MINNE OCH MANIPULATION - Centre for European Studies - Lunds ...

Empire, the fake “sources” speak of “the horrifying Selim I, a cruel oppressor of
Christians who destroyed and converted to Islam Bulgaria, Albania and Bosnia”
and who is accused of the assassination of the Patriarch of Constantinople. In
sharp contrast with these falsifications, the “Annals of Universal Patriarchy”
contain no report of an assassination of an Orthodox patriarch, neither in the XVth,
nor XVIth century. The Austrian scholar Peter Schreiner is the publisher of Greek
chronicles of the period, that describe Selim I’s personality and the events during
his rule. The chronicles contain no data about forceful Islamization campaigns in
the Balkans from this period. Christian authors describe Selim I as “a courageous
man of wise and fair judgment”. Furthermore: “He shows respect to Christians
and especially to the Church of Christ. During his rule many churches were
restored from ruins” (Chronicles 22 &79, quoted by M. Kiel).
Despite such evidence, however, the most quoted source of the processes
described above, is the narrative of the priest Methody Draginov. In 1984
Bulgarian linguist Ilia Todorov was the first to prove the account to be an
adulteration (Todorov 1984: 56-79). These findings, however, did not prevent
Bulgarian scholars from including the narrative in textbooks and anthologies of
Old-Bulgarian literature. Nor did it stop foreign experts in Bulgarian Studies from
citing the priest’s narrative as highly illustrative evidence. Besides the facts that no
one has ever seen the original of the “Narrative”, and that the language and style
of the priest have nothing in common with the idiom and style of XVIIth century
(as the narrative claims is the time of its composition), the author seems to have no
idea that the villages he depicts as subject to mass and violent Islamization were
already constituents of a large vakuf (the property of a Muslim religious
foundation with a special status).
Thus linguistic, historic and textological analyses of church annals and other
sources show that most historic narrations of the “violent, full of terror and
humiliation” Islamization of Bulgarian lands, specifically those referring to the
conversion process in the Rhodopes Mountains, are hoaxes produced in the
beginning or in the middle of the XIXth century by those who have “discovered”
and published them. Historians have associated the ‘discovery’ of the “Narrative”
with the launching of a series of nationalistic historical deceptions in Europe such
as the Scottish “Ossian” and “Temora”, the Czech “Rukopis Kralevdvorski”, the
Finnish “Kalevala”, and the French mystifications of Villmerque and Henry
Martin (Kelbecheva 2009: 25-37). Other analysts have investigated the ideological
causes and tasks of the author, as well as the special reasons for the conversion to
Islam in the Rhodopes (Zhelizkova 1994: 105-111).
The academic community, mainly the Bulgarian one, continues to argue
about the authenticity of these documents, however, referring to the long-duration
of historic memory and the interpretations made by authors of chronicles of later
periods. (Gradeva 2012: 187-222). Decades long investigations by Bulgarian and
Ottoman history experts have proved insufficient to overcome two-century long
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