Written during The '50s by Bulgarian author Dimitar Talev, the informally named Prespa tetralogy is a Generational Saga telling the story of a Bulgarian family from the fictional town of Prespa in today's Macedonia during the 19th and early 20th century when the region was under Ottoman rule and resistance was forming against it, cluminating in the Ilinden uprising in 1903. The series consists of four novels:
- The Iron Candlestick, telling the story of the settling of the Glaoushevi family into Prespa (Stoyan, a fugitive from the surrounding villages, marries Sultana, the last heir of a once-wealthy family, and revitalizes her household), ending with the wedding of their younger son, Lazar.
- The Bells of Prespa continues through the eyes of mostly Lazar Glaoushev and his wife, Nia, illustrating the cultural upheaval in Prespa and the formation of anti-Ottoman resistance. New prominent characters appear, such as the new rebel teacher, Raiko Vardarski, his female colleague, Ivanka Roumenova, and the new bourgeoisie (the Brashnarovi and Babolevi families).
- Ilinden, named after the historical Ilinden uprising, is centered around it, viewed through the eyes of Lazar and Nia's son, Boris.
- Your Voices I Hear deals with the fallout of the uprising as seen by Boris Glaoushev and each neighboring country trying to claim Macedonia as the Ottoman empire has been driven away.
The tetralogy as a whole features the following tropes:
- All Jews Are Cheapskates: It's Eastern Europe after all, so stereotypes modern American viewers see as Jewish are applied to Balkan people at large and seen as a virtue, what with the relative poverty they lived in during the late Ottoman age. Sultana specifically is adamant on running a tight budget and refuses to buy anything new if old things can be patched up. She even opposes Nia's gas lamp, seeing it as an excessive luxury compared to the old eponymous candlestick.
- Amusingly enough, Avram Nemtour, the wealthiest man in town, is a Jew. While he's not cheap when it comes to personal luxuries, he is an arrogant and corrupt chorbadji whose character falls more in line with the wealthy Greedy Jew stereotype.
- Country Mouse: Characters often react this way when they visit or move to a larger settlement:
- People from the villages, like Stoyan Glaoushev, when they come to Prespa.
- Townspeople of Prespa when they visit a city like Sofia or Thesallonica.
- Even the Unfazed Everyman Itzo Babolev who isn't intimidated by anything he can buy his way to feels this way for a moment when he first arrives at Vienna.
- Georgi Babolev, returning from Vienna, is a City Mouse who sees his hometown as a cramped, dirty, run-down village.
- Darker and Edgier/Genre Shift: The novels get this treatment in chronological order. Candlestick is mostly a Slice of Life story dealing with the Glaoushevi family and their personal drama. Bells starts incorporating cultural and political revolutionary themes and the advent of a rebel movement. Ilinden is a semi-historical tale of an uprising notorious for its bloody end, and Voices has an even darker tone.
- "Near and Dear" Baby Naming: While a lot of people, as per Bulgarian tradition, are named after relatives or other loved ones from the previous generation (who are often dead by the time the person is an adult), they don't need to be dead when the child is born. As in real life, newborns tend to take the name of a grandparent or a family friend:
- Stoyan and Sultana's firstborn is named Kocho, after Stoyan's coppersmith mentor who first took him in.
- Atze Kutrev's son is named Raiko, after the teacher and rebel Raiko Vardarski, who used to live in the Kutrevi's home. Raiko Jr. becomes a teacher and a rebel leader as well.
- Kocho's firstborn son is named Stoyan, after his grandfather.
- Kocho's eldest daughter is named Tzareva, which is a loose translation of Sultana's name to Bulgarian.
- Generation Xerox: The first two books have a pair of a middle-class reformist having a rivalry with the wealthiest man in town: at first Kliment Benkov against Avram Nemtour, then after Kliment's death Lazar Glaoushev takes up the mantle against the aging Nemtour as he grows up; After Avram Nemtour's death Lazar again finds the same type of opposition in the face of a younger man, Taki Brashnarov.
- Rags to Riches: Several families over the generations.
- Stoyan Glaoushev comes to Prespa as a refugee, becomes a coppersmith, marries the impoverished but still richer Sultana, then sets up shop himself, building up a decent-sized business that would later be taken up by his firstborn son, Kocho. Kocho later emigrates to a liberated Bulgaria where he gets richer, his sons get much better education and more prestigious jobs such as lawyers and army officers. Stoya's other son, Lazar, also does reasonably well as a grain trader.
- Itzo Babolev and his brother Miro starts out as a couple of poor boys who do menial jobs for miserable pay. Itzo then starts a small shop and eventually journeys to Vienna, where he establishes trade contacts and becomes the richest merchant in Prespa. He sends his nephew, Miro's son Georgi, to Vienna to study, and when he returns, he expands the family business even more, building the first industrial grain mill in the town.
- Serial Escalation: The Glaoushev men as rebels throughout generations. Stoyan is a peasant who kills his Feudal Overlord's dog in revenge and flees to avoid persecution. Lazar helps form a resistance movement in Prespa, but is confined to the town and the surrounding villages. His son Boris becomes heaviy involved in a rebellion sweeping throughout all of Macedonia.
- Trash the Set: At the end, the bustling main street burns down when a vengeful mercenary whom Avram Nemtour refused to pay after he botched Lazar's assassination sets his stores on fire.
- Trilogy Creep: I Hear Your Voices came out in 1966, more than a full decade after the other three novels, written within a year of each other (1952-1954).
Tropes found in The Iron Candlestick:
- Asshole Victim: Avram Nemtour antagonizes Lazar at every turn just so he can keep lining his pockets, he orders Lazar's assassination. When the Turk he hired fails, Nemtour refuses to pay him, causing the assassin to set his shops on fire. Avram goes bankrupt and suffers a stroke which leaves him halfway paralyzed and he dies soon afterwards.
- Best Friends-in-Law: Lazar Glaoushev intends to marry Bozhana, the sister of his best friend Andrea Benkov. She dies before they even get betrothed.
- Betty and Veronica: Bozhana Benkova as Betty and Nia Nemtur as Veronica for Lazar Glaoushev. He and Nia are in love from the start, but he proposes to Bozhana in a moment of friendly affection when she is ill, later unwilling to break his promise to his best friend's sister. However, she dies before they could get married, and his mother is working for him and Nia to get together anyway.
- Blithe Spirit: Catherina, Stoyan and Sultana's youngest daughter, is an unusually free-spirited and feisty girl. It gets her killed when she gets pregnant by the resident woodcutter out of wedlock and dies from a forced abortion.
- Book Ends: With Sultana and Nia. Sultana's backstory establishes her as the granddaughter of a wealthy merchant who lost everything when his stores burned down. Nia's father, also a wealthy merchant, also dies after his stores at the very same place burn down.
- Dating What Mommy Hates: Catherina falls for Rafe Klinche, who Sultana really doesn't want for a son-in-law because he's messy and unreliable. Deconstructed when Catherina gets pregnant out of wedlock and her mother poisons her to cause an abortion, which causes Catherina's death.
- Hope Spot: In Catherina's arc. She and Rafe fall in love and start a Secret Relationship. Her mother finds out and is outraged, but after seeing her daughter so happy, agrees to marry her off to him anyway. The condition is that Catherina aborts her child so people won't see her pregnant. This ends up killing her.
- Impoverished Patrician: Sultana, granddaughter of a wealthy man, is born among the fallout of his riches as a fire has destroyed most of it and left her an unpromising match. Later the same fate befalls the Nemtour family as Avram suffers losses due to arson and doesn't leave much to his daughter Nia.
- Manchild: Stoyan is frequently described as child-like when he comes to the city. He's a sincere man who can't hide his emotions, is genuinely surprised at unexpected turns of events, and has to be reined in or spurred on by his controlling wife.
- Mistress and Servant Boy: At the start, Stoyan Glaoushev, recent refugee to the town, is hired to work at Sultana's home. She marries him partly to revitalize her household, which she manages to do.
- Old Maid: Sultana is unmarried at 25, which makes her desperate enough to marry a man recently come from the poor villages nearby to seek work.
- Parenting the Husband: The pragmatic, stern Sultana and the naïve, happy-go-lucky Stoyan. He even feels like she reminds him of his mother and sister when she instructs him what to do when he had to "register" at the municipality.
- Planet of Steves: Prespa is a Town of Stoyans. This is the reason for Sultana to get to know Stoyan Glaoushev, since she just called him by a random common name to get his attention and hire him to work.
- Starving Artist: Rafail "Rafe" Klinche is a woodcutter who gets hired to carve the new church's iconostasis. He's a kind-hearted but extremely messy man and, due to his trade, seemingly unable to settle down, which makes him a poor suitor for Catherina in Sultana's eyes.
- The Pollyanna: Stoyan Glaoushev. On the run from his Feudal Overlord, he flees to the town of Prespa, never frowning at hunger, cold and even the lack of work, always believing he'll figure it out later. He remains just as jolly even in his later years, to Sultana's irritation.
- Town Girls: In their childhood and adolescence, Catherina as the Butch, Nia as the Femme and Bozhana as the Neither. Notably, Catherina has much more in common with these two than with her own sisters, Manda and Nona.
- Tsundere: Sultana is a surly, uptight woman who glares at everyone, nags at her loved ones, especially her husband, for every light-hearted thing they do, but does care for them and allows herself to be kind on rare occasions.
- Vicariously Ambitious: Sultana is adamant on restoring her family's prestige. As such, she'll nag his husband to ask for raises, set up his own shop and be aggressive when he gets pressed. She also tries to arrange high-value marriages for her children, which is the only reason she supports Lazar's feelings for Nia.
Tropes found in The Bells Of Prespa:
- Ambiguously Gay: Andrea Benkov has a romantic friendship with Lazar. While that could just be read as an example of Have a Gay Old Time, it's worth noting that Andrea never married or showed any interest in women.
- Beam Me Up, Scotty!: In-Universe. One time, Vardarski has gathered some people, reading them a revolutionary poem note , containing the line "A serpent sucking the people's life". One of the men at the gathering repeats it as "A serpent is sucking the people".
- Connected All Along: Two Russians arrive to Prespa at some point. Ivanka Roumenova recognizes one of them who is going under an alias. It's implied they used to be lovers.
- Domestic Abuse: Taki drops all courtesy and charm the moment he takes Ivanka to the bedroom at their wedding night. He forces himself on her, then in the morning tries to stop her from going to school and when she won't quit her job, slaps her across the face and rips her dress. She has none of it and leaves him immediately.
- Evil Overlord: Hayredin Arap Aga. Originally a simple Psycho for Hire leaading a band of thugs and used by the local beys to keep the raya (non-Muslim serfs) in check by brutalizing them, he soon accumulates enough wealth (mostly by stealing) to become a feudal of his own, build a keep and from it terrorize the surrounding villages. Lazar forms a band of rebels to assassinate him.
- Foil: Resident Idle Rich Taki Brashnarov is that to Lazar's Non-Idle Rich. Taki's seduction of Ivanka Roumenova and marrying her to have her Stay in the Kitchen mirrors Lazar's loving marriage to Nia. The Law of Inverse Fertility is another juxtaposition - Nia and Lazar only have a son 16 years into their marriage after much angst, but Taki and Ivanka's daughter is conceived at their very wedding night, after which they are separated.
- Five-Man Band: Lazar's rebel band who set out to resist Hayredin Arap Aga and the other Turkish landowners.
- The Hero: Lazar himself, The Leader and an all-time political reformer who manages to keep a cool head.
- The Lancer: Raiko Vardarski, the Hot-Blooded newcomer teacher full of Rebellious Spirit.
- The Big Guy: Lame Atanas, a burly villager who gets brutalized by Hayredin.
- Mission Control: Atze Kutrev, another villager who organizes more of his peers into joining the rebellion.
- The Heart: Andrea Benkov, Lazar's best friend who's sensitive and fiery, doesn't do much, but sticks with them until the end.
- The Great Offscreen War: The work is notable for depicting the 1877-1878 Russo-Turkish war this way, since it saw the revival of the Bulgarian state and is regarded as a "war of liberation" and is usually the central event of period pieces taking place during that time. Since Bulgarians in Macedonia (hence also the fictional Prespa) were unaffected by the war and left under complete Ottoman rule, the war is only mentioned in passing, as a liberation that never came. When the war breaks out, Lazar and co. stage a small anticlimactic rebellion that fails.
- Greek Chorus: Unrelated to the other characters, there are two poor craftsmen, the Bulgarian Nestor and the Turk Reçep, who discuss the animosity between the two peoples, even if the two of them are friends.
- It's Personal: Lazar and his mother can hold some grudges. Lazar never sets foot in Nia's house because of her late father with whom he clashed politically; when he finally has the house taken down and a bigger one built in its place to move to with Nia, it's Sultana's turn to vow to never set foot there. It takes Nia going into labor for her mother-in-law to forget the grudge and rush to her house.
- Ladykiller in Love: How Taki Brashnarov seduces Ivanka Roumenova.Brashnarov easily caught on that Roumenova could always be inspired by a friendly companionship with a man, she was even, in her own way, vainglorious and prideful regarding the relationships between men and women, so he, cunning and calculating as he was, did not for a long time mention anything before her about love, not even the very word "love". They were friends, serious people, who had a camaraderie and understood each other, and she was even pleased with herself that she had managed that way to tame such a lecher she had heard so much about.
[...] All of a sudden she saw herself forced to admit that she loved the dashing stud. The first spark of that love had gotten into the young woman's heart since the first moment of meeting him. He had skillfully fanned its flame, moreso with his passion toward her. She had taken this passion for pure love, like hers was. - Law of Inverse Fertility: Nia's angst stems from her not having any children until much later. Also Ivanka who flees her husband after her disastrous wedding night and he has already gotten her pregnant.
- Loved I Not Honor More: His revolutionary activities for the sake of his people distract Lazar's emotions from his wife, who in turn suffers and gets the false impression that he doesn't love her anymore.
- Ludd Was Right:
- When industrially made copper sheets for smithing get introduced, Stoyan Glaoushev is worried about those of his employees who used to produce those manually, even if his son Kocho is overjoyed. Later factory-made copper dishes become available. Kocho emphasizes on the fact that local hand-made dishes are more durable, if crude, but in time the pressure causes him to emigrate. In Bulgaria, he continues his trade manually, producing the same less shiny but more affordable goods for other immigrants to the capital like him.
- After the war, when Georgi Babolev builds a mechanized grain mill, he and Taki Brashnarov monopolize grain trade. Babolev is neutral toward that and tries not to suffocate other traders such as Lazar, but Brashnarov does so with zeal and also pushes Leonine Contracts on villagers, selling them inferior flour at high prices.
- Majored in Western Hypocrisy: Georgi Babolev, the son of the wealthiest merchant in Prespa, is sent to Vienna to study. He comes back an even wealthier merchant who idolizes the Western European countries which are prosperous but uninterested in liberating the Balkans, in contrast with his the Russophilia of his compatriots who rely on pan-Slavism in their belief that Russia will assist Bulgaria and Macedonia's liberation (historically justified for Bulgaria except for the part of it situated in Macedonia).
- Not So Similar: Sultana's attempt at using a "Not So Different" Remark between herself and Nia from the previous book is carried over and deconstructed here. The two women quickly come to a conflict in a home where the mother-in-law is adamant on keeping control. However, Nia, while not letting herself be dominated, is not confrontational unless pressed and settles for a quiet Passive-Aggressive Kombat.
- Obnoxious In-Laws:
- Lazar and Nia can't get a break. After he had a feud with her father while his mother rooted for them, it's Nia's turn to enter a cold war with her mother-in-law as she moves in and refuses to be cowed into obedience.
- Taki's parents come off this way to Ivanka on their wedding day. His father is a boorish and gluttonous man, while his mother is a small, snobbish woman. The sole exception is Taki's little brother, Vasil, who's an innocent kid Ivanka immediately bonds with.
- Perfectly Arranged Marriage: Lazar and Nia have been in love since the beginning of their courtship. Deconstructed in that external circumstances (in-laws, Lazar's political life, not having a child for a long time) still put a strain on their marriage, but reconstructed in that they endure and still love each other.
- Prince Charmless: Taki. He woos Ivanka with tact and feigned respect, acts romantic and gentlemanly, then drops it all the moment she sets foot in his bedroom.
- Poor Country Cousin: A lot of Stoyan's extended family from his village have to crash at his and Sultana's house to avoid being slaughtered by their feudal lord. Some of them stay, and one (Trăpko Velev) later becomes a rebel himself, goes to Russia and later volunteers in the War of Bulgarian Liberation.
- Red Oni, Blue Oni: Lazar to both his childhood friend Andrea Benkov, and the newcomer, hothead rebellious teacher, Raiko Vardarski.
- Schoolmarm: Ivanka Roumenova arrives to head the all-girls school. She quits and moves out of town when Taki tries to stop her from teaching the morning after their wedding night.
- Spirited Young Lady: Ivanka is as much as a feminist as she can be in the 19th century Ottoman Empire. She takes it upon herself to gather girls for her school when parents won't send them by themselves, won't conform to gender norms (although she proves she can do domestic chores really well if she wants to) and otherwise advocates for women to take a more proactive role in society.
- Suspiciously Similar Substitute: Hristaki 'Taki' Brashnarov is a Younger and Hipper version of Avram Nemtour - a wealthy Grecoman (Hellenised Bulgarian) who is Lazar Glaoushev's political rival in the town, prone to bribery and racketeering, stuck-up and takes the side of the oppressive Turkish government, later even selling rebels out.
- This Is Your Name On Foreign: Inverted. The granddaughter of Sultana (from Turkish Sultan) is named Tsareva (from Bulgarian Tsar), translating the title the name is based on into the characters' native language.
- Wardens Are Evil: Ottoman prison wardens are generally portrayed like this. But one Albanian inmate, Jafer, who is hired to beat the rest for interrogations, subverts the trope: After Hauredin Arap Aga is assassinated he approaches Lazar and treats him with admiration for the bravery in that deed. Lazar denies, but asks Jafer to go easy on the weak link who accidentally gave the whole company away (Jafer would have otherwise beaten him to death for his betrayal). The man does so out of Villain Respect for Lazar and his friends.
Tropes found in Ilinden:
- Does This Remind You of Anything?: Atze Kutrev used to shelter the Rebel Leader and teacher Raiko Vardarski at his home. He names his son, Raiko, after him, who also grows up to be a teacher and a Rebel Leader. [[cheatingWithTheMilkman Hmmm...]]
- Headbutting Heroes: IMRO and the Bulgarian-based Supreme Macedonian Committee. The Committee was launched and operated by Macedonian immigrants in Bulgaria who were closely aligned with the Bulgarian government and worked for Macedonia's unification with Bulgaria, relying primarily on Bulgarian support; on the other hand IMRO, while also founded by local Bulgarians and having broadly the same aims, at this point was primarily relying on achieving liberation on their own and was suspicious of interference by the Bulgarian government whose corruption had alienated Macedonian revolutionaries.
- Kissing Cousins: Raiko Kutrev's Fiancée, Maria, is lusted after by her own cousin, Pantoush "Popcorn Pantou".
- Your Terrorists Are Our Freedom Fighters: The early IMRO is described more from the freedom fighter angle, but far less idealized than most Bulgarian works set in the era which play the trope completely straight when it comes to rebels.
