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

Hoaxes, Scandals and Fairy Tales
(Manipulations of Historical Memory in
Bulgaria)
Evelina Kelbecheva
I will tell three stories. The first one is about a historical hoax created in the
1870’s. The second one concerns a scandal about history and myths which
unfolded almost 140 years later. The third one is about a Fairy Tale, or about how
Bulgarians perceive their past today. All three show how persistent, irrational and
potentially dangerous the manipulations of history can be.
The Hoax
The most notorious field of dispute in Bulgarian historiography regards the
Ottoman period, an era which is a stumbling block for both Bulgarian and all other
Balkan scholarship. The hoax concerns the representation and memory of this very
traumatic period in Bulgarian history, beginning with Bulgarian society under
Ottoman rule, and, eventually culminating during the so-called “Regenerative
Process” (1984-1989) under Communism in Bulgaria with its policy of gradual
assimilation of the Turkish minorities. My focus will be on one crucial point –
namely the story invented about the forceful process of Islamization of the
Christian population, which turns out to be one of the major falsifications in
Bulgarian historiography.
The belief of the mass public has been formed by traditional textbooks and
by on-going media campaigns. They both safeguard the conviction that Bulgarians
were enslaved for five centuries by the Ottoman Sultan, that the devshirme took
millions of Bulgarian children as Janissaries, that the Bulgarian people led a
permanent and heroic struggle against the invaders, that the basic Ottoman
ambition was to convert every Bulgarian to Islam and that this process was
accompanied by horrible atrocities. This common perception results from a
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