My habilitation project is dedicated to the history of the Bulgarian Catholics within and beyond the Ottoman Empire in the 17th and beginning of the 18th centuries. The project intends to shed light on the interconnectedness and interactions of the Bulgarian Catholics with the neighbouring majority Orthodox and other Catholic communities, examining their geopolitical positioning within the broader context of the Balkans and the global Catholic missionary efforts during the Counter-Reformation era. By examining their ties to Wallachia, Moldova and Transylvania, this study reveals the emergence of an Eastern Balkan Catholic sphere that transcended imperial boundaries, underscoring the intricate relationship between local religious dynamics and broader geopolitical transformations. This aspect of Balkan, Ottoman, European and religious history remains underexplored in current scholarship, offering an opportunity for original research and fresh insights into key historical debates concerning Ottoman-European relations, Global Catholicism and interfaith interactions.

The research questions address (1) the various dimensions of multi-confessional coexistence and rivalry in the everyday life of the Catholic and Orthodox Eastern Balkan societies, (2) the framework of the Ottoman imperial and provincial administration and its impact on local Catholicism, and (3) the relations with (Catholic) Europe and the role of Bulgarian Catholics in the broader context of European geopolitics and confessional history during the Counter-Reformation. In order to determine the specificities of Catholicism under Ottoman rule and within a broader European context, the project will develop the new concept of ‘Ottoman Catholicism’. Methodologically, the study draws upon approaches from both micro- and global history to consider the practices and strategies of the historical actors as well as the entanglements of communication spaces and the social construction of space.

Following my PhD thesis (University of Vienna, 2023), I have been contributing to the Cluster of Excellence with my research on multilingualism and multiscriptualism in the Venetian-Ottoman borderland of Late Medieval Dalmatia. While the Venetian administration of the Dalmatian coastal towns exclusively used Latin and Italian for its records, the Slavic communities of the surrounding regions under Venetian or Hungarian/Habsburg control resorted to their native Slavic language for their correspondences or written judicial and notarial documents. Likewise, the local Ottoman officials employed mainly Slavic to communicate with their Venetian counterparts. My work analyses how the Venetians first understood and then recorded such Slavic documents as well as oral statements and testimonies expressed by Slavic speakers in front of the Venetian administration. Apart from numerous translations, the archives contain some Cyrillic and Latin-script originals of diverse provenance and content; most documents come from the archives of Venice, Split and Zadar concerning Split, Poljica, Omiš and Klis in the late 15th and early 16th centuries.