This book tells the history of how Ottoman Muslim subjects became citizens of Balkan Christian nation-states. The analysis concentrates on southern Bulgaria, a region marked by shifting borders, ...competing Turkish and Bulgarian sovereignties, rival nationalisms, and migration. These kinds of problems accompanied to the disintegration of the dynastic empires into nation-states. The monograph demonstrates how local post-Ottoman constructions of capitalism engendered nation and citizenship. The analysis shows how land that belonged to Muslims—individually or communally—became symbolic and material resource for Bulgarian state building and capitalism. Muslim land was also the terrain upon which rival Bulgarian and Turkish nationalisms developed. Both also evolved in relation to the late Ottoman Empire and early republican Turkey. Bulgarian statesmen expected of Bulgarian Christian farmers to grow into modern citizens by mechanizing their labor so as to increase revenue for industrialization. By the outbreak of World War II Turkish Muslims had turned into polarized national minority; their conflicting efforts to adapt to post-Ottoman Bulgaria disclosed the increasingly limited citizenship rights available not only to Turkish Muslims but to Bulgarian Christians as well.
This book traces the establishment of a master narrative of the Middle Ages in Bulgaria and its evolution to the present day, including the attempt at a Marxist counter-narrative, thereby offering a ...critical analysis of Bulgarian historiographical views.
By exploring the development of ethnic diversity and national tensions in Bulgaria and Bosnia, while also drawing parallels with Macedonia, this volume uses the three most diversely populated areas ...in the Balkans to tackle complex issues. What institutions of state building are capable of managing diverse ethno-religious traditions and conflicting national identities? How do people on the ground respond to state-sponsored political projects at the local community level? In what ways do studies of cultural representations of ethno-national and religious conflicts call attention to inequality and human rights violations? How have studies of human rights problems in the Balkans contributed to changes in international law? More generally, what is the role of the humanities and social sciences in developing a discourse on the subject of conflict resolution and human rights? The volume engages the question of ethno-national conflicts and identities from three perspectives: historical interpretations of national conflict and ethno-religious tensions in the context of empire- and state-building; cultural debates as reflected in the use of language and dance, film, and media production and circulation as tools for nation-and community-building; and thirdly, current political controversies over national resurgence and human rights both in the post-Yugoslav war context and in connection to European Union integration.
"Post-Stalinism--the last three decades of socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe--gave birth to new political ideas and social struggles, which reshaped socialist societies and forged new ...global imaginaries. With a focus on socialist Bulgaria, Restless History traces the dynamic polemical and social shifts that took place during this period. With anti-Stalinist and humanist visions, socialist societies rebuilt their material and social worlds around social-reproductive needs such as care, housing, education, leisure, rest, and access to culture and the arts. In the sphere of global politics, they created anti-racist, feminist, anti-colonial, and anti-imperialist solidarities that challenged Western hegemony and reordered the global geographies of power. Yet the changes of the period also took some troubling directions: humanist imaginaries of socialist progress, modernity, and nationhood welcomed ideas of national and social homogeneity, opening the doors to ethnonationalism. Following the promising as well as troubling moments in the history of Bulgarian post-Stalinism, Zhivka Valiavicharska brings to life the complexities of real lived socialism. Restless History re-examines the post-Stalinist period in Bulgaria, Eastern Europe, and beyond--in all its tensions and contradictions--to offer the socialist past as an unfinished history, one that cannot be easily put to rest."--
In 1900, some 100,000 people living in Bulgaria-2 percent of the country's population-could be described as Greek, whether by nationality, language, or religion. The complex identities of the ...population-proud heirs of ancient Hellenic colonists, loyal citizens of their Bulgarian homeland, members of a wider Greek diasporic community, devout followers of the Orthodox Patriarchate in Istanbul, and reluctant supporters of the Greek government in Athens-became entangled in the growing national tensions between Bulgaria and Greece during the first half of the twentieth century.
InBetween Two Motherlands, Theodora Dragostinova explores the shifting allegiances of this Greek minority in Bulgaria. Diverse social groups contested the meaning of the nation, shaping and reshaping what it meant to be Greek and Bulgarian during the slow and painful transition from empire to nation-states in the Balkans. In these decades, the region was racked by a series of upheavals (the Balkan Wars, World War I, interwar population exchanges, World War II, and Communist revolutions). The Bulgarian Greeks were caught between the competing agendas of two states increasingly bent on establishing national homogeneity.
Based on extensive research in the archives of Bulgaria and Greece, as well as fieldwork in the two countries, Dragostinova shows that the Greek population did not blindly follow Greek nationalist leaders but was torn between identification with the land of their birth and loyalty to the Greek cause. Many emigrated to Greece in response to nationalist pressures; others sought to maintain their Greek identity and traditions within Bulgaria; some even switched sides when it suited their personal interests. National loyalties remained fluid despite state efforts to fix ethnic and political borders by such means as population movements, minority treaties, and stringent citizenship rules. The lessons of a case such as this continue to reverberate wherever and whenever states try to adjust national borders in regions long inhabited by mixed populations.
In this compilation, the authors aim to determine whether there was an association between contact with urban greenery and displaced aggression in young people in Bulgaria and, if so, whether nature ...experiences were a significant mediator of that association.
The authors have taken as target of the research project to draw up a picture of the architectural influences and the heritage of the Danubian Monarchy in Bulgaria at the turn of the century. On this ...way one unknown site of the architecture of the Danubian Monarchy is being cleared up. The contribution of the specialists from the Danubian Monarchy and of the Bulgarian architects educated there is being presented in the first part of the research project. The study starts out from the complex and multifarious cultural context of the European turn of the century and the political changes in southeastern Europe at this time. The decisive contribution of the specialists from the Monarchy in the field of urban design is being duplicated. The architectural influences of the Monarchy are studied in the finale chapter. The phenomenon of the willing acceptance of strange cultural elements is being explained. A chapter is devoted to the specific phenomenon of the Bulgarian National Romantic because there are detected important contributions of graduates from the architectural schools of the Monarchy. In the second part of the research project the fundamental information to the different architects and artists is being summarised in a catalogue. There are biographic descriptions of 66 persons, a listing of works and their illustrations, as well as the resources of information to be found. The work is illustrated with a maximum number of authentic documents. The shorten text consists of 171 sites and is illustrated with 338 pictures. In conclusion it is established that the search for the architectural heritage of the Danubian Monarchy in Bulgaria at the same time a search for the roots of the academic architecture in Bulgaria is.
Die Verfasser haben sich das Ziel gesetzt, ein Bild der Architektureinflüsse und des baulichen Erbes der Donaumonarchie in Bulgarien zu erstellen. Dadurch wird eine in österreichischen Kulturkreisen wenig bekannte Seite der Architektur der Donaumonarchie aufgedeckt. Im ersten Teil des Forschungsprojekts wird der Beitrag der Fachleute aus der Donaumonarchie und der dort ausgebildeten bulgarischen Architekten geschildert. Ausgegangen wird vom komplexen und vielfältigen Kulturkontext der europäischen Jahrhundertwende und den politischen Geschehnissen in Südosteuropa. Es wird der ausschlaggebende Beitrag der Fachleute aus der Donaumonarchie für den Städtebau thematisiert im letzten Abschnitt werden die Architektureinflüsse der Donaumonarchie geschildert. Erklärt wird das Phänomen der bereitwilligen Annahme fremder Kulturelemente. Ein Abschnitt ist dem spezifischen Phänomen der Bulgarischen Nationalromantik gewidmet, da hier wichtige Beiträge von Absolventen der Architekturschulen der Donaumonarchie festzustellen sind. Im zweiten Teil der Forschungsarbeit sind die grundlegenden Informationen zu den einzelnen Architekten und Baukünstlern in einem Katalog zusammengefaßt. In ihm sind biographische Angaben zu 66 Personen, Aufzählung der Werke und deren Abbildungen und die Informationsquellen zu finden. Die Arbeit ist mit einer maximalen Anzahl von authentischen Dokumenten dieser Zeit illustriert. Das mit Abkürzungen im Text zusammengestellte Material enthält 171 Seiten und ist mit 338 Abbildungen illustriert. Schlußfolgernd wird festgestellt, daß die Suche nach dem Architekturerbe der Donaumonarchie in Bulgarien gleichzeitig eine Suche nach den Wurzeln der akademischen bulgarischen Architektur ist.
Bulgarians by Birth is a collection of sources in English translation concerning the revolt of the Comitopuls, the Empire of Samuel, and the war between Byzantium and Bulgaria in the late 10th and ...early 11th century.
Muslim Lives in Eastern Europeexamines 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.
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