In mid-1989, the Bulgarian communist regime seeking to prop up its legitimacy played the ethnonational card by expelling 360,000 Turks and Muslims across the Iron Curtain to neighboring Turkey. It was the single largest ethnic cleansing during the Cold War in Europe after the wrapping up of the postwar expulsions (‘population transfers’) of ethnic Germans from Central Europe in the latter half of the 1940s. Furthermore, this expulsion of Turks and Muslims from Bulgaria was the sole unilateral act of ethnic cleansing that breached the Iron Curtain. The 1989 ethnic cleansing was followed by an unprecedented return of almost half of the expellees, after the collapse of the Bulgarian communist regime. The return, which partially reversed the effects of this ethnic cleansing, was the first-ever of its kind in history. Despite the unprecedented character of this 1989 expulsion and the subsequent return, not a single research article, let alone a monograph, has been devoted to these momentous developments yet. However, the tragic events shape today’s Bulgaria, while the persisting attempts to suppress the remembrance of the 1989 expulsion continue sharply dividing the country’s inhabitants. Without remembering about this ethnic cleansing it is impossible to explain the fall of the communist system in Bulgaria and the origins of ethnic cleansing during the Yugoslav wars. Faltering Yugoslavia’s future ethnic cleansers took a good note that neither Moscow nor Washington intervened in neighboring Bulgaria to stop the 1989 expulsion, which in light of international law was then still the legal instrument of ‘population transfer.’ The as yet unhealed wound of the 1989 ethnic cleansing negatively affects the Bulgaria’s relations with Turkey and the European Union. It seems that the only way out of this debilitating conundrum is establishing a truth and reconciliation commission that at long last would ensure transitional justice for all Bulgarians irrespective of language, religion or ethnicity.

First Published in 1997. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

"The plight of the Turkish people living in Bulgaria since it ceased to be part of the Ottoman Empire deserves to be better understood by the world at large than it has been up to now. It is a painful story of the progressive violations of the human rights of a people who constituted about a third of the whole population. The author is an authority on Turkish and Ottoman history and in the present book he recounts with a wealth of documentary material the oppression of the Turks under Bulgarian rule starting with the Monarchy and ending with the People's Republic. It is an indictment of the persistent Bulgarianization of the Turks, often by force, in the fields of language, education, culture, freedom of speech, sport, local administration, and the right of emigration." --Dust jacket.

Introduction : Bulgaria's methods of nation building and the Turkish minority / Kemal H. Karpat -- Turkish settlements in Rumelia (Bulgaria) in the 15th and 16th centuries / İlhan Șahin, Feridun M. Emecen, Yusuf Halac̦oğlu -- The Turks in Bulgaria, 1878-1944 / R.J. Crampton -- Urban development in Bulgaria in the Turkish period / Machiel Kiel -- The Turkish minority in Bulgaria / Bilâl N. Șimșir -- Ahmed aga Tǎmrašlijata, the last derebey of the Rhodopes / Bernard Lory -- There are no Turks in Bulgaria / Ali Eminov -- Turkish influence on Bulgarian / Alf Grannes -- The rights of minorities in international law and treaties / A. Mete Tuncoku.

In Managing Invisibility, Hande Sözer examines complicated invisibilities of Alevi Bulgarian Turks, a double-minority which faces structural discrimination in Bulgaria and Turkey. While the literature portrays minorities’ visibility as a requirement for their empowerment or a source of their surveillance, the book argues that for such minorities what matters is their control over their own visibility. To make this point, it focuses on the concept protective dissimulation, a strategy of self-imposed invisibility. It discusses cases indicating Alevi Bulgarian Turks’ strategies of dealing with historically changing majorities in their larger societies and argues that dissimulation actually reinforces the intergroup distinctions for the minority’s members. The data for the book was gathered during 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork in Bulgaria and Turkey.

'Bulgaria and Europe: Shifting Identities' offers a comprehensive analysis of Bulgaria's relationship with the European continent, focusing particularly on its accession to the EU and the aftermath.

Muslim Lives in Eastern Europe examines how gender identities were reconfigured in a Bulgarian Muslim community following the demise of Communism and an influx of international aid from the Islamic world. Kristen Ghodsee conducted extensive ethnographic research among a small population of Pomaks, Slavic Muslims living in the remote mountains of southern Bulgaria. After Communism fell in 1989, Muslim minorities in Bulgaria sought to rediscover their faith after decades of state-imposed atheism. But instead of returning to their traditionally heterodox roots, isolated groups of Pomaks embraced a distinctly foreign type of Islam, which swept into their communities on the back of Saudi-financed international aid to Balkan Muslims, and which these Pomaks believe to be a more correct interpretation of their religion. Ghodsee explores how gender relations among the Pomaks had to be renegotiated after the collapse of both Communism and the region's state-subsidized lead and zinc mines. She shows how mosques have replaced the mines as the primary site for jobless and underemployed men to express their masculinity, and how Muslim women have encouraged this as a way to combat alcoholism and domestic violence. Ghodsee demonstrates how women's embrace of this new form of Islam has led them to adopt more conservative family roles, and how the Pomaks' new religion remains deeply influenced by Bulgaria's Marxist-Leninist legacy, with its calls for morality, social justice, and human solidarity.