BULGARIAN-SPEAKING MUSLIMS - Lalev

after the loss of the Second Balkan War, Bulgaria still held on to most of the Rhodope Mountains, a
territory compactly settled by Slavic-speaking Muslims (Pomaks). To legitimize its claim over the
freshly acquired Ottoman territories, Bulgaria’s first order of business, following the conquest, was to
proclaim the Pomaks “Bulgarian,” based on language commonality, and to attempt to convert them to
Orthodox Christianity. The Balkan Wars’ pokrastvane – religious conversion through Orthodox
baptism and name replacement – began a sustained assimilation of Pomaks in Bulgaria. It would set a
precedent for further religious conversion, name changing, and systematic suppression of Pomak
cultural traditions. Following the pokrastvane, Bulgarian historiography institutionalized the thesis
that the Pomaks descended from “Bulgarians” forcibly Islamized sometime prior to the eighteenth
century. Acting upon this thesis, Bulgarian nationalists launched another round of religious
conversion in the Rhodopes in 1938, but it was promptly aborted by the communist takeover in
September 1944. The final and most comprehensive assimilation took place in 1972-1974, when the
communist regime substituted the traditional Turkish-Arab names of all Pomaks with ones of
Bulgarian-Orthodox significance. This state of affairs only ended with the collapse of communism in
Bulgaria, and across Eastern Europe, in late 1989.
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