U.S. English Foundation Research

BULGARIA

Language Research

A Slavic state, Bulgaria achieved independence in 1908 after 500 years of Ottoman rule. Bulgaria fought on the losing side in both World Wars. It fell within the Soviet sphere of influence after World War II. Communist domination ended in 1991 with the dissolution of the USSR, and Bulgaria began the contentious process of moving toward political democracy and a market economy. In addition to the problems of structural economic reform, particularly privatization, Bulgaria faces the serious issues of keeping inflation under control, unemployment, combating corruption and curbing black-market and mafia-style crime.

In the Bulgarian Constitution the term minority is not used; instead minorities are referred to as "citizens whose mother tongue is not Bulgarian".

ROMA

A Large number of Roma arrived in the present day Bulgaria during the 13th and the 14th century. They came from the East and moved westward. According to "reasonably authenticated sources," the Roma were first recorded to be present in the Rila Monastery, Bulgaria, in 1378. By the end of the 14th century, Roma had already established settlements in Bulgaria and throughout the Balkans. Although some theories argue for a much earlier settlement of Roma groups in Bulgaria (8th - 9th century), they are not convincing and are usually dismissed by specialists.

Some Roma specialists argue that there were documents available from 1422 and from 1630 that testified as to the Indian origin of the Romany language. According to other interpretations, the Romany language was unknown to the Europeans when they first came in close contact with the Roma in the middle Ages. The Roma's nomadic way of life made them a great mystery to the local populations, and their language was one of those "mysteries" about them. It was not until the 18th century that the Indian origin of the Romany was discovered. It is interesting to note that the linguistic origins of their language have been used to determine the origin and migration of Roma themselves. The Roma is believed to have originated from the city of Kanauj of Northern India. Due to the extremely great number of language strata, dialects, sub-dialects and geographic divisions, some of its characteristics remain unknown to linguists even today.

Roma are present throughout Bulgaria, in both rural and urban areas. Areas where the Roma population constitutes more than 5% of the population are the districts of Vidin, Montana, Pazardzhik. Sliven, Stara Zagora, Dobrich, Turgovishte and Shumen. Only 3.7% (313,396) of the Bulgarian population identifies itself as "Roma by ethnicity" according to the Census of 1992.

AROMANIAN (VLACH)

In Bulgaria, the Aromanian communities (some 2,000 or 3,000 people) live in the south, and some more in the capital city of Sofia. These communities are not to be confused with ethnic Romanians living in the north of the country, numbering some 20,000 or 30,000 people.

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Updated (May 2002)

THE POMAKS

Concentrated in the mountainous region of Thrace in the Rhodope Mountains of Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey, the Pomaks share a linguistic and religious commonality. They are generally considered Slavic-speaking Muslims.

HISTORY

There are numerous theories as to the origin of the term Pomak. Bulgarian historians have several as well. The first theory states that the term Pomak is derived from the word pomagach (helper) describing collaboration with the Ottoman government in order to maintain land rights. A second theory claims that the term comes from pomachamedanci (Islamicized). A third theory connects the colloquial Greek term, Achrjani, which is often used in reference to the Pomaks.

The word can be traced back to its old Slavonic root, aagarjani (infidels). Yet another theory maintains that it is a corruption of the phrase po mâka (by pain [of death]), as Pomaks were Bulgarian Eastern Orthodox Christians, who were allegedly forced to convert to Islam by the Turks during the reign of the Ottoman Empire. According to this tradition, refusal to convert meant a summary execution.

Historically, the Pomaks have been considered undesirable or even outcasts within Bulgarian society. As several interpretations of their name suggest, they were seen as infidels and traitors to their fellow countrymen. When the Communist party came to power shortly after the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire, the Pomaks continued to bear the brunt of their countrymen's onslaughts.

The exodus to Turkey was not the solution for the Pomaks because as ethnic Bulgarians, they tend to share more cultural traits and general way of life with Bulgarian Orthodox Christians. Linguistically, however, in Pomak villages one can hear various dialects of Bulgarian, heavily influenced by Turkish and Greek. Furthermore, though Muslims, the majority of Bulgarian Pomaks speak little or no Turkish except a few words that have been added to their vocabulary over the last five centuries.

The Bulgarian government began to deal with its intercultural dilemma in 1948, when the Communist regime unleashed a number of assimilatory measures aimed at eliminating all minority ethnicities. These included the Turks, Roma, Armenians, Tatars and Pomaks.

The first wave was a resettlement program designed to relocate the Pomak population from Bulgaria's southern border regions. The second major set of measures was aimed at the assimilation of the so-called "national consciousness." In this process, the Communist government forced all Bulgarian Muslims to change their names from Arabic-Islamic names to Slavic-Christian. This process came to be known as "vâzroditelen protses" (the process of rebirth). The government hoped that by adopting conforming names, all non-ethnic Bulgarians would both abandon their former values and beliefs and embrace the Bulgarian "national consciousness" and a value system. This practice was extended to other non-Christian minorities, as well.

Crossing the border regularly (both to graze animals and to maintain contact with relatives) was viewed by the Communist regime as an unacceptable threat to national security. To insure the stability of the borders between Bulgaria and Greece and Turkey in June 1948, the Communists began to remove people whom they considered disloyal to the Communist regime from the border inland.

In 1950's government promised to improve the conditions of the country's Turkish language schools and to widen minority cultural activities. By 1984, the birth rate among the Muslim minorities was at 2.5 percent compared to the zero annual birth rate of the Bulgarians (Bousfield and Ricardson, 1996). Another motivating factor for the forced assimilation was the rising Albanian population and ethnic conflicts in present day Kosovo. Within this historical context the name changing campaign of the Pomaks began in the mid seventies and eighties. Failure to accept the Slavicized version of their Arabic names, Pomaks, Turks and Roma were either killed outright, sent to forced labor camps or deported. Živkov's hard-line methods of resolving Bulgaria's ethnic dilemma nearly cast the country into anarchy and pandemonium.

Source: Shane Jacobs, The plight of the Bulgarian Pomaks, 28 May 2001, http://www.ce-review.org/01/19/jacobs19.html

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Updated (March 2003)

The Bulgarian state was created after the 1878 Russian-Turkish war. The 1878 Treaty of Berlin guaranteed interests of the ethnic Turks, Romanians, Greeks and other ethnic groups living together in Bulgaria.

In the first years after the Liberation, the curricula of all private schools offered broad opportunities to study in a mother tongue. This policy had changed gradually since the beginning of the century and in the mid 1920s, compulsory Bulgarian-language education was introduced for a number of subjects also in minority schools.

The biggest ethnic minorities those days were Turks, Greeks and Roma. From the Liberation to World War II, the Kingdom of Bulgaria was involved in four population exchanges, all connected either with eviction of non-Bulgarians or their "exchange" for Bulgarians living abroad. These steps significantly reduced the numbers of Turks, Greeks, Romanians and Germans in the country.

The 1920s and 1940s witnessed name changes of the Bulgarian Muslims, which were both violent and unsuccessful.

As a result of World War II, many Bulgarian Jews emigrated to Israel (1948-1953). Several other minorities were either uprooted or substantially reduced through population transfers (15,000 Armenians, 2,000 Czechs and Slovaks, 100-200 Serbs). Despite three exoduses, in 1950-1951, 1969-1978 and 1989, Bulgarian Turks have remained the largest minority community in the country.

During its first years, the communist regime promoted ethnic identity of some minorities; however, the situation changed since the 50s, when it abandoned its "internationalist" policy. One of the first signs of repression came in 1948, when the government issued two decrees dealing with resettlement of the Bulgarian Muslims from the districts along the Bulgarian-Greek border to Northern Bulgaria. In 1958, the resolution to merge Turkish and Bulgarian schools was adopted, thus initiating their eventual "bulgarization" achieved in 1984-1985.

In 1984, publication of bilingual national periodicals stopped and since then newspapers and magazines were published only in Bulgarian.

After changing names of the Bulgarian-speaking Muslims (completed by 1973), the attention focused on the names and identity of the Bulgarian Turks. Between 1984 and 1985, the government forcibly renamed more than 850,000 Turks and some Muslim Roma with the explicit aim - to "bulgarize" them. Since the police and special troops were largely involved in these persuasion procedures almost 350,000 Turks escaped to Turkey in 1989. About 100,000 of them returned to the country after the fall of the communist regime in November 1989.

As for Roma, the communist policies were just as erratic. After encouraging Roma organizations, press and culture in the late 1940s and early 1950s, in the 60s, all Roma institutions were either closed down or radically reformed. A 1958 decree forced nomadic Roma to settle down. A gradual process of name changes of Muslim Roma started in the 1950s and was finalized in 1984-85.

Still, the most controversial was the policy aimed at the Macedonian minority living in Bulgaria. In the 1940s and 50s, the Communist Party neither opposed nor encouraged inculcation of Macedonian self-awareness in Pirin Region. However, in the mid-1950s, this policy dramatically reversed and authorities refused to recognize Macedonian identity not only in Bulgaria, but also in the neighboring Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia. The number of Macedonians dropped from 169,544 in the 1946 Census to 9,632 in the 1965 Census (Macedonians were not included in the 1992 Census). In the 1960s and 70s, there was a number of political trials of people charged with activities based on "Macedonian nationalism."

After the fall of the communist system in Bulgaria in 1989, an effort to restore ethnic and religious rights of the country's main minority communities was observed. In late 1989, the Bulgarian Communist Party resolved to restore the names of all people forcibly renamed and to amnesty those persecuted in connection with the forced name changes. Legal and political obstacles to establish cultural and educational associations, professional organizations, and drama companies of minority communities were removed. Turks, Armenians, Roma, Jews, Karakachani and Vlachs registered their own cultural organizations. In 1998, Macedonians finally managed to register their Traditional Macedonian Organization Ilinden. In 1999, the United Macedonian Organization PIRIN was registered as a political party by the Sofia city court.

Source: Minority Rights in Bulgaria by the Bulgarian Helsinki Committee, September 1999, http://www.ihf-hr.org/reports/Minoroties/Bulgariafin.pdf

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