‘My father died many years ago. They asked for his name. “Rüstem”, I said. They changed it to “Radi”.’ This is how an elderly man describes the moment when he was forced by Bulgarian officials to desecrate his own father’s gravestone. ‘The names were written on the stone. They ordered us to paint over them.’
Ethnic Turkish people were a thorn in the side of Bulgaria’s socialist-nationalist regime. First, Turkish names had to disappear, then their language, their culture, their religion, Islam, and finally, in 1989, the people themselves.
From the mid-1940s, Bulgaria’s socialist government pursued a brutal policy of assimilation against the country’s minorities. Any hint of diversity, any deviation from the majority society, had to give way to an ethnically and culturally uniform idea of the Bulgarian nation.
The policy was particularly aggressive against Muslims, ethnic Turks, Pomaks, and Muslim Roma. They had lived in their towns and villages for centuries and knew no other homeland, yet they were not Bulgarian enough for the government.
The persecution of Bulgarian Turks intensified from 1984, when the government called its campaign of forced assimilation ‘rebirth’. It began with the changing of names, with ethnic Turkish people forced to adopt Bulgarian Christian names.
The village of Gorski Izvor, on the Bulgarian border with Greece, was made to serve as an unwilling prototype of terror. In the middle of the night, it was surrounded by police with dogs and soldiers with tanks. They went door to door, rousing people from their sleep and their beds. They handed out new identity cards with Christian, Slavic names.
These, the police and military ordered under threat of force, would be the people’s new names and identities. If Bulgarian officials decided that someone would be called Hristo or Marija from now on, they could not object and had to endure the assignment of new names, ID cards, and identities.
On 31 March 1985, the Bulgarian government announced that all Turkish names had been changed to Bulgarian names – and that assimilation would continue.
Next came the ban on speaking Turkish in public under threat of punishment. Turkish-language newspapers were banned, Turkish schools and mosques were closed, with some of the latter used as rubbish dumps. Protests against this racism were drowned in blood using tanks and weapons. Particularly shocking for the community was the murder of Türkan Feyzullah, who was just an 18-month-old baby at the time of her death. She and two other people were killed and dozens more wounded during a peaceful demonstration against Bulgarisation. Türkan died immediately, in her mother’s arms.
The danger was not confined to demonstrations. Participants in mass hunger strikes were arrested and forced into exile, deported to Austria without being able to contact their families. Others who resisted the erasure of their identities were arrested and transported to camps. Thousands of people were imprisoned – without charge, without trial, tortured and subjected to forced labour. The largest of these camps was Belene, which was located on an island in the Danube. Belene was officially referred to as a ‘labour and re-education camp’, though today it is often classified as a concentration camp, even in Bulgaria. Initially used as a prison for political opponents of the regime, it became a place of horror for ethnic Turkish people from the mid-1980s onwards. Many people died as a result of the cruel treatment in the camps, hunger, torture, or exhaustion from forced labour.
In 1989, it became clear that even the forced assimilation of these people was not enough for the Bulgarian government. The years of persecution of Bulgarian Turks culminated in the president of Bulgaria openly calling on them to leave the country and opening the country’s borders. Thousands of prisoners and their families were deported, while others fled in fear. 360,000 ethnic Turkish people were forced to leave their homes.
But not everyone was expelled: teenagers and young adults who had not yet completed their military service were often forced to stay. Anger, despair, and fear of having to murder members of their own community spread. Some young men committed suicide.
Many Bulgarians took advantage of this suffering by buying the houses of their displaced neighbours at ridiculous prices. Anyone who is displaced, who is forced to start from scratch in an unfamiliar country, is desperate or helpless enough to give up their own home, even for little money.
After the fall of the communist regime, people were allowed to return. However, after all they had survived, less than half of the people decided to return to their homeland. Despite everything, ethnic Turkish people remain the largest minority in the country. Around one in ten people in Bulgaria is ethnically Turkish.
Although the Belene camp in Bulgaria is now also referred to as a concentration camp, it is still difficult to come to terms with the crimes that took place there: the left-wing Bulgarian Socialist Party is blocking the opening of the concentration camp archives, although this was stipulated as a condition of the country’s Association Agreement with the EU.
It was not until 2012 that the Bulgarian parliament condemned these crimes. However, no one has yet been punished in court, the victims have received no compensation, and there is hardly any room in Bulgaria for remembrance of the injustice. The EU has seemingly forgotten all of this, and is not endeavouring to demand justice for the survivors.
Yet, while the survivors slowly become the dead, there is one small consolation for the community: their gravestones can finally bear their correct Turkish names once more.
