History of Deva

Bulgarian merchant colony

In 1711–1712, Deva was settled by a group of Roman Catholic Bulgarian merchant colonists, refugees from the unsuccessful anti-Ottoman Chiprovtsi Uprising of 1688. The colonists were originally mostly from Chiprovtsi and Zhelezna in northwest Bulgaria, though also from the neighbouring Kopilovtsi and Klisura. However, the colonists came to Deva from Wallachia and from Vinţu de Jos, where a similar colony had been established in 1700.

The Bulgarian merchants, who in 1716 numbered 51 families and 3 Franciscan monks, established their own neighbourhood, which was known to the locals as Greci ("Greeks", i.e. "merchants"). Their influence over local affairs caused Deva to be officially called a "Bulgarian town" for a short period, even though the maximum population of the colony was 71 families in 1721. The Bulgarians received royal privileges of the Austrian crown along with their permission to settle and their acquisition of land and property. The construction of Deva's Franciscan monastery commenced in 1724 with the funding and efforts of its Bulgarian population, so that the monastery was commonly known as the Bulgarian Monastery. However, the Great Plague of 1738 and the gradual assimilation of the Deva Bulgarians into other ethnicities of Transylvania prevented the colony from growing and by the late 19th century the Bulgarian ethnic element in the town had disappeared completely.