The Buzz: A Miniature Culture War Ignited by One Post

Something strange is unfolding in Bulgaria – a Facebook post has detonated a miniature culture war about Europe, national dignity, and who gets to speak for the nation. The author is Milen Ruskov – one of Bulgaria’s two towering literary figures (the other being Georgi Gospodinov) and arguably its most polarizing voice.

Ruskov re-emerged on social media this summer after a long silence, posting a series of furious broadsides against the European Union and the “Westernization” of Bulgaria. The post that lit the fuse reads:

“I like that these people now openly say they’re collecting signatures AGAINST the euro. Not for keeping the lev, but AGAINST the euro. That’s how it should be. Those nasty colonialists came here to take over my country. Which is still my homeland, after all. And they came here. These intruders. These pushy types. They come into your house and start rearranging the furniture. Get out of here, you euro-idiots! The English are smart – they broke free in time. We didn’t!” – Milen Ruskov (Facebook post, translated from Bulgarian)

The backlash was immediate. Political commentator Yavor Siderov denounced Ruskov’s outburst as an “ersatz version of the endless Russian cultural war between zapadniki (Westernizers) and slavophiles,” arguing that the debate merely reproduces imported civilizational fractures that paralyze genuine intellectual discourse.

Cultural theorist Alexander Kiosev cut to the quick with one sardonic sentence:

“It’s funny: one of our great living writers wants everyone to love him. Since that role is already taken, the other wants everyone to hate him. There’s a famous book about this – Games People Play.”

It would be easy to dismiss the exchange as a provincial squabble. But in truth, it exposes one of the deepest Bulgarian paradoxes: the longing to be recognized as fully European – and the simultaneous conviction that “Europe” secretly despises us. This tension produces periodic eruptions of national outrage whenever a sacred symbol is mocked or a foreign artist holds up an unflattering mirror.

Before tracing this pattern, we must understand the two writers who embody its extremes.

Two Poles of Contemporary Bulgarian Literature

To most European readers, Georgi Gospodinov needs no introduction. He is Bulgaria’s most translated author, a melancholy humanist whose novel Time Shelter won the International Booker Prize in 2023. His prose is nostalgic, European, and recognizably cosmopolitan.

Milen Ruskov, by contrast, is almost unknown outside Bulgaria. Domestically, however, he is revered: the author of Heights (Възвишение, 2011), which won the European Union Prize for Literature in 2014, and of Chamkoria (2017), an epic portrait of Bulgaria between wars. Ruskov’s novels are dense, linguistically inventive, and anchored in Bulgarian history. He is celebrated as a writer who speaks from within – not to please Brussels or international juries, but to confront the nation with its own ghosts.

The contrast between Gospodinov and Ruskov has come to symbolize the central fault line in Bulgaria’s cultural psyche. On one side stands the correct writer – the universalist, the reconciler, the gentle humanist seeking acceptance through civility. On the other side stands the confrontational writer – the provocateur, the nationalist heretic, the one who refuses to be “liked.”

Ruskov’s post about “euro-idiots” went viral precisely because it gave blunt voice to something long simmering: resentment toward the perceived colonial hierarchy of Europe, where Bulgaria plays the obedient periphery.

The Deeper Question: Why Do Bulgarians React So Allergically?

Why is it that Bulgarians erupt with fury at any suggestion they are “not quite European,” yet insist just as fiercely that they are a special kind of European – wounded, misunderstood, and morally superior to the decadent West?

This is not a new tension. For two decades, Bulgaria’s public life has moved in a cycle of outrage and shame – provoked each time the country’s image in Europe is touched by irony or critique. Three emblematic episodes capture this pattern.

Milestones of Bulgarian Outrage

The Batak Affair (2007): When Myth Meets Scholarship

In 2007, historians Martina Baleva and Ulf Brunnbauer proposed a conference re-examining how the Batak massacre of 1876 became a cornerstone of national mythology. The public reaction was explosive. They were accused of “denying Bulgarian suffering,” and the event was cancelled. What mattered was not history but sacrilege: to question the myth was to betray the nation.

David Černý’s Entropa (2009): The Squat Toilet Heard Around Europe

When Czech artist David Černý unveiled his satirical EU installation Entropa in Brussels, Bulgaria’s “tile” depicted the country as a series of squat toilets. The reaction bordered on hysteria: official protests, talk-show outrage, and finally, the Bulgarian section was covered in black cloth. For many, this confirmed Europe’s contempt; for others, it revealed how fragile national pride had become.

The Malkovich Affair (2024): Theatre as National Insult

In November 2024, actor John Malkovich directed Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man at the National Theatre in Sofia. The production, ironically set during a 19th-century Bulgarian war, was accused of “mocking national heroes.” Nationalists stormed the stage, forcing police intervention. For days, media and politicians traded accusations. Once again, Europe – or what Bulgarians imagine as Europe – became the aggressor, and national dignity the victim.

Across seventeen years, the theme repeats: a perceived foreign offense triggers a collective performance of wounded pride. Each episode ends the same way: Europe becomes an insult, and Bulgaria becomes its most ardent defender.

Why Ruskov Matters (and Why He’s Invisible Abroad)

Ruskov’s importance lies precisely in this paradox. His novels channel the emotional undercurrents of the Bulgarian psyche: the ambivalence of a small nation forever oscillating between pride and humiliation.

His language resurrects the idiom of the 19th century, the heroic bravado of the National Revival, and the bitterness of the wars that followed. For Bulgarians, this feels “real.” For foreigners, it feels archaic, provincial, or simply impenetrable.

That gap explains his fame at home and obscurity abroad. To the Bulgarian reader, he is the authentic one – the writer who did not bend to the cosmopolitanism of the literary marketplace. To many of his admirers, Gospodinov may have triumphed internationally, but Ruskov has remained morally intact.

Europe as Mirror and Phantom

Here we reach the heart of the matter. Since 1878 – the year Bulgaria emerged from Ottoman rule – the country has lived within what might be called a frozen national ideology: a 19th-century model of ethnic nationalism that could never realize itself, was never reformed, and therefore survives as injured pride.

The abrupt end of Ottoman rule interrupted a process of gradual modernization. The wars of the early 20th century ended in humiliation; Communism froze open discussion of nationalism for four decades; post-1989 democracy imported European vocabulary faster than local mentality could absorb it.

The result is a psychic paradox: Europe is both the dream and the trauma, the admired model and the despised master. Bulgarians want to belong, yet also to defy. The same energy drives Ruskov’s rebellion and Gospodinov’s melancholy: one shouts, the other sighs, but both orbit the same wound.

The Present Quarrel, Revisited

The Ruskov episode is not about the euro. It is about ownership of the Bulgarian voice. For a public weary of lectures from Brussels and domestic elites, Ruskov’s fury feels like vindication. For the urban liberal class, it sounds like provincial regression. Both sides are performing: one the role of the defiant victim, the other that of the civilized pupil eager for European approval.

Kiosev’s quip about Games People Play captures it perfectly: one writer seeks universal love, the other seeks universal hate. Both are locked in the same mirror, measuring their reflection against the imagined gaze of Europe.

From Submission to Eruption – and Back Again

The rhythm is historical. For centuries, survival meant submission. Under Ottoman rule, obedience was self-preservation; rebellion meant annihilation. After independence, the reflex persisted: recognition replaced obedience, but the structure remained the same.

Communism reinforced the habit. To speak too loudly was dangerous; irony and silence became the native arts. When democracy arrived, the trauma mutated. Now the same energy oscillates between mimicry (“let’s be like Europe”) and rebellion (“Europe despises us anyway”). Every few years, the pendulum swings back with mechanical precision.

The Diagnosis: A Frozen Ideology

In my view, the Bulgarian national project remains a frozen ideology – a system created in the 19th century and never fundamentally re-examined. Like a religion that escaped reformation, it persists as ritual rather than reason. It cannot openly dominate politics, yet it cannot die.

Each new outrage – Batak, Černý, Malkovich, Ruskov – is a tremor from that buried structure. The same archaic logic speaks through modern keyboards: they insulted us; they mock us; we must prove our worth again. The “European ghost” is not real; it is an echo of our own self-doubt.

Toward a Cure: Re-founding the Story

If there is a way forward, it lies not in more love or more hate, but in rewriting the story. Bulgaria must abandon the fantasy of being “Europe’s misunderstood cousin” and instead claim Europe as a practical community, not a tribunal.

That means cultivating civic patriotism instead of ethnic nostalgia, self-critique instead of wounded pride, and confidence in smallness instead of resentment over marginality. To be European is not to imitate; it is to participate.

Coda: The Specter and the Mirror

The specter haunting Bulgaria is not Europe itself – it is our projection of Europe, the invisible judge we carry in our minds. Every few years we stage the same play: a writer curses, another rebukes, the public splits, and the nation rehearses its trauma.

The alternative is quieter, and therefore harder: to live as a small country in untheatrical dignity, to engage without inferiority, to remember without worship, to argue without hysteria. Until that happens, the specter will keep wandering through our feeds, and we will keep mistaking our reflection for a verdict.