National interpretations in Bulgarian writings on the Pomaks from the communist period through the present1

The rise of nationalism in 19th-century Southeast Europe was thoroughly shaped by the legacy of the millet system of the Ottoman Empire that defined political organization and cultural-communal identity along religious lines. While being off-springs of a secular zeitgeist and its attendant influences, the independent states that seceded from the Ottoman Empire constructed a national identity delimited by linguistic differences but also centred upon and fused with Orthodox Christianity. A parallel legacy that the millet system bequeathed to the region is the presence of sizeable Muslim communities, despite large-scale immigration to what remained of the Ottoman Empire and subsequently to Turkey. Shaping a distinct cultural identity, the Muslim religion rendered difficult the assimilation of these communities into predominantly Christian Orthodox states such as Bulgaria and Greece, as well as in Albania and the Yugoslav lands (notably BosniaHerzegovina, Serbia and Montenegro). In so far as Islam has been a bridge facilitating their incorporation into Turkish national identity, Muslim communities have been viewed as a threat to the nationalizing states of the Balkans. A case of a Muslim community as such is that of the Pomaks, a Slavophone group professing Islam and inhabiting the highland areas of the Rhodope mountains in the south of Bulgaria, but also found in smaller numbers in the region of Western Thrace in north-eastern Greece. Numbering about 220,000 people, Bulgaria’s Pomaks are primarily a farming rural community occupied in tobacco production and animal husbandry. While remaining caught in the interstices of Bulgarian-Turkish nationalist antagonisms, a segment among Pomaks in the post-1989 period has sought to break free from the latter. Scholars argue that in this period a process of nationalization of religious identity is again under way, dramatically epitomized in the case of the Muslims of BosniaHerzegovina in the 1990s. Evidenced among Muslims elsewhere in the Balkans,