Country: Turkey

Group: Bulgarians

Date: 4/26/2020

Team: Colleen Clauss (lead), Vianney Mancilla, Erika Walker

Present-day Bulgarians in Turkey are made up of a small number of Christian Bulgarians and about 600,000 Pomaks, which are descents of native Bulgarians who converted to Islam during the Ottoman rule of the Balkans (Poulton, 1993). The Young Turk government carried out several projects of ethnocide, using “social engineering” that included intentional “demographic dilution” to encourage “Turkification,”  the loss of minority cultures, languages, and identities in order to facilitate the establishing of a Turkish nation-state (Üngör, 2008). One of these projects was forcing the Kurds and Christian Armenian villagers out of their homes and replacing them with Muslim settlers, including Bulgarian Turks. The goal of this resettlement was to advance the “Turkification” of the area by using “scattered settlement in order for [the groups’] mother tongue and national traditions to be extinguished quickly” (Üngör, 2008). In 1913, during the Balkan Wars, the Thracian Bulgarians (residents of Thrace, a region split between present-day Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey) were victims of ethnic cleansing under the Young Turk government (Valentina 2012, 2012). About 50,000-60,000 Thracian Bulgarians were murdered and others were expelled (Vukov, 2015). Many of the Thracian Bulgarians living in Turkey have been “Turkified…as they have blended into the Turkish society and have been often linguistically and culturally dissimilated… [and] most of them currently do not profess Bulgarian identity” (Wikipedia, 2020).

Our team rated the evidence as a 2 because some evidence was found in a peer-reviewed journal, but this source had few details about Bulgarians specifically. This is an appropriate example of ethnocide, because it seems that the Young Turk government targeted Bulgarians as well as other minorities in their efforts to systematically seek to destroy minority ethinic identities, languages, and cultures. The ethnic cleansing of Thracian Bulgarians in 1913 may be better categorized as targeted lethal violence than as ethnocide because it seems that people’s lives, rather than their culture and language, were targeted. It is not clear if Bulgarians in Turkey are considered an officially recognized minority group, and the fact that many have “blended in” to Turkish culture and may not claim Bulgarian identity may be considered evidence of ethnocide (“Bulgarians in Turkey,” 2020).

Sources

  1. Wikipedia (2020). Bulgarians in Turkey. (2020). https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Bulgarians_in_Turkey&oldid=933923378
  2. Poulton, H. (1993). The Balkans, Minorities and States in Conflict, Minority Rights Publication Retrieved from https://books.google.com/books?id=m_AcqFSfvzAC&pg=PA243#v=onepage&q&f=false
  3. Üngör, U. (2008). Seeing like a nation-state: Young Turk social engineering in Eastern Turkey, 1913-50. Journal of Genocide Research, 10(1), 15–39. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623520701850278
  4. Valentina Ganeva-Raycheva (2012). Migration, Territories, Heritage: Discourses and Practices in Constructing the Bulgarian-Turkish Border. Migration, Memory, Heritage: Socio-cultural Approaches to the Bulgarian-Turkish Border. IEFSEM-BAS.
  5. Vukov, N. (2015). Resettlement Waves, Historical Memory and Identity Construction: The Case of Thracian Refugees in Bulgaria. IMISCOE Research Series Migration in the Southern Balkans, 63-84. doi:10.1007/978-3-319-13719-3_4