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

discussions. The debate was between scholars defending the freedom of academic
research on the mechanisms and the proliferation of knowledge about the tragic
events in Batak in May 1876, and those (academic historians, students and general
public) who refused to accept the term “myth” to describe the event, accusing both
international and Bulgarian participants in the project of being “traitors” and
“national nihilists”. As in the case of the phony allegation against historians who
“wanted to replace the term Turkish yoke with Ottoman presence” in the early
1990s, twenty years later the same groundless populist accusations were directed
towards the academics who dared to investigate the formation of the national
memory 27 .
The highly emotional negative reaction of certain political and academic
circles, starting with professors from the Bulgarian Academy of Science and
ending with the semi-military youth organization of the extreme left nationalistic
party Ataka (who were present at the public debate in the Red House, but left the
hall), is alarming. It is alarming because it is evidence of a refusal of the Bulgarian
public to engage in constructive, enlightening and innovative debate about
traumatic, but still unexplored and unexplained, phenomena of national history.
In fact, in spite of the initial desire of the participants in the project for a
wider public debate, it never occurred. The planned conference, which was
supposed to finalize the results of the project, was canceled because the director of
the Institute of Ethnography at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences refused to
provide the facilities promised for it. Martina Baleva, who resides in Germany, has
periodically received phone threats and considered it unsafe to return to her native
Bulgaria. On countless websites the debate went on – the defenders of “national
pride” were far more active and aggressive than the academics that defended their
right to independent research 28 . It was obvious that certain party headquarters
27 Needless to say, no “revisionist” historian ever denied the fact of the massacre, neither any other
atrocities that occurred at that time; nor did anyone challenge the idea that the international
resonance of the atrocities in Bulgaria triggered the further diplomatic and political attempts of the
Great Powers to resolve the Bulgarian question, finalized with the Russian-Turkish war from 1877-
1878.
28 Following a lecture given at the American University in Bulgaria by Evgenia Ivanova, author in the
volume and participant at the public debate in the Red House, the student virtual fora were inundated
by comments accusing her and myself as “deniers of the Batak massacre, thus of the glorious past of
Bulgaria”. The response of Bulgarian students at the American University in Bulgaria (the most
international university in the region, featuring students from 52 different mostly ex-communist
countries) was not expected. The reaction to the controversy around Batak of the highly educated
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