Erasure of Muslims in Bulgaria – their role in its history and culture as well as their indigeneity – is slow process of genocide overlooked by the rest of world. Arzu Merali reports from the Bulgarian capital Sofia*.
Mt. Vitusha gazed magnificently back at me, as I looked at Sofia from my hotel window. The April sun, shining deceptively, invited me out into the cold of the Bulgarian capital. Within the half an hour it took me to walk to the Largo – the post-war road that links the capital’s main buildings – the illusion was unmasked. My consolation that I could get out of the nightmare that is the life of the un-Orthodox in the Balkans.
I am British and used to occasional racial abuse, the frequency of which varies according to era and area. Sofia’s hatred is taken for granted – ingrained in every cobblestone of Alexander Batenburg Square. There is no need for a Bulgar to insult you. As a Muslim, Gypsy, Turk, or foreigner you are de facto insulted.
The National Archaeological Museum was once the Buyuk Djami – a 15th Century Mosque. It stands silent and humbled, ivy clad and dwarfed by gargantuan communist rebuilding. Its significance as architectural precursor to buildings of a ‘quintessentially Bulgarian nature,’ is hidden and despised.
I spoke to a Pomak woman, Sommaya, in her 20s, bescarved and articulate. Bulgarian mythology, like its Serbian counterpart, would have us – and has had us – believe that Muslims in their country, are the remnants of invading Turks. Pomaks are Bulgarian Muslims, truly Slavic in origin over the many Bulgar ethnicities. They are forgotten in a realpolitik that demonises ethnicity by (non)belief. My queries were answered. How do you cope with being overcharged because you are a Muslim? Being told you cannot continue your studies? – a common complaint I heard whilst there from all sorts of dissident voices. How about not being able to walk in vast parts of the city without being shunned, your presence there and your personal security quietly questioned?
She shrugged. “This is life for us.” Her resignation was as passionless as the hatred that surrounded her. “I am from Sofia. My schoolmates no longer talk to me. I am trying to get a job.” Her training was as a teacher, but schools will not accept her Muslim identity. She has been trying for secretarial posts. Her new husband also can’t find work. For her that is the Bulgarian nation in all its thirteen centennial glory.
Celebrating the new century in the last days of communism, saw leader Zhivkov sanction the murder of dissident writer Markov in London, and a national revival that involved violent alienation of Romanian speakers, Gypsies, Turks and Pomaks – Bulgaricisation. The policy led to an enforced Turkish exodus, and the deportation of Pomaks and other ethnic undesirables, to concentration camps (including the notorious Belene) if they refused to change their names and religion. Police beatings, killings – the usual abuses of human rights that the prelude to genocide entails – were frequent and ethnically discriminating. Communism is now dead but an amnesiac ideal of an oxymoronic Slavic and Orthodox Bulgarian nation endures.
“May their memory live for ever!” a large sign announces as you enter the Alexander Nevski Memorial Church. It adulates the 200,000 Russian men who gave their lives in 1877 for liberation (and Romanov longevity.) Forgetfulness is the defining characteristic of nation-building. Successive regimes of absolute monarchist, fascist, communist and democratic strains have inflicted terror on those within modern Bulgarian realms. Stambolov assassinated in 1886 on the orders of his protégé Ferdinand, was one of many dictators whose rule was begotten from vehement hatred. His was anti-Russian. Many internecine wars between Slavic and Orthodox brothers ensued, until Zhivkov’s political demise engendered another brotherhood of hatred.
It is well-known that Bulgaria supplied arms to the Serbs in contravention of UN sanctions during the Bosnian wars. This is a democracy which extradited Uzbek asylum seeker, Abdullah Batanov, to an ominous fate for the princely sum of $10 million. A move applauded by a nation whose living standards vary, but which does not suffer the grinding poverty of its Macedonian and Albanian neighbours. Designer shades, and mobile phones abound on the streets of Sofia. The young and the hip ready to sacrifice their humanity.
An elderly and honest taxi driver took me to Mt. Vitusha. He charged me the right fare, and tried to explain to me the materialistic hypocrisy of old party bosses whose villas lined the roads of the suburbs we traversed to reach the Boyana church, home to a peculiarly Bulgarian Last Supper. To him nothing had changed. The church was closed and the ethnic credentials of the medieval fresco remain unverified to me. One shopkeeper – the owner of a gift store filled with local work and traditional design, was glad to see me. These two seemed to be aliens.
I was accosted by two officials demanding to see my passport, as I queued at the currency exchange in the airport on my way home. Where are you from? Britain. Disbelief. Why are you leaving? I’m going home. Mutterings in Bulgarian. Where is your husband? I don’t have a husband. Stunned silence. Ok, go. A frequent traveller who had seen the ritual enacted on many occasions, explained later, they thought me a Turk escaping. As boarding began one of my interrogators resurfaced at the gate to crosscheck my identity once more, loathe to let me through.
The Banya Bashi Mosque was reopened after communism fell. A lecherous, self-confessed ‘Turk hater’ sells pornography to his regular clientele from a stall outside. There’s nothing other traders, Muslim or otherwise can do to have him removed. The local police enjoin and enjoy his freedom. The traders no longer try – defeated by identity politics.
My travel book assured me that Bulgaria, was not and even during its alliance with Nazism, never had been anti-Semitic. The continually redesigned ghettoisation of Jews (and Muslims) in the area near Zhenski Pazar (‘Women’s Market’) after various Liberations, indicates otherwise. Only 3,000 Jews – perhaps a thirtieth of the war time population – are left in Sofia. Were the others such fanatical Zionists they emigrated to Palestine in the late 1940’s as legend proclaims?
Unlike its neighbour, and co-ideologue Serbia, Bulgaria’s genocide against its Muslim inhabitants is silent and slow. Exist, however it does. Its protracted denouement, hides the ultimate horror of cultural and eventually physical obliteration that is the only result of unchecked demonisation, vilification and discrimination. Its pogrom includes a scale of forced conversion and ethnic cleansing its perpetrators do not even attribute to its Ottoman oppressors.
The travelogue – an anaesthetic to the European reader – continued. ‘Bearing in mind that Islam is associated with the Ottoman Empire, under which Bulgarian Christians languished for 500 years, it’s not surprising that Bulgaria’s Muslims have on occasion been regarded as a threat to national unity and have suffered state repression as a result.” Why care if they are annihilated?
Arzu Merali is a freelance journalist, based in London, UK.
Image: Banya Bashi Mosque / Başı Camii, Sofia Bulgaria by Ali Eminov, CC BY-NC 2.0
* Date of article is approximated
