Friday, January 25, 2019 <p><img alt="" data-entity-type="" data-entity-uuid="" height="515" src="/sites/default/files/2019-01/Greek%20woman%20from%20Trebizond%20c1880.jpg" width="349" /></p> <p>I ran across this note I made a few years ago, about&nbsp; a story called "Hadji Velis" (which literally means "Pilgrim Pilgrim") from Imera:</p> <p>A rich man and wife decided to take their son to boarding school and to go on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, and so they left their beautiful daughter in the care of a trusted servant. The servant began to want the money with which they had entrusted him all for himself. He lured the girl out in a boat and abandoned her on a distant and deserted shore. She was found by a hunter. Even though she had stopped speaking altogether, the hunter married her and they had three children, even though it took him years to trick her into talking to him. She told him her sorrows and he decided to send her back to her father’s house to cheer her up. He sent her and the children with a trusted servant, who was overcome by lust along the way. He threatened her and killed her children. She escaped, exchanged clothes with a shepherd, and wrapped her head in a goat’s intestines to look like a scaldhead. Unrecognized, she took a job as cook in her parents’ house, where her husband eventually arrived as a guest. At a tale-telling session, she narrated her story. The murderer was put to death, while the other servant was sent away to await God’s justice and died unlamented.</p> <p>I was telling the outlines of the story to Dr. Valentina Izmirlieva, a professor at Columbia University who is studying pilgrimage among the Orthodox peoples of the Balkans, and I mentioned that the father in the story takes his wife and son on pilgrimage with him, but leaves his daughter behind. She asked, "Do you know why he didn't take his daughter?" I said that, if he didn't, there would be no story. She smiled and said, actually, the reason goes deeper than that:</p> <p>In the Balkans, pilgrimage to Jerusalem was a way not only to achieve a religious goal, but also to raise their social standing. Using pilgrimage in this way may have been borrowed by Christians from their Muslim neighbors, who added Hadji to their names after a journey taken for religious reasons to Mecca. Once a pilgrim had been to the Holy Land, the name "Hadji" became a permanent fixture of his or her name. The usual pattern was for a man to take his wife and his sons with him. Daughters would be left at home so that their social status not be raised so high to endanger her being able to find a marriage partner, who normally would be of equal or higher status than herself. Therefore the merchant of the "Hadji Velis" variants (and the related tale "The Rich Boy" from Stavrin) is willing to risk the danger to his family's honor and his daughter's safety by leaving her at home.</p> <p>Thanks, Valentina, for opening my eyes to an important aspect of social mobility in the Balkans, and its effects on women!</p>