BULGARIAN-SPEAKING MUSLIMS - Lalev

the annexation of the (greater part of the) Rhodopes to Bulgaria. This was a turning point in the life
of the prevalently Muslim Rhodopean population, the Pomaks, who changed citizenship almost
overnight (from Ottoman to Bulgarian). They spoke Bulgarian as their mother tongue, but unlike
Bulgaria’s majority, professed Islam rather than Orthodox Christianity as their religion.
Since the pokrastvane of 1912-1913, the state-endorsed historiography has maintained that
the Pomaks are descended from Christian Bulgarians, forcibly converted to Islam by the Ottoman
Turks somewhere between the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Involuntary
Islamization – if indeed it happened – could have been the result of residual Muslim grudge against
the Ottoman Christians following the inauspicious Turkish-Venetian and Russian-Turkish wars in the
same period. 22 Powerful religious ideologies drove these wars, whereby the Islam of the Ottoman
Empire and the Christianity of the Vatican, Venice, Poland, Austria, and – later – Russia crossed
swords in a violent struggle for hegemony over the Holy Land, the eastern Mediterranean, as well as
parts of Europe, Asia, and Africa dominated by the Turks. It is very likely that these Christian-Muslim
hostilities had heavy repercussions for the Christian population within the Islamic Ottoman Empire,
segments of which must have converted at a sword point or for fear of retribution. In five centuries of
Ottoman rule in the Balkans, however, many adopted Islam voluntarily for both personal conviction
and socio-political gains. Still, historians are yet to determine authoritatively and conclusively how or
when the Pomaks of the Rhodope Mountains became Muslims. 23
The dispute over Pomak cultural identity continues to pose problems for the community.
The official political discourse is one of actively discouraging the Muslim Rhodopeans from pursuing
22 Bulgarska Akademiya na Naoukite (BAN) /Bulgarian Academy of Science/, Iz minaloto na balgaritemohamedani
v Rodopite /On the Past of the Bulgarian Mohammedans in the Rhodopes/ (Sofia: BAN, 1958).
23 For evidence of (voluntary) conversion to Islam, see Anton Minkov, Conversion to Islam in the Balkans (Leiden:
Brill, 2004). See also Maria Todorova, “Conversion to Islam as a Trope in Bulgarian Historiography,” in Balkan
Identities: Nation and Memory, ed. Maria Todorova (New York: New York University Press, 2004), 129-57; Maria
Todorova, “Identity (Trans)formation among Bulgarian Muslims” (Location: Global, Area, and International
Archive, 1998), at: http://escholarship.org/uc/item/8k7168bs. Last accessed 30 November 2009; Ulf
Brunnbauer, “Histories and Identities: Nation State and Minority Discourses – The case of the Bulgarian
Pomaks”, (Karl-Franzens-University of Graz, 1997), at: http://wwwgewi.kfunigraz.ac.at/csbsc/ulf/pomak_identities.htm.
Last accessed 30 November 2009; Antonina Zhelyazkova ,
Bozhidar Aleksiev, and Zhorzheta Nazurska, Myusyulmanskite obshtnosti na Balkanite i v Bulgarija /Muslim
Communities in the Balkans and in Bulgaria/ (Sofia: IMIR, 1997); Vera Mutafchieva, “The Turk, the Jew and the
Gypsy,” in Relations of Compatibility and Incompatibility between Christians and Muslims in Bulgaria, ed. Antonina
Zhelyazkova (Sofia: PHARE, 1994).
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