/ world today news/ In no way should they close pages of history – be they unflattering or inconvenient for our neighbors, because there is a great danger of forgetting who we are and where we come from. If we lose our connection with the root – there is no future ahead of us. We cannot speak of “presence” when it comes to oppression.
The problem of “coexistence” between Bulgarians and Turks is multi-layered. It depends from which point of view it is looked at and how it is interpreted. Unfortunately, native journalism likes to overexpose some of the issues. The most correct term that can be applied to this period of 500 years from the point of view of science is “Ottoman rule”. Because the Turkish state did not exist then.
The founding principle of the Ottoman state rested on the basis of religion, not national or ethnic. Once you are a Christian, you are heaven. If you become orthodox, you become an Ottoman, part of the ruling class. For this, it is difficult to essentially say that the country is essentially Turkish. It is such in language, its purely Turkish-ethnic character began to consolidate towards the end of the 20s of the 20th century.
People are quite emotional about what happened during this reign. Of course there are many dark pages. Cohabitation means that maybe, yes, they lived together. But we should not go from one extreme to another, saying that everything was “flowers and roses” as they do today in their /Turkish – note ed./ textbooks, for example, that we Bulgarians lived very well with the Turks. OK, then why the April and Ilinden Uprisings?
The truth is always somewhere in the middle and must be sought there. We cannot go from one extreme to the other on the principle of the pendulum. The bullying of Bulgarians was common.
The coexistence problem is like a valve that needs to release tension. This is a very silly terminology argument.
After all, these are 500 years in which the Bulgarian state is gone, the population is subjected to foreign rule and suffers all its negatives. Whether we call it slavery, whether we call it dominion, does not matter so much. The fact is that Bulgaria does not exist as a country and the Bulgarians are oppressed. That’s it.
Within the Ottoman Empire until the beginning of the 20th century there were cases of being sold into slavery. Including during the April Uprising, there were cases of Bulgarians being captured and sold in the interior of Anatolia. The problem with slavery is that in the Ottoman Empire there is no legal basis, no law for it. It was some kind of shady practice.
If we go further back in time – the 14th-15th century, janissary was a very vile form of exsanguinating the local population. Janissary itself is a “cool” system, which means “slave”. These “towers” are slaves of the sultan. And these are the janissaries, who necessarily do not have Turkish origin and are from the conquered population. This was their role: The best part of the conquered population was deprived of connection with it, and secondly they were drawn into the framework of the ruling system in the Ottoman Empire. This is a double-edged sword – a situation in which both the conquered population is bled to death, kept down in the lowlands, and its dispossessed elites become part of the Ottoman ruling class. This can be seen today in the people living in the European and Asian parts of Turkey. They are totally different. The majority of those in the European part are representatives of the Janissaries, with purely European features – blond, with blue eyes. And in Anatolia there are the typical Turks – shorter, darker and with aquiline noses.
Coexistence between Bulgarians and Turks became unbearable at the end of the 19th – beginning of the 20th century. In this period, the Ottoman Empire was a crumbling state. When the central authority is weak, oppression, tyranny begins to manifest itself. The ruling class begins to think that all is forgiven. The Turks are annoyed by the fact that the Christians are starting to get richer and more educated than them. And the Turks, because they are the ruling class, have the right to seize what belongs to the gyaura, to the infidel. And they are starting to take advantage of this thing. And so the conflict is there. People will not tolerate being bullied. This is how this series of uprisings comes about. Not only with us, but also with the Greeks and the Albanians. During these uprisings, tens of thousands were left homeless, dozens of villages were burned to ashes, as well as killed, beheaded and dishonored.
The Ilinden uprising was many times more violently suppressed than the April uprising, and it was much larger in scope. The Ilinden uprising was a peculiar apogee of the resistance movement of the Bulgarians. It is the result of the so-called “creeping genocide” against the Bulgarian population, which in practice was carried out not only with the tacit consent of the Ottoman authorities, but also with its support. The state itself began repression on the eve of the Ilinden uprising. In this period, the words of Damyan Gruev, said before the uprising, are remembered: “Better a terrible end than endless horror. The knife rests against the bone.” And then it is seen that this coexistence is not what they now want to describe.
We have to think very seriously when we implement the European orders that we actually have to be accurate about what the truth of the story is. And we should not close our eyes to her. We are required to remove things that may offend our neighbors, but after all, these things have happened. We cannot and must not forget them. How can we forget the Batash massacre, Ilinden, the destruction of the Thracian Bulgarians in 1913 and many others…
At one point, the renaissance process is constantly in our eyes, films like “Bulgaria – my land” are shown on “Al Jazeera”, incredible lies are told in Turkish textbooks, that by capturing the Edirne fortress, we have committed genocide, that the most persecuted is the Turkish and Muslim population in Bulgaria, and the next moment they say that the largest Muslim minority is in Bulgaria.
Well, if we had chased and driven them, would they have stayed here? These contradictions are obvious. And at the end of the day, we have to think, look after our own interest. Historical things should not be so blindly revised in textbooks.
In no way should we close pages of history – be they unflattering, inconvenient for our neighbors, after all, history is taught by us, not them. There is a great danger of us forgetting who we are and where we come from. When we lose our connection to the root – there is no future ahead of us. That is, no matter how unflattering they are, things must be said and known. As silly as this argument is, things should be age-appropriate for future generations and presented in a way that is convenient for them to understand.
Here is an example of how in the Ottoman Empire the way of determining belonging to the population stands a little different way than how we see it today. Today, starting from the national point of view, we think that belonging to a certain ethnic group is defined as belonging to a national one. Things were not like this in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th century. For example, in the Batak massacre, the biggest advances were made not by regular Turkish units, but by the Bashiboz population gathered from the Bulgarian-Mohammedan villages in the vicinity of Batak. And they do this massacre, not because they belong to the Turkish ethnic group, but as part of the ruling class. Thus, the Bashibozuk proves its loyalty to the “Ottoman Turkish Guvlet” or the so-called state. It is a country of Muslims, not of Turks, Albanians, others of different ethnicity. That is, they are the ruling class and as such must maintain their dominance. That’s the idea.
We should always talk about this problem, but it can be solved by specialists, not by journalists, patriots or Euroliberals.
I do not support the thesis that this was a “presence”, it was oppression, oppression, the power of a country foreign to the Bulgarians, which in every way repressed the Bulgarian population. And no matter how unflattering a truth is, it should be talked about.
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Dr. Kiril Alexiev, historian and curator at the Regional History Museum in Blagoevgrad.
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