Turks in Bulgaria (Flame-War Warning)

Defining the place of Bulgaria's Turkish minority within the national body politic has been one of the invariable features of the multiple projects of modernity that punctuate Bulgaria's history. All of the primary political turning points in Bulgarian history - quasi-independence from the Ottoman Empire in 1878, the dawning of the communist era in 1944, and the post-communist period beginning in 1989 -have required a re-positioning of Bulgarian national, cultural and political postures on the so-called "Turkish question." The emergent approaches to the manufacturing of Bulgarian modernity have sought to define or redefine the Bulgarian political nation through the drawing (or redrawing) of ethno-cultural boundaries between Bulgarian and Turk. This highly complex and contested process of Bulgarian nation building has generally been conceptualized in the literature as an essentially "Balkan" anti-Turkish campaign based on the fruition and expression of ancient enmities between Bulgarian and Turk. However, although this process did result in a violent ethnic-untangling of Turk from Bulgarian its impetus was not the a priori existence of local hatred between Bulgarian and Turk. Ironically, these purportedly ancient Balkan enmities were constructed within the Bulgarian nationalist elite's appropriation of inherently ambiguous Western Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment concepts of nationhood.

As Michael Herzfeld points out, there is a common illusory distinction made between Western European "rational" nationalisms based on a social contract and the kinship based associations of "primitive" Eastern societies. Contrary to such an illusion, Herzfeld asserts that by the nineteenth century, blood would "become the elixir that would convert local social relations into national culture,"1 remaining the key metaphor for Western European and other nationalisms. This prevalent "highly sacralized rhetoric of blood" has readily interfaced with other prevalent social and political philosophies taking on a variety of ambiguous forms and supplying sharpened tools of nation building.

Throughout Bulgarian history blood metaphors have played an important role in the rhetoric of Bulgarian nationalism and its fashioning of the Turkish "other," readily melding with - and in fact emerging from -prevalent European models of social and political organization. Throughout this process the confrontation between Bulgarian and Turk has crescendoed as the momentum of nation building has accelerated with the tools and technology of twentieth century state-craft. Yet the powerful metaphors that color Bulgarian anti-Turkish nationalism, do not reflect an essential Balkan backwardness in contrast to European "rationalism," on the contrary the Bulgaro-Turkish relationship is a product of the tools and themes of modernity, and as such of European constructed dichotomies of national self and other. The Bulgaro-Turkish relationship evolved in the shadow of both the apparent clarity and the inherent contradictions of the theories and practices of modernity. As such the Bulgarian project of sorting the national "self' from the Turkish "other" within defies simple formulae, instead revealing a complex and contested pursuit for national unity among the mire of Balkan cultural complexity.

Common views of Bulgarian nationalism since 1878 as "virtually equated with anti-Turkish sentiment,"2 belie the complexity of both the elite project of the cultural construction of the Bulgarian nation and inter-ethnic relations on the local level. Historically, contradictory sentiments of intimacy and violence, enmity and affinity towards local Turks as both native and stranger have colored Bulgarian nationalist vacillation between a degree of acceptance and a total rejection of the Turkish presence in Bulgarian social body. In the pre-independence and subsequent imperial period, Bulgarian monarchs, nationalists, and bureaucrats were engaged in an ongoing dialogue of national self definition, in which European conceptual tools were employed in defining the parameters of the modern Bulgarian nation on the foundations of theoretical "enlightened" toleration.

Significantly, Russian and West European nation-state building tools came with ample conceptual baggage, namely the assumed superiority of Europe and the Christian World over the "Oriental Barbarism" of the Bulgarian Ottoman past. When William Gladstone, a prominent 19th century British Prime Minister, raised British public indignation over the "Turkish atrocities" against Bulgarians in the 1877 April Uprising, images of the "Turkish infidel" lording over European Christians captured the Bulgarian national imagination.3 Yet, as Marin Pundeff points out, a wide array of European intellectual products, including Orientalism, came to Bulgaria via Russia, intertwined with the prevalent myth of the Russian Christian protector "Diado Ivan" (Grandpa Ivan) as liberator from the Ottoman overlords.4 Pan-Slavic visions of liberating Orthodox brethren from the Turkish yoke permeate Russian portrayals of the episodes of the decisive 1877-78 Russo-Turkish war, "a mission before the Tsar and God - the struggle with Islam."5

In post-liberation Bulgarian politics Russian meddling had to share the stage with Western European intrigues and the rise of independent minded local elites in this formative period for Bulgarian national consciousness. The newly "elected" king of Bulgaria, Alexander of Battenburg, reigned under the mandate of a European inspired "liberal" constitution. Battenburg's famous proclamation "I shall love all of my subjects, regardless of their creed," and his obstinacy against Russian pressures to revoke constitutional rights for minorities were reflected in the large scale cultural and social autonomy granted to the local Turkish minority.6 In fact, the intrusion of Imperial Russia in Bulgarian politics later in this period provoked respected Bulgarian national revolutionary and statesman, Stefan Stambulov, to pursue a decidedly pro-Turkish policy and even propose a political union with the Ottomans with the Sultan as Bulgarian Tsar.7

In spite of this potential for a Bulgaro-Turkish rapprochement, this period was marked by the creation of a national myth which intersected with powerful Russian and to some extent West European images of "liberation" from the "Turkish yoke." Virulent anti-Turkishness seemed to pervade 19th century Bulgarian cultural efforts, as illustrated by the seminal work of "the father of Bulgarian literature" Ivan Vazov with his famous novel Pod Igoto (Under the Yoke). But it is worth noting that competing positive literary images of the Turk gained lasting popular admiration in Iordan Iovkov's Legends of Stara Planina.8 Furthermore, Aleko Konstantinov's creation of the popularized archetype of Bulgarian "backwardness" in his character, Bai Ganyu, was indicative of a deeper identification with the "oriental" within the Bulgarian national self.9 These literary projects were mirrored in ethnographic projects with even greater significance for Bulgarian nationalist claims and practices.

The quest for defining the Bulgarian national self was part and parcel of territorial claims which dominated Bulgarian politics until the conclusive "second national catastrophe" following World War II. Like other fledgling Balkan nations and their Great Power patrons, Bulgaria initiated highly politicized ethnographic projects which drew "scientific" conclusions about the populations within and outside its borders. Certainly, proving the "Bulgarian-ness" of Macedonian Slavs was most central to the Bulgarian imagined ethnographic map of the Balkans. Yet this project intimately involved the Muslim populations of the "Bulgarian lands." In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Supported by the Imperial Russian Academy of Sciences, Stoyu Shishkov embarked on a in depth study of the so-called "Pomaks" - Slavic-speaking Muslims of Southern Bulgaria. Shishkov, in his pioneering ethnographic study of the scattered Pomak villages of "Southern Bulgaria," posited and scientifically "proved" the "Bulgarian-ness" of this partially "Turkified" and "Islamicized" group. According to Shishkov, the geographically contiguous "Turks" were also the product of "Ottoman assimilation politics" but had perhaps irretrievably lost their Bulgarian heritage. In contrast, the Pomaks "who spoke the most pure dialect of old-Slavic" were Bulgarians in the "purest" sense and because they were scattered throughout Macedonia and Thrace bolstered Bulgarian claims to these territories.[l0] The implied ancestral "Bulgarian-ness" of both Pomaks and Turks did much to complicate the Bulgarian nationalist projects to follow as the Muslim minorities within became unruly symbols of both victims of Ottoman oppression and perpetrator of historical crimes.

Thus, the nineteenth and early twentieth century Bulgarian national imagination was by no means an anti-Turkish monolith in theory or practice. Acceptance, rejection, tolerance, and intolerance coexisted and competed for a place in evolving Bulgarian sentiments and the imperatives of national modernization projects. In the subsequent Communist period, the theoretical and practical project of nation-building was embarked upon with the fickle but uncompromising tools of nation building, imparted by the Soviet Union.