site.btaFelix Kanitz, the "Columbus of the Balkans"

Felix Philipp Kanitz (2 August 1829 - 8 January 1904) was an Austro-Hungarian traveller and ethnographer, whose travels earned him the flattering nickname "Columbus of the Balkans". Several generations of Bulgarians know his pictures from their history schoolbooks. Kanitz contributed substantially to making Bulgarians known in Europe and in the world. Several streets, a village in Bulgaria and an Antarctic peak are named after him.

Kanitz was born in Pest, the Austrian Empire, to a rich Jewish family and enrolled in art in the University of Vienna in 1846, aged 17. After 1850, he travelled widely, visiting several European countries. He settled in Vienna and in 1858 made his first journey to the Balkans - to Dalmatia. In the next years he visited Herzegovina, Bosnia, Montenegro, Serbia and Bulgaria. He gradually became interested in the intricacies of the emerging Eastern Question, until he was engrossed in studying the Balkans in general and Serbia and Bulgaria in particular.

At that time, the Balkans were considered something of a European Frontier: a roughly mapped territory, with a revered ancient past, inhabited by peoples whose languages, habits and ways were subject to both research and speculations. As Maria Todorova nicely puts it (in "Imagining the Balkans"), the region could be seen as "a bridge between stages of growth, and this invokes labels such as semideveloped, semicolonial, semicivilized, semioriental."

Kanitz was not the first to visit the region. But he quickly understood that geography and infrastructure data about Bulgarian lands, provided by travellers like Ami Boue, Heinrich Barth, Auguste Viquesnel or Helmuth von Moltke were limited and far from correct in many aspects. In the preface to Danubian Bulgaria and the Balkans ("Donau-Bulgarien und der Balkan"), Kanitz writes about "the almost unknown 'Danubian Bulgaria'".

Kanitz made a total of 18 visits to Bulgarian lands and left first-hand observations, notes, evaluations, maps and images that could hardly be assessed in several sentences. A good painter and drawer, Kanitz was the author of numerous drawings related to the life in the Balkans. Towards the end of 1848, Kanitz became a correspondent for the Illustrirte Zeitung of Leipzig, a job he would keep almost until the end of his life. Nowadays his drawings offer a unique insight into the development of places like Balchik, Gabrovo, Kalofer monastery, Belogradchik, Ruse, Vidin, Tarnovo and Provadiya, to name just a few.

His works differ from the travel notes of his predecessors in several other aspects. Firstly, his interests covered numerous fields of academic inquiry: geography, cartography, ethnography, demography, natural history, linguistics, folklore, art, history, architecture and archaeology.

Felix Kanitz's research into the Balkan past is sometimes described as amateurish, but it was of enormous help to disciplinary archaeology. He used to send the inscriptions found to the prominent Roman world expert (and future Nobel-Prize winner) Prof. Theodor Mommsen in Germany. It is not unusual to come across humble notes in Kanitz's writing such as: "I found a votive tablet embedded in a wall of an obscure hut: a fact that greatly hindered my copying the inscription on it. Mommsen deciphered the text and emended it…". And it was Felix Kanitz who documented and described for the first time the Madara Horseman - the unique stone relief that is now on the list of UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

Inaccuracies in his descriptions and sketches are often due to his enthusiasm and the delight of discovery. He was not blind to the lack of European practices, norms and conveniences, but he was fascinated in finding a people that is hard-working and industrious, studious and crafty. He was equally fascinated by the bridge built by Kolyu Ficheto over the Yantra River near Byala, and by the exotic Persian wheel (saqiyah), a water-lifting device powered by horses or oxen.

His most impressive ability seems to be his mastery in grasping the general beyond the specific. For instance, in the absence of statistical data, he managed to reconstruct the ethnic shape of villages, districts and hamlets through sheer observation and interviews. Despite the almost complete lack of general sources, numbers and estimations, his evaluations of the socio-economic life of Bulgarian lands - production, trade and consumption - are indeed impressive.

Judging from his travel notes, he was able to establish close contacts with people from all classes, peasants and artisans included. In 1872, near the marshes of Silistra (on the Danube), he caught malaria. He decided to continue his work though - a risky decision in a region where no medical aid or medicines were available. Suffering from a high fever, he fainted near a village and the peasants carted him to a doctor with touching care. (Kanitz compared the carters' sad songs to a funeral chant.)

His condition was serious - he had to return to Vienna and his recovery took two years. After that, he continued his work: travelling, writing, preparing sketches, printing, and editing. His first-hand experience, his contacts and accumulated knowledge about Serbia and Bulgaria enabled him to see deep into the Eastern Question. And he was one of the first to notice (in 1875) the fact that Bulgarians "more and more often are coming back to their lost state independence, a fact that is of extreme political importance!".