Bulgaria - The social impact of seasonal migration

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1. Historical Overview - Migrations After WWII
1.1. In-migration, 1944-1989.
a) Until the end of WWII, the changing political boundaries of Bulgaria were the basic
factor explaining migration, especially in the border regions (Bobeva 1994, 221). After
September 1944, as a defeated Axis-country, Bulgaria had to return the lands it acquired
in April 1941 as a German ally, i.e. Aegean Thrace, Aegean and Vardar Macedonia, as
well as the border regions around Tsaribrod and Bosilegrad, which it disputed with
Yugoslavia. After these territories went to Greece and Yugoslavia at the end of WWII,
thousands of ethnic Bulgarians left for Bulgaria proper and were resettled there roughly
until 1949. Until the end of 1944 only, around 100 000 Bulgarian immigrants were
welcomed into the country (Vassileva 1991, 138-53). 1 These migration waves included
two types of Bulgarian migrants - refugees, namely people from Bulgarian origin but of
foreign citizenship who were leaving their home places in Alexandroupolis, Xanti,
Drama, Kavala, Demirhisar, Siar, Tasos island, etc. for the first time; and the so called
resettlers, i.e. Bulgarian citizens who migrated from Bulgaria proper to the newly
incorporated lands in 1941-3 and were now to return to their pre-war settlements. The
refugees went primarily to the South-western Bulgarian regions of Gorna Dzhumaia,
Plovdiv and Sofia, while the resettlers (from Aegean Thrace) went back to their former
dwellings in Stara Zagora and Bourgas regions in the Bulgarian South-east.
Once in Bulgaria, the newly arrived Bulgarian immigrants experienced two further
types of movement in the second half of the 1940s. Those of them who were from Vardar
and Aegean Macedonia were transferred - voluntarily and sometimes involuntarily - to
Yugoslavia, into the then People's Republic of Macedonia. In 1945, Yugoslavia attempted
to gather all of them on the territory of the People's Republic of Macedonia, and was
assisted in its efforts by the Bulgarian government, which then propagated the
establishment of a Balkan Federation and believed in the existence of a separate
Macedonian nation. Although the exact number of people transferred from Bulgaria to
Yugoslavia is not known, some researchers think it is around 40 000.
The second type of movement experienced by the newly arrived Bulgarian immigrants
was their resettlement throughout Bulgaria. In 1945, the number of Bulgarian refugees
settled to Bulgaria was 12 015, and that of resettlers - 22 444. During the secondary
resettlement, Bulgarian immigrants from South-western Bulgaria were sent to Northern
and North-eastern Bulgaria, as well as Dobrudzha in order to alleviate the migration
pressure on the South-western areas and find better opportunities for work and survival
of the migrants. The majority of them settled in villages. They were primarily small
peasants, who rarely possessed more than 50 dka of arable land. The secondary
resettlement ended in 1949, and a change in the law of Bulgarian citizenship adopted in
1950 gave Bulgarian citizenship to all refugees of Bulgarian origin but without
citizenship.
b) Two other waves of in-migration - this time for political reasons - took shape in the
late 1940s. Greek Communists and civil war fighters began migrating to Bulgaria after
1 For migration trends in the period before WWII, see the collection of documents Migratsionni dvizheniia
na bulgarite: 1993