ABSTRACT
In the various domestic urban cultures of the nineteenth-century, Ottoman Empire processes of differentiation between representative and more intimate spaces of the household, and collective and individual spaces, depended on religion, ethnicity and class characteristics as well as on gender, age and position in the family hierarchy. This chapter investigates the aspect of domestic urban life, analysing nineteenth-century Bulgarian memoirs and novels. It reveals, based on Bulgarian sources, gendered aspects of domestic gardens in the Balkan area of the Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. The term ‘vernacular garden’ appeared in the late twentieth century and, as John Dixon Hunt and Joachim Wolschke-Bulmahn have pointed out, was borrowed from architecture. Bulgarian historiography on vernacular gardens can build on theoretical considerations developed in the 1990s. The chapter uses unpublished memoirs of famous women as well as an autobiography of a village woman, published by her daughter.
