User:Nostradamus1/Turks in Bulgaria
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[edit] January 1878
As Russian forces pushed south in January 1878, the troops, the Bulgarian volunteers, and the emboldened local Bulgarian villagers inflicted a welter of atrocities on the local Muslim population. Some 260,000 Muslims perished in the war's carnage, and over 500,000 refugees fled with the retreating Ottoman forces.
[edit] A
The problem of the Turkish minority in Bulgaria continued into the 1980s. Because birth rates among the Turks remained relatively high while Bulgarians approached a zero-growth birth rate in 1980, Bulgarian authorities sought to mitigate the impact of growing Turkish enclaves in certain regions. While Bulgaria discontinued its liberal 1969 emigration agreement with Turkey (presumably to prevent a shortage of unskilled labor resulting from free movement of Turkish workers back to their homeland), in 1984 Bulgaria began a massive campaign to erase the national identity of Turkish citizens by forcing them to take Bulgarian names. Official propaganda justified forced assimilation with the assertion that the only "Turks" in Bulgaria were descended from the Bulgarians who had adopted Islam after the Ottoman occupation in the fourteenth century. This campaign brought several negative results. Bulgaria's international image, already damaged by events in the early 1980s, now included official discrimination against the country's largest ethnic minority. The resumption of terrorist attacks on civilians, absent for many years, coincided with the new policy. And Bulgaria's relations with Turkey, which had improved somewhat after a visit by Turkish President Kenan Evren to Bulgaria in 1982, suffered another setback.
[edit] The Chervenkov Years
Chervenkov’s suspicion of external, non-Soviet elements, and his Stalinist determination to limit diversity at home, were combined in his attitude towards Bulgaria’s small minority groups. The Pirin Macedonian problem had shown what embarrassment could be caused by foreign claims upon Bulgarian citizens, but Yugoslav claims on Pirin could be rejected on the grounds that its populace was Bulgarian by race. No such claim could be made for the Jews, Armenians and the Turks resident in the country. Chervenkov therefore allowed the Jews to leave, although this was in contradiction of the anti-Israel policies adopted in Moscow. Neither Jews not Armenians were numerous enough to constitute a serious minority problem, but this was not the case with the Turks. The 1925 agreement with Atatürk had allowed for a trickle of emigration, but in January 1950 the Bulgarian government announced that it would allow a quarter of a million Bulgarian Turks to leave for Turkey. The Turkish authorities protested vehemently. The condition of those entering Turkey was deplorable, said Ankara, and included amongst theme were a number of gypsies who were as unwelcome in Turkey as they were in Bulgaria. In September the border was closed until an agreement later in the year, by which the Turkish side would accept 650 emigrants per day. By 1952, when the border was again closed, some 162,000 Turks had left Bulgaria. The sudden explosion of the emigration issue was directly connected with the collectivization programme, for many Turks who left were from Dobruja and the grain-growing areas of the north-east, which the Chervenkov regime was particularly anxious to bring into the collectivized system. After 1952 softer policies towards the minority groups meant that the question disappeared into the background until the mid-1980s. (A Short history og Modern Bulgaria pp.174)
[edit] Zhivkov years
A marked improvement in relations between Bulgaria and Turkey was noticeable in the late 1960s. An agreement facilitating the emigration of some Turks of Bulgaria was signed in October 1969, and in 1976 Zhivkov became the first Bulgarian leader since the war to visit Turkey. By 1979 50,000 Turks had left Bulgaria under the terms of the 1969 agreement, the non-reneval of which proved to be a pointer to a serious deterioration of Bulgaro-Turkish relations in the mid-1980s.
[edit] Bulgarianization
A long term problem which preoccupies many Bulgarians is that of demography. According to the 1965 census Bulgaria had more centenarians than any other state, but if this were a cause for self-congratulation, the picture at the other end of the age pyramid was very different. In 1939 population growth had been 1.5 per cent per annum, but in 1974 it was 0.74 per cent and in 1981 a mere 0.3 per cent. If present trends continue Bulgaria will have a zero or even negative population growth rate by 1995 at the latest.
It is generally assumed that the decline in the birth rate is more marked amongst Bulgarians than amongst the Turks and particularly the gypsies; in 1970, when the national population growth rate was 0.72 per cent, that in the Tolbukhin province with its large proportion of Turks was 1.21 per cent. Fear of these differential growth rates may have prompted the policy recently introduced by the authorities of insisting that the Turks assume Bulgarian names. In 1940, when Turkish names of towns and villages were Bulgarianized, the authorities deemed it unnecessary or unwise to insist upon changes in personal names, but in 1981 national identity was deleted as an item on internal Bulgarian passports, and in 1984, no doubt with the December 1985 census in view, a fierce and often insensitive campaign was launched in areas with a large proportion of Turks to force ethnic Turks to Bulgarianize their names; in 1985 perhaps fifty Turks lost their lives in this campaign. Publication of Turkish-language sections in newspapers ceased, and high-ranking party and government officials toured the country making such idiotic assertions as that the ‘Turks’ of Bulgaria had never in fact been Turks, but were Bulgarians who had been Turkified immediately after the Ottoman conquest. Why this policy was adopted is difficult to understand, notwithstanding the 1971 party programme’s call for the creation of a ‘unified socialist state’. It has been suggested that the elimination of Muslim names will harm Islam, in which name-taking is an integral part of an individual’s religious maturation; the desire to weaken Islam, the argument continues, derives from the belief that so conservative a faith will hamper the rapid adoption of the new technology. This argument is less bizarre when viewed in the context of the fervour with which the scientific-technological revolution is being promoted in contemporary Bulgaria. The easy escape from Turkish minority problem might have been to continue the emigration agreement of 1969, but this was decided against , probably because of the need to retain sources of unskilled manual labor. As matters stand the affair of the Turkish minority seems to have earned the Bulgarian regime a good deal of needless and unwelcome international publicity for little or no apparent purpose.
It has been suggested that discontented Turks were responsible for the extraordinary terrorist attacks which affected Bulgaria in 1984 and 1985. On 30 August 1984 bombs exploded in the railway station at Plovdiv and at the airport in Varna; on that day Zhivkov traveled between the two cities. There were also reports that shortly after the explosions fly-sheets promising ‘Forty Years: Forty Bombs’ appeared in the streets of a number of Bulgarian cities. On 9 March 1985 seven people died in a suspicious fire on a Bulgarian train, and later in the same month the chief prosecutor, when introducing new and more stringent anti-terrorist regulations, admitted to the Subranie that thirty deaths had been caused by such acts of violence in the preceding year. Apart from the very dubious hints at Turkish complicity there is as yet no indication as to who might be responsible for these outrages. (A Short history og Modern Bulgaria pp.206)
[edit] Ottoman Rule
The vigorous and self-righteous Christians of the Victorian era created the impression that their co-religionists under Ottoman domination had suffered continual persecution for 500 years. It was not so. Ottoman history is certainly not free from terrible incidents of hideous outrage, but in Europe these were occasional. Many, if not most, followed acts of rebellion and if this does not excuse the excess it perhaps goes some way to explain it. Other outbursts were spontaneous, localized and random, the result usually of a peculiar combination of personal, political, social or economic factors. It would be unwise to imagine the Ottoman regime as some form of lost, multi-cultural paradise, but on the other hand it would also be wrong to deny that as some periods in its history the empire assured for all its subjects, irrespective of religion, stability and a reasonable degree of prosperity. (A Concise history of Bulgaria, pp30)
[edit] Ethnic and Social Change After the Liberation
Before the outbreak of the April Uprising about a third of the population of what was to become Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia were ethnic Turks, almost all of whom were Muslim. The atrocities of 1876 naturally created amongst the Christian Bulgarians an urge to take revenge. A number of Muslims fled during the conflict and there was some destruction of Muslim buildings and cultural centers; a large library of old Turkish books was destroyed when a mosque in Turnovo was burned in 1877, and Sofia, which one Russian soldier had described as a ‘forest of minarets’, lost most of its mosques, seven of the in one night in December 1878 when a thunderstorm masked the noise of the explosions arranged by Russian military engineers. In the countryside a number of Turkish villages were burned and there were many instances of ethnic Turks being driven from land which was coveted by local Bulgarians.
Such events are the depressing feature of wars in the Balkans and elsewhere, but they were not repeated in peacetime Bulgaria. The treaty of Berlin insisted upon freedom of worship for all faiths and outlawed discrimination on the basis of religion. It also guaranteed the property rights of Muslims who chose to reside outside the principality whilst retaining land within it.
After 1878 Bulgaria and Eastern Rumelia abided by the letter of these international laws. But no amount of legislation could prevent Muslim emigration from both areas. There was some cultural pressure on Muslims. A decree of the Russian Provisional Administration, for example, had declared the rice-paddies of the Maritsa valley a health hazard because they were breeding grounds for malaria-carrying mosquitoes. This was no doubt true but Muslims could not help but see the decree as an attempt to make more difficult the growing of their staple food.
More important were laws regulating land tenures and taxation. Regulations affecting land unworked for three years, a period later extended, meant that absentee Turks forfeited their property, whilst in Eastern Rumelia in 1882 the imposition of tax on land owned rather than on the produce it yielded again hit many Muslim landowners; they were accustomed to leave part of their land fallow and if taxes were levied only on produce this had no financial penalty which obviously did have when a tax based on ownership increased the amount to be paid without any compensating increase in the amount earned. Many of the Muslims left simply because they could not adjust psychologically to living in a Christian state and society. Many Muslims resented the fact that a number of mosques were taken from them. Some of these were reverting to Christian places of worship, but others were given over to secular usage; some became storehouses, one a printing house, and one even a prison. Even more distressful to many Muslim families was conscription into a Christian army. Muslim soldiers did not have to wear the cross on their uniforms but they do have to obey Christian officers, observe Christian festivals, and in many cases eat Christian food. In later years exemption from military service for Muslims was made easier but conscription was in force for the first ten years after 1878, a time of maximum disorientation and demoralization for the Turkish and Muslim population. This makes the loyalty and courage of the Turks during the war of 1885 all the more remarkable.
Many Muslims, however, had not stayed long enough in Bulgaria to be involved in that war. There was a steady stream of emigration and by 1900 the Turkish element, as measured by mother tongue, had declined form about 33 percent in 1875 to 14 percent of the total population. In absolute terms the Turks were 728,000 in 1880/4 (the figures being for the principality in 1880 and Rumelia in 1884) but only 540,000 in 1900. In the same years the number of Greeks had increased from 53,000 to 71,000.
[edit] Under Communist Rule
After 1971 party programme had called for the creation of a unified socialist nation the assimilationist pressures on the gypsies and on other minorities increased. In the early 1970 pomaks who had become Turkified were required to adopt Slav names, and those who did not were punished; in 1974 500 of the 1,300 inmates of the notorious Belene labour camp were Pomaks who had resisted pressure to change their names. The Turks were not yet put under such pressure but increased emigration was encouraged. In 1968 Bulgaria and Turkey signed an agreement allowing for the reunification in Turkey of families separated by the exodus of the early 1950s. In the ten years during which the agreement remained in force some 130,000 Turks left Bulgaria.
Zhivkov regime was facing unprecedented challenges and these were made much more serious by the continuing legacy of the regenerative process which was to dominate the fateful spring and summer of 1989. By the late spring the oppressed Turkish minority had found its champions amongst the Bulgarian intelligentsia. In late May, shortly before the Paris meeting of the CSCE, a number of leading Turks began a hunger strike. Within days there was a confrontation and when Zhivkov on 28 May called a meeting of the politburo on a Sunday it was clear that the leadership was seriously concerned. They had every reason to be. The Turkish areas of the north-east were in a state of virtual revolt. Zhivkov’s response was to go on TV and announce that if they really preferred capitalist Turkey to socialist Bulgaria the ethnic Turks were free to leave. Zhivkov seems to have believed that this would call the Turks’ bluff and that few would emigrate. He was wrong. By August, when the despairing authorities in Turkey itself closed its borders some 344,000 ethnic Turks had left Bulgaria. Emigration on such a massive scale clearly created difficulties with the Turkish republic. President Bush promised backing to Ankara but Moscow informed Bulgaria that it did not wish to become involved in Bulgaria’s national question. Zhivkov was isolated internationally. On November 10, the day after the Berlin Wall was breached, Zhivkov resigned.
In 1992 relations between president Zhelev and the governing UDF party were bad. There had been intermittent skirmishes over issues such as the control of the intelligence services but in the late summer of 1992 the president launched an outright attack on the government. Gratuitous aggression on its part, said Zhelev, had only alienated the trade unions, the press, the non-parliamentary parties, and even the church. The UDF fought back with equal vigor but it now had an added cause for concern because Ahmet Dogan, the leader of the MRF, upon which the government relied for its majority in the assembly, sided with the president. The MRF itself faced grave difficulties. The government’s economic reforms had hit the Turkish areas even harder than the rest of the country, and many Turks believed the land privatization program was discriminating against them; they responded by emigrating. If this second wave of emigration were to continue the Turkish population might be so depleted as to deprive MRF of the 4 per cent of the national vote it needed for representation in the subranie. In September the MRF , to prove its muscle, drove the chairman of the subranie from office.
The internal administration of Eastern Rumelia, it had been decided in Berlin, was to be under the control of a governor general but he was to rule through an elected assembly whilst a permanent council of that assembly was to function as a form of cabinet. It had been intended by the Berlin powers that the permanent council would contain representatives of the Turkish and Greek minorities in Rumelia and an elaborate system of proportional representation had been devised for when the regional assembly elected the permanent council from its membership. These plans were scuppered by one Bulgarian deputy, Ivan Salabashev, who had a doctorate in mathematics from Prague. He lectured, drilled and rehearsed his colleagues so effectively that when the vote was held all posts in their council were taken by Bulgarians. Though minority rights were safeguarded in Rumelia the election of a purely Bulgarian permanent council meant that the province’s political machinery was entirely in Bulgarian hands.
[edit] Establishment of Bulgarian Political Supremacy in Eastern Rumelia
The great powers whose representatives had designed Organic Statute had forseen the problem of the minority races and had taken steps to protect them. In local government the two regions and twelve districts of the Turkish system were replaced by six provinces and twenty-eight cantons in the hope that these smaller units would better represent minority interests; the religious leaders of all the main communities were among the ten ‘’ex offico’’ members of the Regional Assembly; and the Greek, Bulgarian and Turkish languages were to be equal in all public debates and publications. The powers also hoped that all groups would be represented in the Standing Committee of the Assembly and to achieve this objective they arranged for that committee to be elected by proportional representation to ensure the election of at least four non-Bulgarians. One prominent Bulgarian, Ivan Salabashev, had other ideas. He also had a doctorate in mathematics from Prague and thus armed he showed his fellow Bulgarians how they could elect more than six members, even staging a mock poll to convince the doubters in the ranks. He succeeded and proved that even in Rumelian politics knowledge was power for all but two of the ten chosen were Bulgarian. This was but one sign that the Bulgarians were going to secure complete political domination in Rumelia without serious opposition from the Turks and the Greeks. A further indication was Aleko Pasha’s nomination of Bulgarian prefects in all six provinces and the appointment, without complaint from the other groups, of Bulgarians to many posts in the administration. Bulgarian political supremacy was finally and irrevocably established in the elections to the Regional Assembly in October 1879 for of the thirty-six elected deputies thirty-one were Bulgarian. The speech from the Governor General was delivered in Greek, Turkish, and somewhat halting Bulgarian. The reply to the address was in Bulgarian only. Bulgarian political ascendancy had been established and it was not contested either within Rumelia or by any of the powers.
Now reassured that their autonomy within the province would be real the Bulgarians in Rumelia set about securing domination within the political machinery of the province. The presumed obstacles to this domination were the resident Turks and Greeks. Figures compiled by the Russian Provisional Administration showed that the province’s 815,000 inhabitants 70%, or 573,000 were Bulgarian, 21.4 (175,000) were Turkish and 5.2% (42,500) were Greek, the remainder being Gypsies, Armenians, Jews and others. The potential power of the Turkish element lay in their previous ruling position and the backing they could expect from the Sultan and his supporters in Europe. The Turkish question was also complicated because many Turks who had previously played an influential tome in southern Bulgaria and who had fled before the Russian army in 1877-8 were now returning to their former homes no doubt expecting also a restoration of their former influence in local affairs. The Turks were supported by the other large minority group, the Greeks. The Greeks do not accept the statistics provided by the Russians, though no-one could doubt the overall numerical superiority of the Bulgarians.
[edit] Bulgaria Before the Liberation of 1878
In the mid 13th century the Second Bulgarian Empire dominated the Balkan Peninsula. By the end of the following century factional divisions between Bulgarian feudal landlords had gravely weakened the cohesion of the Empire which therefore collapsed before the invading Ottoman armies in the 1390s. The Bulgarians, most of whom lived in the quadrilateral contained by the Danube, the Aegean coast of Thrace, the Black Sea and the valley of the Vardar in the west, now entered upon five hundred years of Ottoman domination. Bulgarian institutions at anything above the village or communal level were dismantled and the separate Bulgarian Church was merged into the Orthodox Patriarchate in Constantinople (Istanbul), although a small, semi-independent Bulgarian Church did survive until 1767. The conquerors also assumed virtual ownership of the land, though legal ownership was vested in Allah’s representative on earth, the Sultan. The function of the new tenurial system imposed by the Turks was to provide the Ottoman army with cavalry troops, the sipahi or land-lord being required to provide a number of men proportionate to amount of land held. He was maintained economically by this tenants, or rayahs. For the Bulgarian peasant the new system offered greater security than the old Bulgarian Empire had been able to provide and exceptional privileges were enjoyed by peasants living on ‘’vakif’’ land, that is land whose income had been permanently entailed for the upkeep of a religious or charitable institution. Such privileges were the right of all tenants, Christian or Moslem who lived on vakif land, but in general the Christian subjects of the Sultan had to endure a number of disabilities; they usually paid more taxes than Moslems, they were not given legal equality with Moslems, they could not carry arms, their clothes could not be as colorful as those of the Moslems nor could their churches be as high as mosques. The new rulers made few attempts to enforce conversion to Islam and relatively few Bulgarians were attracted to the new ruling faith by the legal privileges its adherents enjoyed. Those who did convert, the Pomaks, retained their native language, dress and customs, and were to be found primarily in the Rhodope mountains.
The Ottoman system at its height did much to protect the rayah but by the 17th century the system was in decline and at the end of the 18th had all but collapsed. Central government had been weakening for decades and this had allowed a number of local adventurers and free-booters to establish personal ascendancy over separate regions. These local ‘’ayans’’ employed armed retainers and having established their authority frequently imposed new and far more arduous tenancies on the peasantry under their control. During the last two decades of the 18th and first decades of the 19th centuries the Balkan Peninsula dissolved into virtual anarchy, a period known in Bulgarian as the ‘’kurdjaliistvo’’ after the armed bands or ‘’kurdjalii’’ who plagued the area at this time. In many regions thousands of peasants fled from the countryside either to local towns or more probably to the hills or forests; some even fled beyond the Danube to Moldova, Wallachia or Southern Russia.
During the Serbo-Bulgarian war of 1885 the main body of the Bulgarian army had moved itself from one end of the country to the other with little help from modern technology. Despite this the army, poorly clad and shod, covered between forty and sixty kilometers a day and not a single deserter was posted. There was no organized commissariat so on its march the army was fed by the local population who in many cases spontaneously set up feeding stations and rest points. Full cooperation was given by all the non-Bulgarian ethnic groups in the country with the exception of the Greeks.
Particularly troublesome was the mayhem caused by the Turkic Pechenegs. Following the conquest of Bulgaria they became the empire’s immediate neighbors in the northeast Balkans. Former Byzantine allies used to harassing the Bulgarians, the Pechenegs saw no reason to cease raiding south of the Danube after the Byzantine victory. Unable to defend its Danubian border adequately, Byzantim enlisted some outlawed Pecheneg rebels to serve as frontier defense troops. Their continuous raiding north of the Danube against the main Pecheneg body sparked a retaliatory invasion of the empire. Although the Pecheneg invaders were defeated and many were captured and used as either mercenary frontier guards or settlers, the Byzantines found themselves with a large and unruly horde of Turkic nomads within their borders. The ineffectual Emperor Constantine Monomachos let himself be drawn into the continued squabble between the former rebels and the main branch of Pechenegs with unfortunate results. His intervention in Pecheneg affairs served only to unite them in rebellion against imperial authority. Theree Byzantine armies led by inept courtiers met defeat at the hands of the rebel Pechenegs, who proceeded to pillage and plunder Thrace and Moesia with impunity. Only after mercenary units composed of Vanagian(Rus) imperial guardsmen and Anatolian mountaineers finally defeated a large Pecheneg force did the rebellion officially end in 1052. Pecheneg raiding and brigandage, however, continued for decades afterward, causing untold economic disruption in the Balkans and forcing the government to make repeated extortion payments in return for protection of peace.The establishment of Pechenegs within the empire also had repercussions for Byzantine foreing relations. When the now-resident Pechenegs began raiding northwar into Hungary, the Magyars retaliated by attacking Byzantium in 1059. Although peace was swiftly restored, continued Pecheneg incursions into Magyar territories led the Magyars to attack the empire again in the late 1060s, which resulted in their capturing several Danubian cities. A thirg Magyar attack in the early 1070s, for the same reasons, ended with the Hungarians briefly in possession of Belgrade and firlmy in control of eastern Slavonia. To add to the Byzantines’ woes, during the mid-1060s a new Turkic steppe nomadic people – the Oghuz- crossed the Danube into the empire and proceeded to ravage Moesia, Thrace, Macedonia, and northern regions of Greece. An outbreak of plague struck down many of the invaders, causing the survivors either to flee or to join the imperial forces as mercenaries. The Oghuz had been pushed into the Balkans by yet another group of Turkic steppe people, the Cumans. They waited in the steppe-country wings north of the Danube delta for a future opportunity to raid the empire.
Alexion Komnenos’ faced renewed Pecheneg problems in the central and north eastern Balkans during the late 1080s and early 1090s. He resorted to an alliance with the Cumans, who controlled the plains north of the Danube, to finally destroy the Pecheneg thread, but such action left the empire vulnerable to Cuman incursions. Those developments, coupled with the Seljuk Turks’ occupation of most of Anatolia, placed the Byzantine Empire in dire straits. In desperation, Alexios wrote to the pope in 1090 requesting Western mercenary troops to help bolster his faltering military. Pope Urban II used Alexios’s letter to strengthen the papacy’s temporal authority in the West by placing the pope at the head of a Christian crusading movement against the East. As a result, Alexios received more than he bargained for.
[edit] Establishment of the Second Bulgarian Empire
In 1185 Byzantine Emperor Isaac Angelos levied a special tax in the territories formerly occupied by Hungarian king Bela III to pay for his grandiose wedding to Bela’s daughter, which had been part of the agreement for Hungarian withdrawal. The Vlahs living in the Balkan Mountains refused to pay. At the same time, two Bulgarian notables and brother, Petur and Ivan Asen, arrived in Isaac’s camp seeking a ‘’pronoia’’ grant in that region. Isaac refused their request in an insulting fashion, and the brothers returned to their home in Turnovo bent on revenge. They issued a call for revolt that shrewdly allied to their cause the Orthodox religious cult of St. Demetrios, the traditional protector of Thessaloniki, venerated by Orthodox inhabitants throughout the Balkans. By appealing to the cult sentiments of both Bulgarians and Vlahs, the brothers were able to unite two populations that shared a common pastoral existence but were separated by different languages and traditions.
By proclaiming the favor of the popular saint, the Asen brothers successfully stirred up a widespread rebellion of Bulgarians and mountain Vlahs. Although Vlahs initially played a leading role in the revolt’s early stages (Petur and Ivan even may have been ethnic Vlahs themselves), they rapidly were superseded by Bulgarians, whose imperial traditions the brothers adopted – Petur Asen assumed the title and regalia of Bulgarian tsar in Turnovo. The rebellion sunk roots in the Balkan Mountains and spread to Bulgarian peasant villages in Moesia. Popular discontent with high taxes and proliferating dues and tithes imposed by the Byzantine authorities swelled the rebels’ ranks.
Isaac took a year to begin dealing with the Asens’ rebellion. In 1186 he marched north and defeated the brothers in battle; they fled beyond the Danube and took refuge with the Cumans in Wallachia. After winning the support of thos e warriors, the brothers returned with a Cuman army in tow and reestablished themselves. The Cumans commenced raiding into Byzantine Thrace and along the Black Sea coastline. Isaac’s efforts to repeat his former vistory proved fruitless, and in 1188 he was constrained to recognize an independent Bulgarian state that included Moesia and Dobruja, which the Asens governed from Turnovo. The Cumans’ Wallachian holdings fell under nominal Bulgarian control.
The Second Bulgarian Empire was modeled heavily on Byzantium. Byzantine administrative and landholding systems operating at the time of the rebellion were retained, but the statewide centralization characteristic of Byzantium’s bureaucracy could not be implemented completely. The new Bulgarian bolyar class was drawn from the rebel leadership, augmented by the brothers’ direct appointees. Many were Cumans while others were service nobles.
The success of the Bulgarian uprising signaled Byzantine military decline. The empire barely managed to retain the regions around Adrianople and Plovdiv against Bulgarian and Cuman raids. Ivan Asen was murdered by one of his bolyars, as was his brother Petur II Asen in 1196-7). Rule passed to the youngest Asen brother Kaloyan. In 1201 Kaloyan lost his primary military support when the Cumans were defeated by the Russians of Galich and was forced to sign an agreement with Emperor Alexios III.
13th century The Mongol-Tatars of the Golden Horde, having devastated Bulgaria during the 1240s, conducted nearly annual raids into Bulgaria, extorting tribute and causing widespread disruption. Reduced to tributary status by the Mongol-Tatars and cursed with weak central leadership after Ivan II’s death, Bulgaria fell prey to growing disaffection among its regional bolyars. The Asen dynasty came to an ignominious end with the overthrow and death of Koloman II Asen (1256) at the hands of bolyar rebels form the Belgrade regions.
[edit] Era of Ottoman Domination
In less than 150 years following their first permanent settlement in Europe, the militantly Islamic Ottoman Turks came to dominate most of the Balkan Peninsula and emerged as major players in general European affairs. During the early 16th century the Ottomans pushed beyond the Balkans, conquering Hungary and threatening Habsburg Vienna at the very heart of Central Europe. By that time the Balkan states of Byzantium, Bulgaria, Serbia, and Bosnia had been destroyed and the Romanian Principalities reduced to Turkish vassal clientage. The conquered Christian populations of the Balkans were submerged in a powerful, highly centralized, theocratic imperial state grounded in the precepts of Islamic civilization and Turkic traditions. While the subject Christians were reduced to second-class status in Ottoman society, those precepts and traditions offered them a certain measure of religious toleration, administrative autonomy, and economic well-being that was exceptional for non-aristocratic society in the rest of Europe. That condition changed during the 17th century, when the effects of Western European technological developments and global exploration began to inflict consistent military defeats and economic hardships on the Turks, resulting in the destabilization of Ottoman society and a progressive worsening in the overall situation of the Ottomans’ non-Muslim subjects that continued though the 18th century.
As the Ottomans’ victories in the Balkans multiplied, increasing number of Anatolian warriors flocked to their ranks, and their territorial conquests grew. In the wake of the advancing armies arrived a steady stream of settlers from the Ottomans’ cosmopolitan border society in Anatolia. Many came voluntarily, seeking new lives in a new land, settling in the cities and countrysides of the newly won territories. Some, such as the more nomadic pastoral tribes (termed yürüks), were colonized at the sultans’ orders in regions depopulated by decades of warfare or to secure and protect strategic lines of communication. As Ottoman territory in the Balkans expanded, the new arrivals provided both a ready recruitment pool for the larger army needed to serve on the borders and a demographic base to ensure firm Ottoman control.
Once Orhan decided to pursue holy war against the Christians in Europe, Anatolian Turks were settled in and around Gallipoli to secure it as a springboard for military operations in Thrace against the Byzantines and Bulgarians. Most of eastern Thrace was overrun by Ottoman forces within a decade and permanently brought under Orhan’s control by means of heavy Turkish colonization.
[edit] The ottoman system
[edit] Converts to Islam
[edit] Persistent Nationalism
Bulgaria was the most ethnically homogeneous Balkan Communist state. Its only minority of any consequence was religious – Muslim. Approximately 10 percent of the population were Muslim Turkish speakers and Pomaks. Bulgaria’s failures to win national territorial expansion in the Balkan and world wars resulted in rising pressures for assimilating the Muslim minority and strengthening the domestic national base for anticipated future efforts in Macedonia, to which the new Communist leaders were not immune.
Georgi Dimitrov’s regime granted Muslims representation in the legislature, encouraged their participation in local Communist administrations, and founded bilingual media, but such efforts ended after Communists no longer required Muslims’ support for solidifying their takeover. In the late 1940s the Islamic religion and Turksih-language schools were subjected to state regulation. The 1950s collectivization drive in predominantly Muslim-inhabited tobacco-growing regions was an escalation of official anti-Muslim policy, with Muslims compelled either to emigrate or to have their property confiscated. The situation degenerated into the forced emigration of over 150,000 Turks and Pomaks to Turkey (1950-51). The émigrés arrived at the frontier at such numbers and poverty that Turkey, unable to handle the situation adequately, closed its borders. The miserable refugee camps caused an international scandal, and rising international diplomatic pressures convinced the Communists to ease their collectivization policies.
In the situation’s immediate aftermath, the Communists made token efforts to salve Muslim sensibilities to limit the harm done the important Bulgarian tobacco industry by emigration. Assimilation pressures on the Muslims continued: To change Turko-Arabic to Slavic names; to cease attending mosques; to adopt modern dress; and to renounce numerous religious practices. Bulgaria and Turkey worked out a bilateral emigration agreement (1968) permitting a controlled number of Turks to leave for Turkey (some 130,000 between 1969 and 1977). Those Muslims who remained (their numbers kept relatively large by a high birth rate) experienced continued discrimination.
With Bulgaria’s planned economy stagnating and the population’s living standard declining, by the mid-1980s Todor Zhivkov’s regime was on the brink of losing governing validity. Zhivkov decided to intensify anti-Muslim assimilation efforts to foment the Slavic majority’s traditional anti-Turk nationalistic sentiments in his favor. An official “unity of the Bulgarian nation” campaign was enacted (1985). Academics were used to justify forced name changes among Muslims by claiming that Bulgaria’s Turks were not ethnically Turkish but, rather, descendants of “forcibly” converted Ottoman-era Slavs. Through mass intimidation, Slavic(Christian) names replaced Turko-Arabic(Muslim) ones in all official documents, the public and private use of the Turkish language was proscribed, all public Islamic rituals banned, and numerous mosques were demolished.
In desparate self-defense, many Muslims took up armed resistance, and jailed Muslim leaders staged hunger strikes. Whole Muslim-inhabited regions came under martial law. By 1989 the situation was tense. Zhivkov cam under grooving diplomatic pressure to resolve the problem. Domestically, the situation crippled economic activity and eroded the regime’s credibility even further among a growing number of dissident intellectuals. The Communists tried to end the affair definitively by expelling most of the Muslim minority. Beginning in May 1989, amid organized, neo-fascist mass public demonstrations in support of “national unity”, some 360,000 Turks were forced to flee to Turkey, under the guise of being granted “tourist” exit visas for “vacations”. The “Muslim/Turkish Problem” played an important role in the collapse of Bulgarian communism later that year.
The ethnic origin of the Turks of Bulgaria had never been disputed since the Bulgarian independence in 1878. However, during the last decade of Communism, different scholars serving the needs of the Communist regime, started to promote the idea that there were no Turks in Bulgaria, but only Turkicised Bulgarians[1]. Since the start of democratic process in Bulgaria after 1989 there have been no further disputes as to the Turkish descent of the Turks of Bulgaria, although the word "Turkish" has proven to be rather complex in terms of variety of identities united under it, especially against the background of the currently acknowledged and dominating historiographic views.
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The Turkish minority in Bulgaria originates from the Turkic tribes, which started to penetrate the Balkan Peninsula and Asia Minor as early as 3rd-4th century. Before that they inhabited the territories formed by the Altay Mountains, Touva, and Western Mongolia, which were then a part of the multiethnic tribal union of the Huns. The Turkic migration to the Balkans is divided into three basic stages. The first invasion stage is locked up between its start in 3rd-4th century, the foundation of the Bulgarian state in 681, and up until the time of the Bulgarian Kingdom’s adoption of Christianity as a state religion in 864, when the Turkic invasion was particularly intensive.
The second penetration stage covers the time of Byzantine rule in Bulgaria (1018-1185), during which period the Turkic Pechenegs, Uzes (Oğuz), and Cumans (Kipchaks) massively invaded and settled into the Bulgarian lands. The third, and most significant, stage of Turkic invasion into the Bulgarian state includes the whole 500-year long Ottoman rule on the Balkans (fourteenth-nineteenth century), when the process of establishing a solid Turkish-Muslim presence on the Peninsula was started and affirmed.
As a result of the disintegration of the Huns’ union in first century AD, different Turkic tribes such as the Avars, Khazars, Bulgars, Souvars, and others, started to consolidate their own Turkic identity, and united by the common language, they found a state in fourth century known as the Great Turkic Khanate. The Khanate ceased to exist when in eighth century the greater part of its Central-Asian territories was occupied by the powerful Arabs, who imposed Islam as a religion together with imposing their government.
The Arab rule over the Turks, however, did not last, and in ninth century the chieftain of the Oghuz Turks, Oghuz, set the foundations of a next independent Turkic state, which thrived for more that two centuries. By eleventh century the Oghuz state was already weak, and the clan of the Seldjuk Turks was gaining strength in its southern parts. Under the Seldjuk Turks’ leadership, a considerable part of the Turkic tribes moved to the south from Central Asia, and founded a state on what is today Iran, Mesopotamia, and the behind-Caucasus territories. After defeating the Byzantine troops at the battle of Manzikert on 19 August 1071, the Seldjuks invaded Asia Minor and penetrated into the Balkans.
Simultaneously, other waves of Turkic tribes, among which the Bulgars (a unifying name for Ogurs, Utigurs, Kutigurs, Onogurs, Kotrags, and others), moved to the North – Northwest after the collapse, first, of the Hunnic union, and, then, of the Great Turkic Haganate, and entered the Balkans through the Danube River. Their invasions to the Peninsula were particularly intensive during seventh century. The dominant view in the contemporary Bulgarian historiography is that the "proto-Bulgarians" (a name into use after the WWII) belonged to the Altaic or the Hunno-Turkic tribal groups.
In sixth century, being in the apogee its political and military might, the Great Turkic Khanate conqueres new territories, including the Azov and Caucasian steppes, which were occupied by Bulgars (proto-Bulgarians) at the time. A century later, the state split into Western and Eastern Khanate, and the Bulgar tribes remained settled in the Western part. Gradually the Bulgars from the areas of the Azov and Caspian Sea, united around the Unogundurian chieftain Kubrat, successfully rebelled against the Khanate, and established an independent state called Great Bulgaria in 632 AD.
After the death of Kubrat, however, the newly founded and still unstable state collapsed and the Bulgar tribes started a new diaspora. Part of them settled permanently on the territories of the former Great Bulgaria; others, under the leadership of Kubrat’s son Kotrag, headed northward and established themselves in the area of the Volga River. Available historical data points out that in tenth century the Kotragian Bulgars adopted Islam as their religion while preserving their Turkic language. Another son of Kubrat, Asparuh, leading about 100,000 (according to others—about 800,000) people, settled in the Danube River’s delta in seventh century, where he has to constantly fight with Byzantium. As a result of more than two-century-long, persistent struggle with the declining Empire, Asparuhian Bulgaria transformed into a well-established medieval kingdom by the ninth century. The two main ethnic communities —proto-Bulgarians (the Turkic Bulgars) and Slavs— that shared the territories of the relatively young state, lived segregated and spoke their own languages. Although a minority, the proto-Bulgarians ruled the country.
However, with the adoption of Christianity as a state religion by king Boris I (852-889), the Slavic ethos, which represented the majority in the Kingdom, started to dominate as many of the Slavs already professed the Christian faith, and the rest that do not, vigorously accepted it. The proto-Bulgarians (many of whom were Muslims from the time before they settled in the Balkans) who were the ruling class within the Bulgarian kingdom by then had started to loose their positions, and as a result, their Turkic language, culture, and traditions gradually faded away.
Yet, not all of the Asparuhian Bulgarians were assimilated. One part of them, which secluded themselves after the introduction of Christianity, managed to preserve their Turkic identity , and became natural allies to the (Muslim) Pechengs, Uzes, and Cumans (the afore-mentioned Kotragian Bulgars coming from the area of the Volga River), who invaded Bulgaria in the period 1018 - 1185. When the Ottoman Turks (another complex blend of Turkic tribes) coming from Anatolia entered the Balkan Peninsula between 1363 and 1393, they encountered a local Turkic community formed by the non-assimilated Asparuhian and the Volga Bulgars, and mixed with them.
As the Muslim Ottomans penetrated the Balkans through the Dardanelles, defeating the armies of the Bulgarian King Ivan Shishman, the local population professing Christianity, retreated to the mountainous regions, and yielded the fertile valleys to en masse coming Yörüks (a livestock-owning people), nomadic and semi-nomadic Oghuz Turks from Eastern Anatolia, as well as other militant tribes brought over from Anatolia for the purposes of resettlement into the newly-conquered lands. During the forthcoming years the Ottomans undertook a policy of active colonisation of the conquered territories, and, thus, the number of the Muslim population on the Balkans grew steadily.
Many other factors contributed to the fast and dramatic increase of the Muslim population in the new territories, among which the freshness, simplicity, and progressive character of the still young Islamic religion attracting many followers. The Ottoman sultan as the caliph of Islam, initially spread the faith through both sword and persuasion. However, having proven more fruitful, the second means became preferable, on one hand, because it match the commandments of Islam, and on the other--because a bigger number of people converted for privileges, and better social status, rather than from intimidation to change their faith. The preservation of property and social status, as well as the desire to acquire new privileges, became the driving motive of many members of the former ruling class of the conquered Bulgarian kingdom to convert to Islam. The historian Ibrahim Yalamov furnishes the example with the son of the last Bulgarian king Ivan Shishman —Alexander Shishman- who was promoted to a governor of the Ottoman province of Aidan under the name Süleyman Pasha.
Within the multiethnic Ottoman state, Muslims and non-Muslims did not have equal status. The so-called millet system allowed the non-Muslim subjects of the Empire to freely establish and manage their religious community affairs, but they were obligated to pay the cizie tax for being provided with military protection. The non-Muslim male representatives were exempted from serving in the army, but this way they are effectively prevented from pursuing a military career. Non-Muslims were also denied access to any significant administrative state post, and generally did not have good opportunities for political and social advancement. Another factor contributing to the fast increase of the Muslim population within the Ottoman Empire was the emergence and unfolding of many heretic movements during fourteenth century, as a result of disagreement with the dogmas of the Orthodox Church. In the course of time these movements earned a good deal of followers among the Bulgarian population. The most significant among them were the Bogomils, who were particularly prone to convert to Islam. Thus, active heretic fractions and remnants of pagan populace in the fourteenth century Bulgaria become natural sources of increase of the Muslim population as well within the enlarging Ottoman state.
To sum up, the invasion of Central Asian Turkic tribes in Bulgaria from the North-East started as early as third-fourth century AD, and continued with a different degree of intensity up until the fall of the medieval Bulgarian kingdom under Ottoman rule. Since then in the course of 500 years there was a massive colonisation of the Bulgarian territories by Ottoman Turks and their accompanying tribes, and a fast increase of the Muslim population on the Balkans. Thus, parts of non-assimilated pre-Ottoman, Turkic communities and later coming Turks, amalgamated with the Ottomans (as well as with converted local population), and gave birth to the ruling Turkish ethos in the Empire. Gradually, cities and villages, assuming identity of Turkish settlements, emerged during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in which the majority of the population is Muslim.
After Bulgaria’s liberation in 1878, there was an initial period during which the authorities launched a policy of ethnic cleansing. This resulted in mass either forced or voluntary departure of Turkish-Muslim population from Bulgaria to Turkey, which appeared the natural successor of the Ottoman Empire. The first official census conducted in 1881 in the Principality of Bulgaria revealed that the ethnic Turks—the dominant ethos until recently—constituted only 27% (or 2,007,919 persons) of the Principality’s total population, and the Turkish population in Eastern Rumelia enumerated 240,053 people, or 34,5 % of the entire population of the province.
The emigration waves of Turks from Bulgaria continued intensively in the following years as well under the pressure of hostile nationalism in the state. Thus, from 26% in 1881, the Turks dwindled to 19% in 1887, and to a mere 4% of the total population in 1900. According to foreign sources, the number of Turkish-Muslim emigrants that left Bulgaria only in the period 1878-1912 varies between 1-1,5 million people. This figure is incomparably lower according to Bulgarian sources – 350,000 persons. Thus, it is hard to argue on what the true number of Muslim emigrants at the time was. However, it remains a fact that for a comparatively short period of time in the newest Bulgarian history the Turkish-Muslim population in the country was dramatically reduced. Further statistics show that 70,603 Turks/Muslims departed from Bulgaria between 1893 and 1902; 198,688 - in the period 1923–1939; and 21,353 – between 1940 and 1944. By 1934, the Turkish minority in Bulgaria constituted less that 10% of the country’s total population, which percentage remains unchanged at present.
During the Communist regime the Turks in Bulgaria experienced three other emigration waves over a period of time, namely: 1950-1951, 1969-1978, and in 1989 and onwards. Before the start of the first one, the then First Party Secretary and Prime Minister, Todor Zhivkov, handed a note to the Turkish government in which he demanded that Turkey accepts 250,000 Turks from Bulgaria within a three-month period. A total of 212,150 entry visas to Turkey were issued by the Turkish consulate in Bulgaria between January 1st, 1950 and September 30th, 1951, but only 154,393 of the Turkish-Muslim migrants are able to leave for Turkey. Simsir informs that every month approximately 5,000 Turkish-Muslim families (or 20,000 people) striped of property entered Turkey only during the months of December, January and February 1950-1951. Being financially unprepared to meet such an influx of poor Bulgarian migrants, Turkey closed its borders on November 8th, 1951, and as a response, the Bulgarian government banned migration and in November 1951 started a campaign of passport confiscation.
The second wave started in 1969 (and continued actively by 1978) as a result of the conscious fear of the Bulgarian Turks of forced assimilation, a process that was already launched against the Pomak Muslims in the early 1970s and brought to an end shortly afterwards (1970-1974). However, the 1969-1978 wave is known as the emigration of close relatives, because the suddenly interrupted inflow of Turks/Muslims in November 1951 left many families divided. Thus, about 70,000 of the persons who received migrant visa remained in Bulgaria without being able to leave. These and other people (with at least one family member in Turkey) started to collect and submit petitions in which they requested the Bulgarian authorities to allow them to migrate. Thus, by March 1964 the number of Bulgarian Turks and other Muslims who had singed the petitions reached 400,000 persons. Finally, due to this pressure the Bulgarian and Turkish authorities met in Ankara and signed a migration agreement on March 22nd, 1968. According to this agreement only very close relatives were eligible for immigration: spouses, parents, grandparents, children/grandchildren and their spouses and children, as well as unmarried siblings (married siblings were excluded). The agreement included providing opportunities for potential migrants to take their possessions with them or sell them and keep the money. The Turkish authorities expected an inflow of about 25-30,000 Bulgarian Turks/Muslims, who – in accordance with the agreement – would bring their property with them. However, as Bulgaria started to break away from the 1968 agreement, it almost expelled its Turks with no property at all. More than 130,000 persons emigrated from Bulgaria in the course of 10 years (between 1969 and 1979).
The third and most frustrating emigration wave for the Bulgarian Turks—the so-called "Big Excursion" (summer of 1989) —was a direct consequence of the so called "Revival Process" against them, when they were forcedly deprived of their names and identity (1984-1985). Declassified archive documents from that time reveal that the then Communist authorities planned to get rid of 200-300,000 Turks by expelling them from the their home country. More than 350,000 Bulgarian Turks left the country in the summer of 1989, about 100,000 of which later returned.
The emigration of ethnic Turkish population (and not only ethnic Turkish) in and out of Bulgaria continues to this day, however, this movement is now economically motivated and in most cases temporary in nature.
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Yes well done on your effort. But you seem to have missed the fact that my info is from the exact same source as your main one- Hupchik.
I am not pushing nationalistic propaganda, or whatever u accused me of. I was merely establishing the 'scene' in the Balkans prior to the Ottoman invasion. In fact, i ask you to check your bias as your Turkish pride is definitely present in the article, since you speand numerous paragraphs describing the 'specialness' of Ottomans. I sorry to say, but you have been biased. Your concluding sentence stated that ottoman rule may have been beneficial to the Balkan peoples. I recognise the sentence you get it from -Hupchik's work. But you have misquoted him. He says early on they were better off c/f western european peasants, but overall -into the 20th century- there is no doubt that a backward, islamic regime of the Turks was oppressive and socio-economically devastating.
The info i added was coorect and sourced.
