Between Land and Belief: Endangered Timber Dwellings and Their Housing Spirits

Within the Western Balkan Mountains, along the border between Bulgaria and Serbia, lie villages once predominantly populated by Turlaks, an ethnic minority group consisting of pastoral communities and with their own distinct traditions.

Between Land and Belief is a curation of some of the ethnographic research that was carried out in this region between 2024 and 2025, which revealed not only an indeed intriguing Turlak tradition of placemaking in connection with their pastoral traditions, but also a world of spiritual relations with space that organised into a discrete and distinctive Turlak cosmology.

Within the spiritual bounds of home, there was uncovered complexities to the relationships between space and with external influence. As a palimpsest and succession of ancient beliefs, ranging from ancient animist, pagan, Bogomil and their persecution by Christianity, and finally a communist attempt at spiritual and vernacular
cleansing, the region embodies the movement through spiritual meaning and time as much through its language, rituals, and their oral histories as its physical and tangible heritage.