ABSTRACT
Bulgarian lands were part of the Ottoman Empire from the fifteenth to the end of the nineteenth century. This chapter focuses on local notables and administrative practices in Vidin County during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Conventional accounts of Ottoman administration in this county emphasize how certain regulations on land tenure, issued in 1850 as part of Ottoman centralization attempts, marked an end of local notables' supremacy. The local notables not only had a chance to exert their influence in the judicio-administrative sphere of the county but also, as part of a single government of state officials and local elites, did not feel the need to conceal this from the 'imperial gaze' of the Ottoman Empire. One thing seems to be certain, however: the local notables were not left out of this transformation. They adapted and survived through the formation of the modern state in the Ottoman Empire into the Bulgarian kingdom.
