Kyriaki) (ibid., 77).
29. Ibid., 99.
30. Victoria Van Aalst and Mat Immerzeel, “The Proskynetarion of Hernen
Castle,” Eastern Christian Art in Its Late Antique and Islamic Contexts 2 (2005): 84.
31. By far the largest proskynetarion on record (106 x 128 in.) dates from 1886
and is now part of the permanent collection of the Plovdiv Regional Ethnographic
Museum (see fig. 3). It is a remarkable exemplar of its kind, boasting 115 compositions
and 565 individual figures. For details, see Sonia Semerdzhieva, “Do Bozhi grob i
obratno” (To the Holy Sepulcher and back), Izvestiia na Regionalen Istoricheski Muzei
!
Ruse 13 (2008): 109-19. The size of these icons, however, varies greatly. Many of the
extant exemplars are significantly smaller, some as small as 69 x 45 cm (27 x 17.7 in.),
such as the 1767 icon from the Church of St. Shenute in Old Cairo, with a Greek
inscription; see Otto Meinardus, “Greek Proskynetaria of Jerusalem in Coptic
Churches in Egypt,” Studia Orientalia Christiana 12 (1967): 314 and plate XVI.
32. See Otto Meinardus, “Seventeenth-Century Armenian Proskynetaria of
Jerusalem,” Series Byzantina 3 (2005): 35-51. The earliest extant exemplar, which is
kept today in the museum of Saumur in France, dates from 1704; see Mat Immerzeel,
“Proskynetaria from Jerusalem: Souvenirs of a Pilgrimage to the Holy Land,” Series
Byzantina 3 (2005): 23.
33. In most cases, the pilgrim’s name was written hastily with lower quality paint
and tended to fade faster (often becoming illegible), although, on occasion, it proved to
be more durable than the rest of the inscription (ibid., 23-24). Occasionally, the name
rubric appears to not have been filled out at all.
34. The icon proskynetaria, mass-produced in Melkite workshops by Arabic-
speaking Orthodox painters and disseminated as pilgrim souvenirs across the Ottoman
Orthodox lands, could have been one channel for transmitting the term far and wide.
About the Melkite “Arab Orthodox” identity, see Sidney H. Griffith, “The Church of
Jerusalem and the ‘Melkites’: The Making of an ‘Arab Orthodox’ Christian Identity in
the World of Islam (750–1050),” in Christians and Christianity, ed. Limor and
Stroumsa, 175-204. There are witness accounts that the local Arab population in the
Holy Land addressed Orthodox pilgrims as “hajjis”; see, for example, Mikhail
Madzharov, Spomeni (Memoirs) (Sofia: Bûlgarski pisatel, 1968), 242.
35. See Izmirlieva, “Christian Hajjis.”
36. Enio Kurpachov, for example, records in his memoir that, after having visited
Jerusalem with his father as a young boy, the Karlovo dignitary Hajji Nedialko Hajji
Ivanov went to Jerusalem a second time with his wife and family. The wife, however,
was generally known in town as “Hajji Nadialkovitsa” (Mrs. Hajji Nedialko), and
Kurpachov does not even mention her given name; see Nikola Nachov, Iz rûkopisite na
Enia Khr. Kûrpachov (From the manuscripts of Enio Khr. Kûrpachov) (Sofia: Bratia
Miladinovi, 1932), 130-31.
37. Immerzeel, “Proskynetaria from Jerusalem,” 24.
38. For the family hacılık of the merchant from Vratsa, Todoraki (Tosho) Tsenov,
who went to Jerusalem in 1803 with his pregnant wife Paraskeva (Penka), his widowed
mother Stoika, his sons Tsviatko and Ivan (Iovancho), and his daughters Katerina
(Kalitsa) and Maria (Marutsa), see Tsentralen dûrzhaven istoricheski arkhiv (Sofia,
Bulgaria), f. 1546 (Dimitûr Mishev), op. 1, 380, fol. 1, published in Kirila Vûzvûzova-
Karateodorova, Zina Markova, Elena Pavlova-Kharbova, and Vasil Kharizanov, eds.,
Semeeen arkhiv na Khadzhitoshevi (The family archive of the Khadzhitoshev family),
vol. 1: 1751–1827 (Sofia: Bûlgarska Akademiia na naukite, 1984), 56, no. 44. For more
general changes in Jerusalem pilgrimages during the nineteenth century, see Doron
Bar and Kobi Cohen-Hattab, “A New Kind of Pilgrimage: The Modern Tourist Pilgrim
of Nineteenth-Century and Early Twentieth-Century Palestine,” Middle Eastern Stu-
dies 39, no. 2 (2003): 131-48.
!
39. !"# $%&'()*+# ',*&-.)./&0 [sic]# /*+# '0)01(*+# /02*+# 0'*#
30,)0# 4567, inscription on a badly damaged canvas (uncatalogued) from the
repository of the Plovdiv Regional Ethnographic Museum (Bulgaria).
40. !"# 0))*+/&0# $.8./,Ï*+# ',*&-+)./,(0# /*+# '0)01(*+#
/02*+# 4579, inscription on a badly damaged canvas (uncatalogued) from the
repository of the Plovdiv Regional Ethnographic Museum; "# #
## #"###47:6, inscription on
an icon from the Chapel of St. Elias in the monastery of St. Nicholas the
Wonderworker in Arbanasi (Bulgaria).
41. Marta Nagy, “Demeter Hadzsi’s Proskynetarion in Jászberény,” Series
Byzantina 3 (2005): 39-53.
42. Quoted in ibid., 49-50.
43. The title hajji itself—with the appropriate suffixes for any given language—
may, admittedly, function as a family name. One online genealogical site lists 166,771
records of families around the world with the name “Hadzi’; see
http://lastnames.myheritage.com/last-name/Hadzi (accessed 1 May 2013).
44. Nagy, “Demeter Hadzsi’s Proskynetarion,” 50 n. 33, elaborates in a footnote:
“The Greeks living in Hungary took their fortunes, which they made here, back home
to their family living in the Greek mother country. To prevent the further exodus of
Greek capital the Council of the Governor-General issued an ordinance #3523 dated
8 August 1774 requiring an oath of allegiance . . . According to this, Greeks were
allowed to stay in the Empire as would-be subjects of the Habsburg Empire, only if
they were willing to expatriate themselves from the Turkish [sic] Empire and take an
oath of allegiance. This resulted in the loss of the privileges to which Turkish subjects
were entitled. It was no longer really advantageous to trade with the mother country,
and thus commecial relations wih Greek traders were quickly broken; moreover,
almost all kinds of relations were interrupted, since Greek merchants living in Hungary
were obliged to resettle their families in that country. This ordinance was the starting
point for assimilation of Greeks living in Hungary.”
45. Ibid., 52, emphasis added.
46. A detailed description of the frescoes (with partial photographic
representation) is available in Petûr Mutafchiev, “Iz nashite staroplaninski manastiri”
(A tour of our monasteries in Stara Planina), in Izbrani Proisvedeniia (Selected works)
(Sofia: Nauka i izkustvo, 1973): 2:390-91; cf. 2:439-40, plates 15-16.
47. The British adventurer Sir Richard Burton (1821–90) was thirty-two when he
arrived in Mecca as a British secret agent, having cultivated two distinctly different
personas: a Shiite Persian dervish, and an Indian-born Sunni Afghan Pashtun who
worked as an itinerant doctor. He published his adventures in 1855 to instant inter-
national success. Burton, however, is only the most famous among several Christian
impostors in Mecca. On the subject, see Augustus Ralli, Christians at Mecca (London:
W. Heinemann, 1909), and the short but valuable summary in Arthur Jeffrey,
“Christians at Mecca,” The Muslim World 29 (1929): 221-32.
48. Iordan Ivanov, Bûlgarski starini iz Makedoniia (The Bulgarian antiquities in
Macedonia) (Sofia: Nauka i izkustvo, [1931] 1970), 494, 252.
49. Ibid., 254; emphasis added.
50. Nachov, Iz rûkopisite, 103-4.
!
51. About Partenii Zografskii and Pavel Bozhigrobski, see Anton Pop Stoilov,
Bûlgarski knizhovnitsi ot Makedoniia (Bulgarian bookmen from Macedonia) (Sofia:
Pechatnitsa S. M. Staikov, 1922), vol. 1; data about Hajji Gerasim is available in Georgi
Todorov, “Paisieviiat stûlp” (The column of Paisii), Kultura 22 (19 July 2002): 2237.
52. An inscription above the door of St. John the Forerunner’s chapel at the top of
the tower of St. Sabbas in the Hilandar Monastery testifies that the chapel was
decorated with the support of “Metropolitan hajji Sir Simeon” (2?864541!8=":(@/"06"
#2-3) in 1684; Ljuba Stojanovi, Stari srpski zapisi i natpisi (Old Serbian notes and
inscriptions) (Belgarde: Srpska akademija nauka i umetnosti, 1982–88), 4:7081. Cf. the
reference to 2/86454/8(")-/+6(,70(+4":(@/"06"#?2-3( in a note written by the
Metropolitan of Cetinje Sava Oini in 1694; Stojanovi, Stari srpski zapisi, 1:1985.
53. See an excerpt of a Serbian manuscript, dated 1679, from the Holy Trinity
Monastery in Rusinica, where Maksim is proudly titled ##& "
!$""%'"%"""; Stojanovi, Stari srpski zapisi, 1:1129.
54. A marginal note from 1765 in a Slavonic manuscript menologion reads: #?!
7*8(" 03/+(" 2>3-/" 56/4./" #! /" 54,5/7(" 7" 56/" +4754,/39" 2/864541/89"
)+6(,70429" +4754,/39" :(./" 06" (11/3/09, 088469" 3(;-29; see Stojanovi,
Stari srpski zapisi, 2:4365; compare an inscription from another 1765 manuscript,
where Kallinik is referred to already as Patriarch: 5(86?(6:<":(@/"(-3/0<"(sic!)"*846/;
Stojanovi, Stari srpski zapisi, 2:3272.
55. The Life of Hajji Georgis, written by the influential Athonite Elder Paisios
(1924–94), is available in English translation in Elder Paisios of Mount Athos, Elder
Hadji-Georgis The Athonite, 1809–1886 (Thessaloniki: The Holy Monastery of the
Evangelist John the Theologian, 2002).
56. See D. Ikhchiev, Turskite dokumenti na Rilskiia monastir (The Turkish docu-
ments of the Rila Monastery) (Sofia: Pechatnitsa Vreme, 1910), 352-53, no. 22; 367-68,
no. 34; 376, no. 42; 366, no. 32; and 390, no. 56 (note that, in the last document, Hajji
Oglu Molla Ahmed was the son of a hajji and not a hajji himself). The evidence pub-
lished by Ikhchiev contradicts Olga Todorova’s confident claim that Christians were
allowed to use the title hajji “only in informal communication” (Todorova, “Drugiiat
khadzhilûk,” 273-74).
57. Edward Lane’s Lexicon gives the following technical meaning of the term: a
person who “performed the pilgrimage to Mekkah and Mount Arafat, with all the rites
and ceremonies prescribed to be observed at, and between, those places,” or one who
“repaired to the House [of God in Mekkah] and performed the actions prescribed for
this occasion by the law of the Kur-an and the Sunneh” (Edward W. Lane, Arabic-
English Lexicon [Cambridge, England: Islamic Texts Society (1863) 1984], 1:513).
Significantly, the entire edifice of the Ottoman legal and political system was founded
on the religious distinction between Muslims and non-Muslims, and maintaining the
legibility of this distinction was a cornerstone of Ottoman public life. Therefore,
obfuscation of religious codes was potentially subversive of Ottoman order and unlikely
to be supported in any form by the Ottoman authorities.
58. Faroqhi (“Anatolian Townsmen,” 313) points out that the title hajji was
widespread in nineteenth-century Ottoman society as a general title of respect, without
any visible connection to pilgrimage. We may infer that this semantic shift occurred by
a semantic transfer: the respect accrued to a hajji was generalized, so that the title
!
became simply an index of respect. In the process, it was divorced from its specific
religious meaning, which then made it possible to use it as a trans-confessional title of
honor. Note also Carol Delaney’s claim (“The Hajj: Sacred and Secular,” American
Ethnologist 17 [1990]: 514) that, for Turkish Muslims in the late twentieth century,
Hajj was still “the quintessential journey,” and as such “function[ed] as the model in
terms of which certain other journeys [were] implicitly shaped and from which they
acquire[d] additional dimensions of meaning.”
59. See Stefan S. Bobev, “Notes compares sur les Hadjis balkaniques” (Com-
parative notes on the Balkan Hajjis), Revue internationale des Études balkaniques 3-4
(Belgrade, 1936): 1-12. For the Ladino use of the term (h)adjí in the Balkans, see
Sarah Bunin Benor, “Lexical Othering in Judezmo: How Ottoman Sephardim Refer to
Non-Jews,” in Languages and Literatures of Sephardic and Oriental Jews: Proceedings
of the Sixth International Congress for Research on the Sephardi and Oriental Jewish
Heritage, ed. David M. Bunis (Jerusalem: The Bialik Institute, Misgav Yerushalayim,
2009), 77. See also the entries for “jaí” and “jailík” in Joseph Nehama, Dictionnaire
du Judéo-Espagnol (Dictionary of Judeo-Spanish) (Madrid: Consejo Superior de
Investigaciones Científicas, Instituto Benito Arias Montano, 1977), 248. The Jewish
hajjis from Mashhad (Iran) present us with yet another usage of the term. The
Mashhadi Jewish community converted to Islam after the pogrom in 1839 to prevent
further violence, while remaining true to their faith as crypto-Jews. Some even went to
Mecca to prove their Muslim devotion (although they wore a tefillin—a phylactery
used in Jewish morning prayers—under their headdress and in secret offered Jewish
prayers along the way). Thus, their hajji title was earned through participation in the
actual Hajj, even if it was only a form of confessional window-dressing. When some of
these Jewish hajjis went on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, they stayed and reconverted of-
ficially to Judaism, forming a Mashhadi community in the Holy City. Significantly,
they kept their old title as a reminder of their unique religious path. The founders of
both the first and the second Mashhadi synagogues in Jerusalem—Hajji Adonya Ha
Cohen (1901) and Hajji Yeheskel Levy (1905)—retained the title even as high-profile
rabbis. The Mashhadi synagogue in Jerusalem still bears the name of Hajji Yeheskel.
For details, see Raphael Patai, Jadid Al-Islam: The Jewish “New Muslims” of Meshhed
(Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1997), 87; and Hilda Nissimi, The Crypto-
Jewish Mashhadis: The Shaping of Religious and Communal Identity in their Journey
from Iran to New York (Brighton and Portland: Sussex Academic Press, 2007), 33, 77.
60. For details, see Valentina Izmirlieva, All the Names of the Lord: Lists, Mys-
ticism, and Magic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 101-2; cf. Mark
Mazower, Salonica, City of Ghosts: Christians, Muslims and Jews 1340–1950 (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005), 64-93.
61. It is worth noting that, during the late Ottoman period, Eastern Orthodox
peoples in the Balkans considered a pilgrim to Mt. Athos yarım hacı (“half hajji”) (see,
for example, Arkhimandrit Metodii, “Bûlgariia i Sveta Gora” (Bulgaria and Mt. Athos),
Pravoslaven misioner 2-3 [1943]: http://www.svetagora.org/library/list/metodii.html
[accessed 1 May 2013]), similar to the popular Muslim belief that a pilgrimage to
certain local shrines could make a person “half a hajji” (see Hikmet Tanyu, Ankara ve
Çevresinde Adak ve Adak Yerleri [Votive offerings and sites in Ankara and its vicinity],
Ankara Universiteti ilahiyat Fakültesi Yayınları, no. 78 [Ankara, 1967]: 166-76). Cf.
!
Herman Teule, “Syrian Orthodox Attitudes to the Pilgrimage to Jerusalem,” Studia
Orientalia Christiana 2 (2005): 124, who argues, on the example of Syrian Orthodox
culture during the Ottoman period, that “the influence of the Muslim hajj upgraded
the practice of the Jerusalem pilgrimage to an event of great spiritual and social
importance.”
62. A succinct introduction to the thorny and much-discussed question of inter-
confessional struggle in Jerusalem is Otto Meinardus, “Notes on Seventeenth to
Nineteenth-Century Pilgrimages to the Holy Land,” Eastern Christian Art in Its Late
Antique and Islamic Contexts 2 (2005): 79-82.
63. Benjamin Braude and Bernard Lewis, eds., Christians and Jews in the
Ottoman Empire: The Functioning of a Plural Society (New York: Holmes and Meier
Publishers, 1982), 1:16. The attitude of ethelodouleia, or “voluntary submission to the
powers that be,” preached by the Greek Orthodox establishment of the rum millet as a
prerequisite for the survival of the Orthodox under the Ottomans, was also the foun-
dation of political privileges for the millet’s elites, not least among them being the
Orthodox ecclesiastical hierarchy; see Richard Clogg, “The Greek Millet in the
Ottoman Empire,” in Christians and Jews, ed. Braude and Lewis, 1:191. Cf. Christine
Philliou, Biography of an Empire: Governing Ottomans in an Age of Revolution
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 160 ff., who analyzes Stephanos
Vogorides’ position of a Christian attempting, in the aftermath of the Tanzimat re-
forms, “to adapt his vision of Christianity to fit—and legitimate—his milieu of Ottoman
governance.” “My goal and wish,” wrote Vogorides, “is for civilization to be fully real-
ized in Turkey but with the names and paradigms of the Muslim legal system, guarding
the unity of Ottomanism and of the Ottoman ethnos [sic!] and the need for fusion, dif-
fusion, and intermixing and equality before the law [isonomia] of the Christian re’aya”
(ibid., 167).
64. In the mid-sixteenth century, Sultan Süleyman the Magnificent established a
vakıf (pious endowment) of the state’s income from the resm-i Kumame (pilgrim fees
for visiting the Holy Sepulcher) for the benefit of Muslim men who read the Qur’an at
the Temple Mount mosques. Thus, he made Christian pilgrims directly beneficial to
the maintenance of Jerusalem as an Islamic center—with important political con-
sequences for the Sultanate, since the legitimacy of the Ottoman sultans was derived
from their claim “to rule in the name of Islam over the Abode of Islam”; see Oded Peri,
Christianity under Islam in Jerusalem: The Question of the Holy Sites in Early
Ottoman Times (Leiden and Boston: E. T. Brill, 2001), 160-200, esp. 182.
65. For a compelling analysis of Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam as “kindred
religious cultures,” due to their long coexistence and parallel development, see Robert
M. Haddad, “Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam: An Historical Overview,” Greek Orthodox
Theological Review 31, nos. 1-2 (1986): 17-32.
66. I am inclined to assume that the Orthodox led the way in this process, which
was then adopted and adapted, to a degree, by Jews and some Oriental Christians.
Proving this assumption, however, requires a separate study.
67. See, e.g., Madzharov, Spomeni, 167-68. According to Bob ev, “Notes,” 11,
Christian hajjis customarily presented Muslim dignitaries with amber prayer beads
upon their return from Jerusalem. By including Muslim officials in their pilgrim
celebrations and by presenting them with a strategic gift that had a shared meaning for
!
Christians and Muslims in the empire (for tespih, or prayer beads, as the emblematic
hajji gift among Ottoman Muslims, see Todorova, “Drugiiat khadzhilûk,” 266-67), the
new hajjis highlighted the Ottoman nature of their religious achievement and, thus, of
the hajji title that distinguished it.
68. Their length alone must have functioned once as a sign of distinction. The art
historian Justine Andrews shared with me how struck she was by the sheer length of
these hajji names when she first encountered them in Cyprus. In Famagusta, where
many houses feature flags inscribed with the family name, the hajji-families’ banners
are predictably the biggest, which seems to reinforce visually their dominant position in
the community, since they are usually also the richest and most powerful clans.
69. Thus, in September 2012, the daily Bulgarian newspaper Standart announced
that the Bulgarian president, Rosen Plevnaliev, “would become a hajji on October 20”
(http://www.standartnews.com/balgariya-politika/plevneliev_stava_hadzhiya_na_20_ok
tomvri-163238.html; accessed 1 May 2013). In the same spirit, an online picture gal-
lery documents how the former Bulgarian prime minister Boiko Borisov “became a
hajji” in 2010 (http://www.dnevnik.bg/photos/2010/01/12/841047_fotogaleriia_borisov_
stana_hadjiia/?pic=1#picture; accessed 6 December 2012). For a typical “celebrity
hacılık” to Jerusalem, see the interview with the Bulgarian film director Dimitur
Mitovski, who “became a hajji three times” (Paola Khiusein, “Dimitûr Mitovski: tri pûti
stanakh khadzhiia, no me narichaite kakto dosega” [Dimitûr Mitovski: I became a hajji
three times, but call me what you’ve always called me], 24 chasa, 6 June 2012, p. 6).
70. See, for example, the media materials about Nikolai Kolev, librarian from
Veliko Tûrnovo (Bulgaria), who, upon his return from Jerusalem, announced to re-
porters that he was entertaining the possibility of changing his name by presenting city
hall with his certificate from the Greek Patriarchate in Jerusalem, proving “that he had
become a hajji” (http://sever.bg/ ! ! ! !I.a.151305.html; ac-
cessed 29 July 2012). Significantly, the pilgrim certificates issued by the Patriarchate
of Jerusalem still use the hajji title; see a facsimile of such a “hajji” certificate with an
appended Serbian translation from the Greek original in Hadji Dragan B. Popovi,
Istina o Svetoj Zemlji pravoslavni Jerusalim (The truth about the Holy Land: Orthodox
Jerusalem) (Belgrade: Pisac, 1998).
71. At http://www.haji.com/en/philosophie (accessed 1 May 2013), emphasis
added.
The Modern Greek Studies Yearbook is published by the Modern Greek Studies Program at the
University of Minnesota. The price for this offprint is $5.00. The price for volume 28/29 is
$60.00. Checks should be made payable to Modern Greek Studies and sent to:
Modern Greek Studies

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The Title Hajji and The Ottoman Vocabula

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THE TITLE HAJJI AND THE OTTOMAN

MODERN GREEK STUDIES YEARBOOK

It is a very ancient reverend practice of the Christians, the pilgrimage to the

From a Muslim to a Christian Honorific

The great Hajj to Mecca is a divinely instituted seasonal rite with a

factors contributed to the relatively peripheral status of Orthodox pilgrimage to

Early Balkan Sources:

donor inscriptions and bede-rolls of Balkan churches and monasteries, in local

Closely related to sacred maps are the pictorial proskynetaria: portable

Excursus: The Perils of Misreading the Title Hajji

A close acquaintance with the sources offers a good opportunity to il-

According to Nagy’s interpretation, the proskynetarion fills a gap in

Hajji as an Ottoman Title

By the nineteenth century, the Muslim honorific hajji had become a

Monastery (Central Bulgaria) eloquently illustrate this point. In 1848, the

cannot possibly point to a hypothetical religious “hybridity,” as we might be in-

many members of the religious minorities (dhimmis) faced in the Ottoman

Postscript: The Recent Transmutations of the Title

As Balkan Christian territories began to splinter away from the

Fig. 3. Proskynetarion, 1886, tempera on canvas, 106" x 128", from the

Fig. 4. Medallion with a dedicatory inscription featuring the names of Hajji

Modern Greek Studies

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