BULGARIAN-SPEAKING MUSLIMS - Lalev

sustained forced assimilation of Pomaks in Bulgaria. However, while only Bulgarian-speaking
Muslims had been singled out for Bulgarianization previously, the revivalist policies targeted the
Turkish-speaking Muslims as well. Consequently, the final Pomak assimilation of 1972-1974,
conclusively replacing the traditional Turkish-Arab names of the community with Orthodox-
Christian ones, was obscured by the larger Turkish revival process of 1984-1985. The essential
purpose of the renaming was to create a single, culturally uniform nation under the perpetual
leadership of the Bulgarian Communist Party. The chapter has two prominent components:
descriptive and theoretical. Descriptively, it examines (1) the ideology of the revival process; (2) the
Pomak identity crisis it generated; and (3) the political resurrection of Rodina, a nationalist
organization initially persecuted as “fascist” and subsequently redubbed “patriotic” to serve as the
regime’s propaganda machine. Theoretically, the chapter interprets the revival process through –
what I term – the anger-satisfaction continuum model premised on Ernest Gellner’s concept of
nationalism as a shifting and deeply exploitable national sentiment. My argument is that the national
sentiment—i.e. the cultural majority’s attitude toward a vernacular culture—ultimately determines
what heritage becomes (un)acceptable in the public domain.
Chapter IV narrates the life story of Ramadan Runtov, one of the most active Pomak antirevivalists
in Bulgaria from the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s. For over thirty years, Ramadan’s life had
been a sequence of economic hardship, political persecution, imprisonment, and torture. Because of
his vocal opposition to the revival process, the regime promptly arrested Ramadan and tried him on
bogus treason charges (i.e. conspiring the overthrow the “people’s regime”), for which he faced the
possibility of death penalty. The gravity of the charges, however, was largely a ploy to scare him into
silence. Consequently, Ramadan spent over a decade behind bars as a political prisoner, where he
endured a regimen of harassment, starvation, and sleep deprivation. 28 In the end, the regime
rounded up Ramadan and his family and summarily expelled them from Bulgaria in May 1989, just
six month before the collapse of communism in the country. The Runtovs eventually settled in
Istanbul (Turkey), where I interviewed the seventy-seven-year-old Ramadan in the summer of 2007.
28 Ramadan Runtov, interview by author, Istanbul, Turkey, May 21, 2007; Ismail Byalkov, interview by author,
Istanbul, Turkey, May 20, 2007.
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