ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the attempts of Armenians living in Bulgaria to sustain their identity in the face of assimilation.1 The Bulgarian Armenians are like all immigrants, forever insecure under normal circumstances and, as Conover (1998) pointed out, they find it essential to cling to some difference that serves as a distinguishing mark of the exclusive, ethnic group. Buchvarov (1998) brought up the “inherited iconography” of a society, namely a collection of symbols, beliefs, images, and ideas that exert a powerful attractive force for the society’s members. These connections cement the society and determine the territory, real and figurative, which excludes non-members. They create a framework for the experience of milieu. The iconographic “map” also influences the group’s choices and, thus, its behaviors. It enters a member’s consciousness first and then the geographic territory, the modern nation. Émigrés exiled from their native land have lost the actual territory of the nation. What they do have is an opportunity after leaving the homeland to retain and sustain over time the possibility of using religion, language, and other iconographies as a way of perpetuating a milieu and a diasporic social formation. Unlike a physical territory, the cultural realm is intangible and difficult to define, but also potentially adaptable. In today’s societies, the process of establishing the bona fides of ethnic identity has given rise to the seeking out and reincorporating of practices and rituals that codified membership, the “how-tos” of belonging to a separate, unique ethnic group (Bakalian, 1993). This is the role of “inherited iconography.”
