The research presented in this article was financed by the grant of the Polish National Science Center: Social Changes of the Muslim Communities in Bosnia-Hercegovina and Bulgaria in the Second Half of the 19th and at the Beginning of the 20th Century: Comparative Studies (2020/39/B/HS3/01717). For the purpose of Open Access, the author has applied a CC-BY public copyright licence to any Author Accepted Manuscript (AAM) version arising from this submission.

In December 1850, Michał Czajkowski, a long-time and experienced Polish political agent in the East converted to Islam. He took the new name of Mehmed Sadık. Three years later, after the beginning of the Crimean War in 1853, Mehmed Efendi joined the Ottoman army where he founded the Ottoman Cossacks Regiment (Kazak Alayı) with the support of the Sublime Porte. The Ottoman Cossacks Regiment was the first official military unit in the Ottoman Empire until that moment, to be composed almost entirely of Christians, who carried weapons and were in Sultan’s service. The existence of such non-Muslim Ottoman military unit made it a unique instrument of the modernization processes of the Ottoman Empire during the Tanzimat period. However, the reception of this “Christian army”, in which Sultan’s Christian subjects were the main recruits, was rather peculiar and heterogeneous. The military unit was active for nearly twenty-five years in a large area of the Ottoman Balkans – from the Black Sea to the Adriatic Sea, from the Kosovo to Beirut. Praised by their Bulgarian Christian compatriots, sometimes condemned by other Christians such as Greeks and Armenians, often hated by the Muslims, they left a certain mark. Based on original British, Russian, Bulgarian, and Ottoman sources, the following paper will present interesting examples of the cross-cultural contacts and reception of the Ottoman Cossacks Regiment within itself as well as among the Muslim and non-Muslim populations in the Late Ottoman Empire.