ABSTRACT

The 1989 ethnic cleansing of Bulgaria’s Turks surprised Turkish and Western scholars researching the forced assimilation of Turks and Muslims in Bulgaria. The two documentary volumes published in 1989 on the ‘Bulgarian atrocities’ committed against the country’s Turks and Muslims covered the period 1877–1986, without any mention of the 1989 ethnic cleansing (Memişoğlu 1989a; Memişoğlu 1989b). In the same year, the Center for Turkish Studies (established in 1979 at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, and financially supported by Ankara) published a special issue of semi-annual International Journal of Turkish Studies (Vol. 4, No 2) devoted to the situation of Bulgaria’s Turks between 1878 and 1989 (Karpat 1989b). The center’s head and the distinguished Turkish historian, Kemal H. Karpat (1924–), included the 1989 expulsion in his introduction to this journal’s special issue, in which he gave an overview of the assimilationist policies pursued in the Bulgarian nation-state since its inception in 1878 (Karpat 1989a: 21). Subsequently, in 1990, this issue was republished as a stand-alone volume (Karpat 1990).