When I met her at the café in the Red House, my friend’s face was tight with tension. She greeted me a bit nervously, then continued discussing with my other close friend the details of hosting the seminar, which, as it turned out, had been relocated from the university to here. But why, I don’t understand?

“They banned us,” she replied briefly, then carried on with her work.

At that point, I burst out laughing — I don’t know why. Maybe it was a misunderstanding of the situation, or maybe just a reaction to release the tension that was practically sizzling in the air. Banned? In 2009, in an EU member state, someone had banned a seminar titled “Against the Political Monopoly over History: The Other Narrative of the May 1989 Protests — Twenty Years Later”?

Wait a minute — isn’t the rector a historian, someone educated in the West, at the Sorbonne if I’m not mistaken? What century are we living in, for God’s sake?

“It was him who banned us,” came the reply.

“But how? On what grounds?”

“His words were: ‘The seminar is too politicized, too one-sided.’”

I still didn’t get it.

“But is it even possible for the rector of Sofia University to oppose the exploration of our recent history? I can’t believe it, I can’t understand it.”

The two women looked at me with thinly veiled pity. Poor thing. What world do you live in?

“Look, all the Turkish guests are coming straight from Turkey — they’re living participants in the resistance of 1989.”

“So what?”

“What do you mean, so what? These people are actual opponents of Dogan^[1], even though they don’t try to capitalize on that politically. They simply say his role in the events was much more limited than it’s currently portrayed. It’s about which version will enter history — how can you not understand?”

And that’s when it started to dawn on me. George Orwell — 1984. “He who controls the past controls the future.”

Suddenly, things began to take on a painfully familiar, supposedly long-forgotten meaning. Twenty years ago, a party elite — supposedly long gone — had tried to rewrite Bulgarian history. It had changed municipal records, gravestone inscriptions, even school registers. Overnight, it had rewritten the biographies, the lives, the very identities of a million people — word for word, straight out of Orwell^[2].

Now, twenty years later, another party elite — the former victims, what historical irony — was trying to rewrite history once again.

The battle clearly continued, right under the nose of a blissfully bleating people — as always in this region’s history.

At that moment, I almost regretted that I’d quit smoking thirty years ago.

I fell silent, slumped in my chair, and listened to the conversation, which seemed to be transporting me to another planet. Bulgaria, early 21st century. Bulgaria, achingly familiar. Bulgaria, utterly foreign.

***

And so, the day of the seminar came.

And suddenly, I found myself in a completely different situation — utterly stripped of falseness and political posturing, stripped of pathos, stripped of spectacle, of self-promotion, of tallying and claiming credit.

People simply sat and told their stories. They sat and told their stories…

And we hunched in our chairs, suddenly gripped by a long-forgotten shame, sat silent with guilt, sometimes wiping our eyes.

And they spoke…

Grandpa Ramadan Runtov — witness and participant in all the uprisings in the legendary village of Kornitsa, in the Gotse Delchev region. A modern version of Time of Parting^[3], minus the literary gloss. People hunted down, people forced — with fire and sword, quite literally — to abandon their identity, to become something they did not want to be, to cease to be. And people who refused, and fought back.

For decades, not just a few months, as our version of historical memory would have it — the romanticized story of Father Aligorko, the favorite book of most Bulgarians, if one is to believe the latest polls.

The old man did not cry, nor did he complain. His son, Ibryam — much younger and seemingly quite different from his father — spoke with passion but without the slightest trace of pathos about the years of the Revival Process. A lucky man — born just late enough to taste only part of the bitter stew his father had been fed all his life. And he kept repeating — again without pathos — “We don’t hate you. No one hates you. We just want the history to be known.”

And the truth. That day, it hovered somewhere in the air — naked, but not lustful, not seeking acclaim, somewhat indifferent to our own emotions and passions. These people had long since laid a cross over their past (or perhaps a crescent, who knows), had made peace with their former tormentors, had long ago — long, long ago — stopped looking for ways to settle historical scores. One by one, they told their stories — sometimes with humor, sometimes without — simple human stories, lacking any polish or shine. Sabri Iskender, Ali Mustafa Huseinov, Hayrettin Aliyev Yostyurk — they all spoke slowly, sometimes searching for their words, perhaps searching for memory, but without hesitation, without trying to push themselves forward or embellish anything.

And before our eyes — or at least before mine — a view of our own history slowly began to emerge, one that had never quite managed to reach me before. Like most of my friends and acquaintances, I had always opposed any attempts to justify the so-called Revival Process. I had always believed that this story — as repulsive, as inexplicably cruel as it had seemed to me — already belonged to the past, that the path — the shared path — toward the future was now open to all of us, regardless of what ethnic group we belonged to. And only now, only here, for the first time in my life, I began to see the historical map at a new, significantly magnified scale — one that allowed me to understand the logic behind long-past events and to trace the connections between them, connections that until this moment had always remained hidden, always invisible to my eyes.

Because the people spoke not only of the 1980s. They went much further back — first to the ’70s, then the ’60s, the ’50s, the early 20th century, to the first major persecutions during 1912–13, when thousands of Pomaks^[4] across the Rhodope Mountains were forced “to convert” — or to try the knife, if they preferred that more. And thus, slowly, the picture of an unending persecution, an unending oppression began to unfold before my eyes — one that had most likely begun already at the time of the Liberation (someone mentioned the number 500,000! killed during the Russo-Turkish War of Liberation — peaceful Turks, people dragged into the slaughter against their will, turned into mince by the liberators’ cannons). And continuing — unless I’m mistaken — even to this day. Because, my dear fellow countrymen, there has hardly been a period in modern Bulgarian history when Bulgarian Turks, Pomaks, and Roma have not been oppressed and persecuted in one form or another — most often economically, being placed in the role of second-class citizens, but not infrequently directly, brutally, by the power of the knife or the gun. And always with the same demand: either become Bulgarians, or grab your rags — and off to Turkey with you.

Suddenly I recalled Yovkov’s story The Senebir Brothers — the only one, as far as I know, among the classics of Bulgarian literature, who managed to keep his eyes open to the suffering of these people; then, listening to Grandpa Ramadan’s stories, I tried to imagine the reality of such a life — forever hunted, forever oppressed, simply because they believe in a different God and belong to a different ethnicity — and the hair on my head, as sparse as it may be, slowly began to stand on end. A single word kept hammering in my mind: Slavery! A new kind of slavery — unspoken, undefined, never acknowledged — in which yesterday’s slaves had, in turn, enslaved their former enslavers — following the old Balkan recipe, switching roles but not the rules of the game. A slavery paid back with interest — isn’t that the true reality of such an existence?

I don’t know whether you’d even agree to hear out such a radical opinion about our recent history, but this version suddenly helped me — quite unexpectedly, even to myself — to see the present-day Bulgaria in a completely new light, and for the first time to find a convincing explanation for the issue that, in my view, is corroding the country with the greatest force today: the ethnic divide. At one point I simply asked everyone the question I’d never managed to find an answer to: why don’t we want to mix with each other, why are there almost no mixed marriages in Bulgaria between Bulgarians and Turks? The faces of our conversation partners tensed (which is how I understood I’d touched on something truly painful), and then came the candid answer: “Because we’re afraid. We’re afraid that history will repeat itself again — for the umpteenth time in the past hundred years.”

And why afraid, you might ask? To me, the answer seems painfully clear: because throughout all those years Bulgaria has changed countless governments and ideologies, but it has not changed one thing — the unrelenting hatred toward the “oppressors,” the “enemies,” the “enslavers” — even though they’ve long since vanished, and we now live only among their distant descendants, who are no more enemies or oppressors than we are haiduks and revolutionaries. History continues — with new players, but by the old rules.

And from there, it suddenly became clear to me why these people cling with such desperate tenacity to their party and their man — a man just as corrupt, just as eroded by power and money as all the other Bulgarian politicians. Well yes, of course — what else do they have left, after a hundred-year-long experience has convinced them, to the death, that Bulgarians (or at least the Bulgarians they’ve known so far) may change every possible conviction and ideology, but one thing will always remain unshakable: when it comes to a clash of interests, most of them immediately forget their disagreements and close ranks like a wall — against the Turks, against the “foreigners.” It has always been that way — why should today be any different?

And then — as now, while writing these lines — I suddenly realized (“suddenly saw the light” would be the accurate phrase, which I’ll nonetheless spare myself) that Ahmed Dogan is not so much the source as the outcome of certain problems. Yes, exactly. An outcome, not a cause. Yes, he is arrogant. Yes, he allows himself to publicly say things that any politician in the world ought to keep to themselves. Yes, he’s bold, defiant — or perhaps just a man blinded by impunity. All of that is entirely true, and I would welcome the news of his political removal with great relief. But the fate of Ahmed Dogan is not — cannot be — the solution to Bulgaria’s ethnic problem. Because no matter how often the leaders of DPS are replaced, no matter how much pressure is put on this minority to “become more civilized” (which in our context apparently means that they too should stop voting, just like the Bulgarians), nothing will change. As the old line from our revolutionary classics goes: one will fall — another will replace him. Dogan after Dogan will come and go, repeating the same methods of political survival, until at long last there is true equality of rights, freedoms, and opportunities in this country. Until it truly parts with its past — not just in words. Until it becomes a part of modern Europe — in practice, not just in rhetoric.

***

And the seminar went on — and before my eyes unfolded other, again not particularly flattering truths. Or versions — all right, let’s call them that. Like, for example, the truth (version) about our dissident movement, which emerged in the span of just a few months — just like back then, in the summer of ’44 — from, more or less, absolutely nothing. Like the truth that the declaration in support of our fellow citizens, issued by the Club for Support of Glasnost and Perestroika in Bulgaria^[5], doesn’t even contain the word “minority” in its text — Lord, how brave we are, how insanely brave we’ve always been! — which led to a number of people leaving the Club, Deian Kuranov among them. That Blaga Dimitrova^[6] — God rest her soul, and may I too be forgiven for speaking this way of someone no longer among the living, but facts remain facts — refused, or didn’t dare, to read that same declaration in Paris at the symposium “Freedom of the Spirit and the Human Dimension in Europe,” and instead read something else, one of her own essays, from what I understood.

And at that same time — while our dissidents couldn’t agree among themselves on the most basic things — the Turks, organized in their various committees, were launching mass protest actions, with tens, hundreds, and thousands of people standing up against actual military machinery, real threats, real choices — freedom or... Just as we, too, might have liked to do, had we not perhaps forgotten how it’s done.

In short, dear fellow citizens — the Turkish resistance movement is, it seems, the only form of organized resistance against the communist regime in Bulgaria in 1989 that actually managed to cause serious tremors and problems for those in power. That’s how things looked to me after those conversations. Whether this view has any historical validity or not is a question that will likely remain unanswered, at least in the foreseeable future. The shame would be too great, the humiliation too deep, to admit to ourselves that the former oppressors may well have liberated us from the former liberators. Or at least done what we didn’t dare to do — stood up, without fear, to demand the return of their trampled rights and freedoms.

***

The seminar passed, and here I am again, sitting in Berlin, in the quiet of my study. I don’t know to what extent all these things have a right to life and voice, I don’t even know if it’s wise to set them loose here — in a forum that, thanks to technology, gives me the chance to speak freely, but perhaps also a bit rashly. I really don’t know... And yet, I had to say it. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be fair, wouldn’t be right — not somehow.

And then I remember Tolstoy — “Do what you must, come what may!” And I press the keys on my computer. If nothing else, at least now I feel a little better, a little freer. The Silence of the Lambs continues — but not my own.

May 2009

^[1] Ahmed Dogan is the founder and long-time leader of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF), a political party in Bulgaria that primarily represents the interests of the Turkish and Muslim minority. A former political prisoner under communism, Dogan emerged after 1989 as a dominant and controversial figure in Bulgarian politics — praised by some for giving voice to marginalised communities, and criticised by others for fostering clientelism, authoritarian tendencies, and ethnic segmentation of the electorate.

^[2] This refers to the so-called “Revival Process” (Vǎzroditelen protses) — the forced assimilation campaign against Bulgaria’s Turkish and Muslim population carried out by the communist regime in the mid-1980s. Hundreds of thousands were pressured to adopt Slavic names, abandon their language and religious customs, and accept a Bulgarian national identity. The campaign culminated in mass deportations and the exodus of over 300,000 ethnic Turks to Turkey in 1989. The state’s erasure of personal documents and public records was a central tactic in this policy.

^[3] Time of Parting (Време разделно) is a 1964 historical novel by Bulgarian author Anton Donchev, later adapted into a popular 1988 film. Set in the 17th century during the Ottoman rule of Bulgaria, it portrays the forced Islamisation of Bulgarians in the Rhodope Mountains. The book became a nationalist symbol during the communist era and was widely promoted as a narrative of heroic Christian resistance against Ottoman oppression. In the context of the 1980s “Revival Process,” its themes were reappropriated to justify state-led assimilation of Muslims — making it a deeply charged cultural reference that continues to shape ethnic and historical discourse in Bulgaria today.

^[4] The Pomaks are a Slavic Muslim minority group in Bulgaria, primarily residing in the Rhodope Mountains. They are ethnically and linguistically Bulgarian but converted to Islam during the Ottoman period. Their identity has long been contested within Bulgarian national discourse: viewed alternately as “Turkified” Bulgarians, crypto-Muslims, or a distinct group. Throughout the 20th century — and especially during periods of heightened nationalism — Pomaks were subjected to repeated assimilation campaigns, including forced name changes, suppression of religious practices, and coerced cultural “re-Bulgarisation.” Their historical marginalisation reflects Bulgaria’s unresolved tensions around religion, ethnicity, and national identity.

^[5] The Club for Support of Glasnost and Perestroika in Bulgaria was one of the first informal civil organizations to emerge in the late 1980s during the twilight of communist rule. Inspired by Gorbachev’s reforms in the Soviet Union, it brought together intellectuals and dissidents calling for greater openness (glasnost) and restructuring (perestroika) in Bulgarian political life. Despite its symbolic importance, the Club was often hesitant in confronting national taboos, especially those related to ethnic minorities.

^[6] Blaga Dimitrova (1922–2003) was a prominent Bulgarian poet, novelist, and later vice-president of Bulgaria (1992–1993). Admired for her literary achievements, she also became a political figure during the democratic transition. However, her record on minority issues remains controversial; in this case, she avoided reading a declaration in support of the persecuted Turkish minority abroad — a silence interpreted by some as self-censorship under pressure.