A Lager Beer Revolution: The History of Beer and German American Immigration

As a German historian, writing a book on the history of beer seems to be a “natural” instinct. I started this project after attending a Beck’s brewery tour in my hometown Bremen in the early 2010s. Before Heinrich Beck opened his eponymous brewery in 1873, he had returned from a 10-year sojourn to the US. While Beck does not seem to have found his fortune as a brewer in the US, many of his compatriots did.

German-American immigrants triggered a lager beer revolution during the second half of the 19^th century, fundamentally changing US drinking culture. While the term “revolution” carries with it a certain baggage (not least in the US context), the introduction of lager beer was indeed revolutionary in a number of ways: skilled brewers and thrifty entrepreneurs founded a record number of breweries, which in turn led to a record rise of beer consumption and a switch from ale to lager. All of this was underpinned by a vibrant transatlantic social, cultural and technological transfer centered on producing and consuming beer.

A Record Held until 2015

As the US became one of the world’s leading marketplaces, many breweries were founded in the 19^th century. Between 1850 and 1873, the number of breweries rose from 431 to 4,131 – a record that lasted until 2015. Today, there are over 9,500 breweries across the US, and Texas alone has more than 300.[1]

Whereas the recent staggering growth is due to the (historically speaking) “new” craft beer movement, back in the 19th-century German American immigrants were at the heart of this brewing transformation. A closer look at census data shows that in 1880, first- or second-generation German immigrants operated more than 80% of the breweries.[2] It is not a coincidence that the peak in brewery numbers overlaps with the heyday of German-American migration.

Brewing centers developed on the East Coast, especially in New York and Philadelphia, as well as in the Midwest, which became known as “America’s German Belt.” In Texas, commercial brewing started in the 1850s and the number of breweries reached its zenith with 58 in 1876, thereby following the national trend described above.[3]

Shiner brewery — The oldest independent brewery in Texas, the Shiner Brewing Association, was formed in 1909 by a group of German and Czech locals. Prussian-born Herman Weiss was their first brewmaster who started today’s signature beer, the Shiner Bock. In 1914 the brewery was taken over by Bavarian native Kosmos Spoetzel. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

19th-century breweries can be roughly divided into four types: hundreds of small-to-medium-sized local breweries, dozens of large-scale local breweries, dozens of medium-sized national shippers, and a handful of large-scale shippers, which were mostly comprised of family dynasties such as Pabst or Anheuser-Busch.[4] The industry was dominated by breweries in the first three categories and not by the large-scale shippers whose names we know today – only by the turn of the century did these begin to overtake the others as they were able to afford improved brewing and packaging techniques as well as expensive advertising campaigns.

Texas followed the general trend: from the 1880s until Prohibition, many breweries started and collapsed quickly, often suffering from a lack of capital and an inability to compete with the big shippers. In 1883, Anheuser-Busch entered the Texan market with a superior product that sold at a competitive price. A year later, Adolphus Busch co-founded the Lone Star Brewery in San Antonio, which by 1900 became the state’s largest, helping earn San Antonio the title of “the Milwaukee of Texas.”[5]

Advertisement for Alamo Beer (Lone Star Brewing Company), August 3, 1912. — *Alamo Beer (Lone Star Brewing Company), August 3, 1912. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

My upcoming book sheds light on the Atlantic transfer of brewing knowledge (scientific, economical, and socio-cultural) and how this correlated with entrepreneurial success (and failure). German American brewers were among the first to implement the newest European science and technology, such as the process of pasteurization, which had been invented by the French scientist Louis Pasteur in 1864. Adolphus Busch, who was fluent in English, German, and French, had read Pasteur’s work early on and his brewery maximized its profits when it became the first to introduce pasteurized bottled beer.

Beer Republic

The term “revolutionary” also refers to alcohol consumption in the US, in general. Between 1790 and 1850, US Americans drank more alcoholic beverages per capita than at any other time in the nation’s history and (except for Scandinavia) more than any other country at that time. After 1850, the consumption of spirits went down, but beer consumption went up: between 1870 and 1910, per capita beer consumption quadrupled from about 5 to 20 gallons.[6] At first, German American brewers filled the demand of their fellow immigrants by providing a familiar beer of their homeland. Soon, however, lager became preferred by most other US-Americans as well.

During these years, German-style lager steadily replaced British-style ale. Before 1850, ale accounted for over 80% of the national beer production; by 1900, lager made up nearly 90%. Bottom-fermented lager differs in its production, appearance, and taste to top-fermented ale. Today, lager beer might not be the most popular drink, but in the 19th century, it was new and exciting: it was lighter, more sparkling, and lasted longer than ales and porters.

US-American Gemütlichkeit

Within 50 years, the nation had not only switched from drinking ale to lager but also began to enjoy a hybrid drink space, an Americanized form of Gemütlichkeit (loosely translated as conviviality, a feeling of comfort and relaxation) in beer gardens. While US saloons were associated with manhood, crime, and corruption, German-style drinking venues became known for their sociability, family-friendliness, and Gemütlichkeit.[7]

Scholz Garden, Austin, TX. — August Scholz opened Scholz Garden in 1866, the oldest operating business in Texas and likely the oldest beer garden in the US. In 1908, the German singing club, The Austin Saengerrunde, purchased the property and built a bowling alley next to it.
In the photo, Scholz Garden in 2013. Source: Wikimedia Commons

Beer gardens were built across the nation. Their function was, of course, to sell beer, but they also served a social, cultural, and political purpose: beer gardens provided a “piece of home” with waiters in traditional German dresses serving beer in “stein” jugs and typical German food. Soon, these venues also served as community centers for the public at large.

Blatz Brewing Company Chicago Word’s Fair of 1893 promotional poster of a “German” barmaid holding overflowing beer steins. References to German ethnicity were frequently used in advertising through stereotypical representations and/or German brand names.
Source: Wikimedia Commons

Moreover, the beer garden’s family-friendliness helped to promote beer as a temperance beverage and a “healthy” alternative to spirits. Over the course of the 19^th century, the temperance movement had come a long way from promoting moderation to calling for total abstinence of all alcoholic beverages. To German Americans, temperance was more than a mere political issue; it symbolized cultural conflict that threatened their lifestyle and value system. For the brewers, their ethnic interest was greatly reinforced by their economic interest.

Fight against Temperance

While the temperance movement has received a great deal of scholarly attention,[8] the brewers’ battle against it has not. So far, most historians have portrayed the brewing industry as homogenous and too unalarmed. Perhaps these scholars have fallen into the trap of interpreting history from the final outcome, i.e., by knowing that the temperance movement would eventually succeed, its opponents have been mostly portrayed as reactionary or ignorant. Yet, the success of temperance was not as inevitable as some scholars seem to suggest. In my upcoming book, I argue that the beer industry was resilient. It adapted and continued to grow despite the movement. Early on, brewers were well-prepared to fight off temperance and set a precedent in public relations history.

During the summer of 1855, several beer riots over Sunday closing laws and rising license fees broke out in several cities across the Midwest. These tensions were further enhanced when representatives of the nativist Know Nothing Party tried to prevent immigrants from voting. For instance, in August 1855, Know Nothings successfully won the election in Louisville, Kentucky, after a long day of street fighting in Catholic neighborhoods where at least 20 people died.

While the Know Nothing Party was rather short-lived (it dissolved in 1860), local temperance laws were not and hence, riots could not be used as a long-term strategy. Beginning in the early 1860s, German American brewers began to organize themselves. Together with saloon owners, newspaper editors, politicians, and other influential German Americans, they tirelessly lobbied for their cause. The United States Brewers Association (USBA), founded in 1862 by German brewers in New York, played a central role, developing a tight public relations network with its own publication committee issuing numerous pamphlets and books against temperance.

Besides continuously calling for personal liberty, until the introduction of the income tax in 1913, the brewer’s strongest argument was economic: between 1863 and 1909, brewers paid an estimated $1.2 billion to the US Treasury. The Commissioner of Internal Revenue was a regular and welcomed guest at the annual USBA conventions.[9]

The American Brewing Co's Famous St. Louis ABC Bock Beer. — *The American Brewing Co’s Famous St. Louis ABC Bock Beer. Source: Wikimedia Commons*

In addition, the brewers argued for the nutritious nature of beer. They went to great lengths to prove this by financing medical reports and citing “eminent” doctors and chemists. German doctors, in particular, were used as renowned experts in order to appeal to the US regard for science grounded in German academic tradition. Repeatedly, it was the Old Word that served as a reference point by drawing on Germany’s reputation as a top-quality producer of beer, brushing over problems of drunkenness in several German cities. For instance, after the beer tax was increased, beer riots erupted in Munich (1844 and 1888) and Frankfurt (1873).[10]

Ultimately, when World War I broke out, these arguments lost traction. To refrain from drinking was seen as a patriotic duty. Drinking, as the argument went, weakened the military and wasted petrol and grain needed for the war. The Anti-Saloon League, founded in 1893 in Ohio and soon reaching a national audience, frequently characterized German-American brewers as enemies of the state.

While brewers had initially entered the propaganda war well-prepared and often succeeded in fighting off local temperance agitation, World War I triggered the final push for national Prohibition. Some states were already dry by 1914, but the push to garner enough states to pass Prohibition might not have been so quickly realized had it not been for the “war at home”. Ironically, it was the brewer’s self-promoted image of a “German” drink that led to their downfall.

A Revolution Coming Full Circle?

My book highlights how the growth of breweries and the popularity of lager beer in the 19^th century correlated with the rise of German-American migration. German-American immigrants led the “lager beer revolution,” a revolution not just in numbers and economic growth but also in the technological transfer and adaptation of drinking practices. The brewers’ ethnicity helped them to apply and adapt their knowledge to their new homeland. “Germanness” (however loosely defined) became one of their key marketing strategies until World War I, selling an authentically superior “German” beer.

In 1965, Fritz Maytag kicked off the craft beer movement by purchasing the bankrupt Anchor Brewing Company in San Francisco, revitalizing its iconic Steam Beer. Initially, steam beer was first introduced by German migrants who came to the West Coast during California’s Gold Rush in the late 1840s. Similarly, in 1987, Steve Hindi opened the Brooklyn Brewery in the eponymous district in New York – situated at what was known in the late 19th century as “brewery row” and only a couple of blocks south of “Kleindeutschland,” Manhattan’s Lower East Side and the hub of German-American life where hundreds of saloons and beer gardens served the thirst of their customers. Even though Anchor Brewing just announced to close its doors, craft beers are here to stay, and so will its German-American roots.

[1] Cp. Joe Taschler (12/02/2015), “U. S. Brewery Count Reaches All-Time High,” http://www.jsonline.com/business/us-brewery-count-reaches-all-time-high-b99627164z1-360031651.html, last accessed 05/11/2023; Jess Donald (11/2021), “Texas Craft Breweries, Distilleries and Wineries,” https://comptroller.texas.gov/economy/fiscal-notes/2021/nov/brew.php, last accessed 05/11/2023; Louis Biscotti (01/19/2023), “Craft Beer Boom Slows, But Still Grows,” https://www.forbes.com/sites/louisbiscotti/2023/01/19/craft-beer-boom-slows-but-still-grows/?sh=6a9e5665e3e5, last accessed 05/11/2023.

[2] Cp. Edward P. Hutchinson, Immigrants and Their Children, 1850-1950. New York: Wiley, Chapman & Hall, 1956: p. 79-81, 98-99, 121-122.

[3] For an overview of US beer history cp. Stanley Baron, Brewed in America. A History of Beer and Ale in the United States. Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Co., 1962; Amy Mittelman, Brewing Battles. The History of American Beer. New York, NY: Algora Pub, 2008; Maureen Ogle, Ambitious Brew. The Story of American Beer. Orlando, FL: Harcourt, 2019². The popular book market on beer history has boomed since the mid-2000s, cp. Mark A. Noon, Yuengling. A History of America’s Oldest Brewery. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co, 2005; Henry Herbst et al., St. Louis Brews. 200 Years of Brewing in St. Louis, 1809-2009. St. Louis, M Reedy Press, 2009; Martin Hintz, A Spirited History of Milwaukee Brews & Booze. Charleston, SC: History Press, 2011.

[4] Cp. Thomas C. Cochran, The Pabst Brewing Company. The History of an American Business. New York, NY: New York University Press, 1948; Martin H. Stack, Martin, Liquid Bread: An Examination of the American Brewing Industry, 1865-1940. University of Notre Dame (Ph.D. Thesis): 1998.

[5] Andy Rhodes (04/10/2020), “Brewing Heritage”, Texas Historical Commission, https://www.thc.texas.gov/blog/brewing-heritage, last accessed 05/11/2023.

[6] On 19^th century alcohol consumption cp. William J. Rorabough, The Alcoholic Republic, an American Tradition. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1979.

[7] On marketing Gemütlichkeit cp. Uwe Spiekermann, “Marketing Milwaukee: Schlitz and the Making of a National Beer Brand, 1880-1940”, Bulletin of the German Historical Institute 53 (2013): p. 55-67.

[8] On temperance and Prohibition cp. Austin Kerr, K., Organized for Prohibition. A New History of the Anti-Saloon League, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985; Jack S. Blocker, American Temperance Movements. Cycles of Reform. Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1989; Sabine N. Meyer, We Are What We Drink. The Temperance Battle in Minnesota. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press 2015.

[9] Cp. Hugh F. Fox, “The Prosperity of the Brewing Industry,” The Annales of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 34/3 (1909): 47-57.

[10] On German beer riots cp. Werner K. Blessing, “Konsumentenprotest und Arbeitskampf: Vom Bierkrawall zum Bierboykott,” in: Klaus Tenfelde/Heinrich Volkmann (ed.), Streik. Zur Geschichte des Arbeitskampfes in Deutschland während der Industrialisierung. München: Beck 1981: p. 109-123; Lothar Machtan/René Ott, “‘Batzebier!‘ Überlegungen zur sozialen Protestbewegung in den Jahren nach der Reichsgründung am Beispiel der süddeutschen Bierkrawalle vom Frühjahr 1873,” in: Heinrich Volkmann/Jürgen Bergmann (ed.), Sozialer Protest. Studien zu traditioneller Resistenz und kollektiver Gewalt in Deutschland vom Vormärz bis zur Reichsgründung. Opladen: VS Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1984: p. 128-166.

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Review of Guaraná: How Brazil Embraced the World’s Most Caffeine-Rich Plant (2022) by Seth Garfield

Guaraná: How Brazil Embraced the World’s Most Caffeine-Rich Plant is a luminous social biography of a single Amazonia fruit. Historian Seth Garfield re-invigorates the abiding relevance of the history of commodities as an entry point into Latin American history. As a history of consumption, science, and national mythology, the book invites readers into new terrain in the social life of things. Garfield explores guaraná’s many meanings and pathways over three centuries as it was transformed through Indigenous knowledge, European colonization, modern state-building, and the story of capital. By the mid-twentieth century, guaraná had become Brazil’s iconic national soda, famous for its golden hue and energetic punch. Garfield traces the many transnational dynamics and flows that shape guaraná’s uses and meanings. But the book as a whole keeps Brazil and Brazilians center stage.

Guaraná is a gem of a read, as exuberant as Guaraná Espumante champagne. Elegantly written and immensely interdisciplinary, Garfield seamlessly weaves anthropology, history of science, food systems analysis, feminist scholarship, cultural theory, and ethnic studies together. His narrative is peppered with ironic and often humorous insights alongside somber accounts of exploitation and loss. Who knew that guaraná had so many uses? At different times and places, it appears as a cosmic history of the gods, a sexual stimulant, a smart pill for children, a cure for “lady headaches,” and an on-ramp for women to enter public spaces. Lizzie Borden was high on guaraná tea when she allegedly axed her parents in the 1890s. Brazilian soccer teams relied on guaraná soda to fuel victories over Argentina in the 1950s. By the 1990s, Guaraná diet supplements promised lean and toned bodies ready for the beach.

A singular achievement of this book is the way in which Garfield centers Indigenous knowledge and practice in the history of food and consumption. Very few histories of commodities do this, and I know of no book that does it so well. The monograph opens and closes with chapters on the Sateré-Mawé. The particularly insightful first chapter provides a rich discussion of Native production and use, sexual divisions of labor, Indigenous discovery, experimentation, and innovation. The author elaborates both an ethnography and an intellectual history of Sateré-Mawé meanings that makes a strong case for Indigenous knowledge as science. Garfield attributes the same explanatory power to Sateré-Mawé exploration and story-telling of guaraná as he does to eighteenth-century Jesuit plant collectors and nineteenth-century botanists who interpellated tropical plants within Western networks of knowledge.

Other chapters argue that Indigenous knowledge formed a basis of modern medical and pharmaceutical development, even as Brazilian and American scientists elaborated racial hierarchies that occluded that truth. Garfield insists that modern-day scholars recognize Indigenous people as “colleagues” not mere “informants” of Western biochemistry and foodways.” He underscores that Indigenous people should be afforded similar intellectual property rights and centrality in the history of science. These arguments come to the fore in the book’s last chapter on “Indigenous Modernity,” where Garfield circles back to the insights of his own first monograph, Indigenous Struggle at the Heart of Brazil: State Policy, Frontier Expansion, and the Xavante Indians, 1937-1988 (2001). In Guaraná, Garfield highlights how Sateré-Mawé are politically savvy and modern in their own ways, despite the horrific violence and material loss that Indigenous people of the Amazon suffered during military rule. By the late twentieth century, the Sateré-Mawé were tapping into global discourses about Native sovereignty and Indigenous environmentalism to assert land rights and to forge a commercial presence in marketing their own guaraná as eco-friendly Fair Trade products for the Global North.

A second major contribution of Guaraná is the way it reverses the gaze of more conventional histories of commodities and consumption. Garfield asserts the importance of a plant and commercialized food product that never became a global hit. Despite the best efforts of advertisers and scientists, guaraná never had as much of a market outside Brazil. Histories of Latin American coffee, sugar, and other fruits like bananas and grapes, stake their importance on the fact that U. S.-Americans and Europeans consume these goods. Garfield shows that the commodity-subject need not circulate in the North Atlantic to be significant, even foundational, to Latin American histories. In this story, it is Brazilian actions and their impacts that matter most. Guaraná was transformed by international dynamics of colonialism and capitalism, science and technology, but why guaraná matters is a Brazilian story. The ‘transnational turn’ has produced many fine histories of how goods, people, and ideas circulate. Yet Garfield’s global framework emphasizes the effects of Brazilian agency and knowledge on Outsider Others: German Jesuits, Harvard scientists, U.S. corporations. He highlights Brazilian innovation in pharmacology and beverage manufacturing. All of this de-centers Europe and the United States within the history of commodities. If Brazil’s popular Brahma-brand guaraná soda built on German technologies for producing carbonated water or borrowed Coca-Cola’s marketing strategies, it was fundamentally a Brazilian invention, the taste for which did not originate in, or appeal to, the U. S. A.

book cover for indigenous struggle at the heart of Brazil by Seth Garfield

A third contribution is Guaraná’s emphasis on the history of meaning. As a historian of labor and commodities myself, I appreciated that Garfield places his main analysis of agrarian capitalism late in the book in chapter seven, which details guaraná’s economic boom during the military regime’s destructive “green revolution” in the Amazon. This important chapter underscores just how much the “economic miracles” of neoliberalism depended on authoritarian states that sought to conquer “final frontiers” of Indigenous and peasant lands. Historians of Chile, Peru, Colombia and elsewhere will recognize the pattern. But Garfield’s placement of this more familiar history of capitalist production near the book’s end stems from more than just historical chronology. Guaraná is imbricated in other forms of capitalist production long before the Cold War boom-years.

The late staging of political-economy in this history foregrounds knowledge-production and the history of cultural meanings as necessary antecedents to capitalist development. In this story of capital, guaraná had to first be imagined as desirable in the minds of scientists and doctors, Brazilian industrialists, a state longing for national symbols, women and men out on the town. This inverts the logic of most other histories of commodities that more often begin with what and how capitalism is producing, and then backs into a discussion of the social use and cultural meaning. As the logic goes, capitalists produce stuff to make money, and then figure out how to sell it; economic base begets the superstructure of cultural systems. Garfield flips that script and foregrounds the history of ideas and aspiration.

Finally, Garfield’s attention to how guaraná produces hierarchies of gender, race, and region deserves special praise. His analysis ranges from guaraná’s original “discovery” by a Sateré-Mawé woman and the strict sexual divisions of labor in which Native men cultivate the fruit and women prepare it as food, to later associations of guaraná champagne and dietary supplements with whiteness and urban cosmopolitanism, to guaraná’s modernization of patriarchy. Garfield chronicles how guaraná soda allowed women to sip non-alcoholic beverages in public, while men continued to have license to get soused on beer. Black bodies were associated with serving guarana to others, or, for Black men, to signify prowess in sports and music. Exotic spice for a more fundamentally white color of modernity. Garfield reminds us that “mass consumption” can both empower and subordinate. It is a terrain of struggle and constant transformation.

Heidi Tinsman, University of California, Irvine

The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Notes from the Field: From Feasts to Feats (or Feet) on the Coals

This summer, I conducted research in, but also beyond, my regular haunts, namely the dusty old libraries and archival reading rooms of Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. After several days in Sofia, I took to the mountains to follow the paths of ethnographers, tourists, and pilgrims who have written about this distant borderland of Europe over the past 200 years. To this day, Bulgaria has remained a kind of distant terra incognita, beckoning “adventure” travelers to the edge of the European continent. All the more reason for travelers – foreign and Bulgarian – to record their journeys, to map the remote physical and cultural recesses of this Balkan periphery, always seemingly “backward,” in transition, and “off the beaten track.”

The veritable sea of travelers’ accounts are among the sources that inform my current book project, a cultural history of food and drink in the Eastern Balkans, with a focus on Bulgaria from the 1860s -1989. Bulgarian foodways were clearly imprinted by the Empires that ruled or influenced the region, from the Ancient Greek, Roman, Byzantine, Ottoman, Russian, Austro-Hungarian, to the Soviet.

Some of these travelers were Bulgarians, mapping their own homeland and defining their own nation as they went, with the culture of food and drink as important components. But many more were foreigners who consumed and assessed food and drink as sources of pleasure and anxiety. They mapped patterns of restraint and gluttony, as well as the connections of food with identity, healing, and magic. They often used practices of food and drink—production, preparation, and etiquette—as a way of forming or confirming their own opinions about locals as savage and barbaric or alternatively as vigorous and sensible. Such accounts include mouth-watering descriptions of home-cooked meals and local inn or restaurant fare from the days of treks on oxen-drawn carts. The denouement of the story is the 1960s and 1970s when cities of leisure grew out of the snake-infested sands of the Bulgarian Black Sea coast to accommodate millions of visitors from both sides of the Iron Curtain. My interest is in the ways that food and drink fit into old and new rituals surrounding leisure and pleasure. As critical to this story, I explore how foreign travelers and local tourists were part of the transformation of such patterns over the last century. I am also particularly interested in patterns of restraint and abstinence, whether they were intellectual movements of the interwar period or state-directed patterns of pleasure and leisure under communism.

One of my plans for this summer was to follow the well-worn paths of my traveller-authors. This led me to one particularly remarkable place, namely to the village of Bulgari in a spectacular mountainous region called the Strandja, which borders Turkey and spills down to the Black Sea coast in southeastern Bulgaria. I planned my visit to Bulgari carefully, so that I would be there on the feast day of Constantine and Elena, June 4 by the Julian calendar, the day when the nestinari or fire-dancers perform their well-known ritual. Numerous foreigners and locals have chronicled their observations of the nestinarstvo — the ritual of waking on hot coals — which reportedly dates back thousands of years to ancient Thracian times. Locals claim that the originally pagan ritual has been practiced more or less continually since that time. Eventually Christianized, nestinarstvo was also passed on to successive waves of Greek and eventually Slavic residents who moved into the region. The practice was once much more widespread, but Bulgari is one of the last places one can still see the practice in its most elaborate enactment.

1The Nestinarka or coal-walker (in white head scarf) swirls a small urn of burning embers in the air at the beginning of the procession with holy icons into the woods. (Village of Bulgari, in Southeastern Bulgaria, June 2015). — The Nestinarka or coal-walker (in white head scarf) swirls a small urn of burning embers in the air at the beginning of the procession with holy icons into the woods. (Village of Bulgari, in Southeastern Bulgaria, June 2015).

The morning of June 4, 2015 began with a series of prayers in the main church and the ceremonial removal of the icons depicting St. Constantine and Elena (The Byzantine Emperor, Constantine and his mother, Elena). The icons were taken in a solemn procession to the tune of a mesmerizing beat from a drummer and gaida (Bulgarian bagpipe) player. First, the local priest and a number of important participants, including the head nestinarka, or female coal-walker, led a small crowd to a chapel across the main square. There a series of rituals were performed, including a kurban or sacrifice of a sheep by the local priest. The procession continued, with the nestinarka carrying a vessel with burning embers, down a wooded path to a glen where a well and a small chapel were nestled. While blessings took place around the well, icons were placed in a small structure for those assembled to file pass, view, and kiss. Eventually the gathering dissipated until noon, when a huge bonfire was lit in the village square, with an accompanying horo (circle dance) to drumming and bagpipes. By evening folk singers and dancers were featured on an adjacent stage and the square begin to fill with hundreds of people, mostly Bulgarians. As live Bulgarian folk music was pumped over a loudspeaker, a line of hundreds of people snaked around the village square while the bonfire burned down to glowing coals.

2The kurban or sacrificial ram hangs from a hook, while being blessed by an Orthodox priest. The ram’s head is in the foreground on a chopping block. Village of Bulgari, in Southeastern Bulgaria, June 2015). — The kurban or sacrificial ram hangs from a hook, while being blessed by an Orthodox priest. The ram’s head is in the foreground on a chopping block. Village of Bulgari, in Southeastern Bulgaria, June 2015).

Finally, at a little after ten o’clock, the red hot coals were raked out into a starfish shape in the center of the square, with the crowd on all sides pushing against a protective rope. Suddenly the only music was the single drum and bagpipe and three women and three men began to dance across the burning embers. In a trance-like state they moved rhythmically back and forth across the coals to the drumming and bagpipes, icons in hand – held high overhead—a large crown oohing and ahing.

It may be possible to explain how people can walk on hot coals, but I am more interested in the layers of historical sediment that surround the event. First there is the notion that this ritual has been practiced for thousands of years and the current commitment to honor, if not partially reinvent, that tradition. But even more interesting for my current work is the ways in which the event became a site for the intrepid tourist pilgrimage. By the interwar period it is featured in numerous travelogues, and a form of the practice was featured at Black Sea tourist hotels in the communist period. As a site for local tourist observation and participation, the nestinarstvo was and still is deeply connected to food and drink. For example, as chronicled in Ikons and Oxen, Philip Thornton and his resolute party, traveling in 1938, bring to Bulgari a cook from their Black sea hotel and, “Ten pounds of lamb, a gallon of red wine, five bunches of onions and two of carrots, a bottle of butter, a three-pound bag of rice, and a pound of salt.” The salt, the cook explained to Thornton, was to trade to locals for use of their hearths to cook the hearty lamb stew, which they washed down with tasty local wine.

Food and drink were more than just sustenance and pleasure for the traveling visitors. They were (and still are) deeply implicated in the day’s events and rituals. Food was always central in pagan religious rituals and feasting and fasting were deeply embedded in Orthodox Christianity. St. Constantine and Elena Day was a feast day, in which locals pitched in to purchase the kurban, or animal for sacrifice, that was later eaten by the nestinari and others in attendance. Bread has also historically been part of the day’s ritual, and this time pieces of a large loaf were offered to all present at the morning ceremony. Today, a whole street of food vendors catered to tourists and pilgrims who ate and drank throughout the whole day. The ritual feasting included a lamb roasting all day on a spit, a range of other grilled meats, breads, traditional local salads of cucumber, tomato and feta, and generous amounts of local wines, plum brandy, and beer.

Wine has been produced in this region of Bulgaria, which is part of the larger region of Thrace, since ancient times. This is, in fact, the land of the cult of Dionysus (or Bacchus), the Greek (and Roman) God of wine and pleasure. Even more so than food, alcohol consumption is the subject of enjoyment, but also intense scrutiny by foreigners and locals in the period I study. In addition to the cult of Bacchus, this region was also the source of the 11th century Bogomil heresy – one of the first “Proto-Protestant” rebellions against the decadence of the established Christian church. Among other things, the Bogomils practiced temperance and vegetarianism, and as such were a cult of restraint in all manners of consumption. Eradicated by the Byzantines in the 13th century, the “Bogomil legacy” seemed to live on, according to foreign travelers, among other Slavic “fanatics,” including the largest Tolstoyan movement established outside of Russia in early twentieth century. In fact, the Bulgarian village of “Yasna Polyana,” was not far from Bulgari in the Strandja region. Bulgarians set up a commune here in 1908, naming it after Tolstoy’s commune and estate in Russia, Yasnaya Polyana and where they published many of Tolstoy’s works that were banned in Russia. This summer I visited Yasna Polyana, where a recently consecrated bust of Tolstoy presides on the main square.

Bulgari and Yasna Polyana serve as different kinds of markers on what Ivan Hadzhiiski, the founder of Bulgarian sociology, called the “moral map of Bulgaria.” His copious writings from the 1930s, charted the contours of Bulgarian everyday life.. As he rightly notes, the morals of “gastronomy” were defining features of Bulgarian tradition, as well as its transition to modernity. Of course this is not just for Bulgarians. As my favorite historian of food, Felipe Fernández-Armesto notes in his Near a Thousand Tables, food “matters most to most people for most of the time.” The words of Armesto, like Hadzhiiski, accompanied me on my tour, from town to town, from table to table.

A Record Held until 2015

Beer Republic

US-American Gemütlichkeit

Fight against Temperance

A Revolution Coming Full Circle?

Recent Posts