Waqf villages – Ottoman pious foundations, and populating the conquered lands of the Balkans

In this interview, Grigor Boykov, an assistant professor at the University of Vienna (Institute for East European history) discusses his research into waqf villages in Bulgaria during the early Ottoman period.  Ottoman landholders in the conquered territories founded waqf villages to create a stream of income that they endowed to religious or social welfare activities within the Ottoman empire.  Grigor’s research using the original Ottoman tax and legal records, and techniques of modern spatial analysis, shows the waqf also were instrumental in re-populating empty lands, maintaining social order, increasing the value of the land, and safeguarding the heredity rights of the landholders.This podcast is part of a series of interviews covering central Europe in the medieval period for MECERN and CEU Medieval Studies.