Pomaks: Muslim Bulgarians

Islam and Christian-Muslim Relations, Vol. 12, No. 3, July 2001 Pomaks: Muslim Bulgarians TSVETANA GEORGIEVA This article looks at the history of the Pomaks and the development of their identity as it has been and is perceived by themselves, by other Bulgarians and by the state. It identiŽes the political, economic, social and cultural pressures to which they have been subjected and points to an uncertain future in view of the volatility of the situation and the unpredictability of the interactions that will arise between the various forces at work. ABSTRACT Identifying Muslim Bulgarians as a minority community is a controversial issue for part of the general public in Bulgaria—an encroachment on the unity and integrity of the nation. Probably that is why Muslim Bulgarians were never mentioned in the course of the ofŽcial debate on the signing of the Framework Convention for the Protection of National Minorities. Indicatively, the use of their traditional name, Pomaks, triggers sharp criticism and even accusations of high treason not only in the mass media, but also in academic periodicals. ‘Pomak’ is one of the designations and self-designations of Muslim Bulgarians which came to be used in public discourse during the National Revival in the second half of the nineteenth century. After the establishment of the modern Bulgarian state, it became ofŽcial and was used in both the press and the works of the founding fathers of contemporary Bulgarian culture.1 Various historical sources from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries show that the term was popular in the public sphere, along with the names of all other ethnographic groups, such as Shoppi, Rouptsi and Tourlatsi. Several other traditional names and self-names of Muslim Bulgarians— Ahryani, Torbeshi and Potournatsi—eventually came into popular use too. At the regional level, however, they had pejorative implications typical of all group names designating the local, religious or ethnic differentiation of distinct human communities in pre-industrial societies. The Pomaks are a mountain population currently inhabiting Žve Balkan countries: Bulgaria, Greece, Macedonia, Albania and Turkey. They originally populated the mountain ranges that run across the Balkan Peninsula from the Eastern Rodopi to the Northern Albanian mountains.2 A now small group lives in several villages in the Central Balkan Range between Lovech and Teteven. All speak a Bulgarian dialect which, in the high parts of the mountains, has preserved numerous archaic grammatical and lexical forms identical to those found in medieval literature. Language is the Žrst feature that sets them apart from the Bosnian Muslims, who speak Serbian. Both groups of Balkan Muslims use a stock of Turkish words: numerals and kinship terms. The religious terminology is Arabic. Almost all Turkish kinship terms are modiŽed. Baba (father) has been replaced by boubaiko, and ana (mother) by nina, lyalya and maichinka. In the vernacular, ofŽcial qur’ānic personal names have been Slavicized in a speciŽc way: Muh½ ammad to Memcho, S½ ālih½ to Salcho and ¨Alȭ to Alcho, etc. ISSN 0959-6410 print/ISSN 1469-9311 online/01/030303-14 Ó 2001 CSIC and CMCU DOI: 10.1080/09596410120065868 304 Tsvetana Georgieva Experts estimate that there are about 500,000 Pomaks in all: from 80,000 to 120,000 in Albania; 40,000 each in Greece and Macedonia; and between 150,000 and 200,000 in Bulgaria. Abiding by a tacit but hard-and-fast rule of Balkan politics, each state deals with its own Pomaks and is not concerned with the fate of those who live beyond its borders. The status of Pomaks varies from one country to another. In Greece, they are part of the Muslim minority along with the Turks from Eastern Thrace. In Albania, they are incorporated into the Macedonian minority. In Macedonia, they are perceived as part of the majority population, but have recently been identiŽed as a constituent of the Muslim minority along with the Albanians (Apostolov 1998). The origin of Pomaks is the only issue that may be deŽned as pan-Balkan, since almost every country associates them with its past. In Greece, they are identiŽed as Slavophone Islamized Greeks. According to a recent popular theory, they are descendants of ancient Thracians mixed with Greeks. Interest in the Pomak phenomenon has intensiŽed among various sections of Greek society. Greek Pomaks have recently been declared the last non-literate people in Europe, and two ofŽcial dictionaries—Greek– Pomak and Pomak–Greek—have been published. Turkish historiography and, in particular, Turkish propaganda deŽnes the Pomaks as mountain Turks descended from Turkic tribes who settled in the Balkans in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, such as the Pechenegs, Oghuz and Kumans. Another theory associates them with the migration prompted by the revolts of nomadic tribes against Umayyad Iran in the eighth and ninth centuries (Serifgil 1980). All versions identify them as Turkics who came to the Balkans several centuries before the fourteenth-century Ottoman invasion. In Bulgaria, such theories are regarded as transparent fabrications which sink into oblivion after short-lived publicity. The Bulgarian origin of the Pomaks is an axiomatic fact that is conŽrmed by the identical language and traditional folk culture, by drawing parallels with the Serbianspeaking Bosnian Muslims and by relatively rich information in Ottoman sources. The earliest evidence of Muslims in Rodopi settlements comes from an Ottoman tax register from 1499–1502. Their inhabitants have Bulgarian names, and the registrar deŽnes them as ‘inŽdel raya’; in many villages, however, there are isolated cases of ‘new Muslims’ who are registered as Ali, son of Vladislav, Elias, son of Todor, and Behader, son of Georgi, residents of the still-existing Pomak village of Teplen in the Western Rodopi (Dimitrov & Stoykov 1963). The number of Muslims in the Rodopi Mountains, recorded by various Ottoman documents, grew steadily after the sixteenth century. An extensive study by Kiel (1998), based on several Ottoman registers dating from 1516 to 1865, traces the gradual increase of Muslims in Rodopi population centres. According to this study, in the seventeenth century Islamization intensiŽed to the point where the Muslims eventually outnumbered the Christians, who became a minority. Apart from the Ottoman documents, information about the Pomaks is relatively scarce. Frenchman Paul Lucas was the Žrst European to mention Slavophone Muslims in the Rodopi Mountains in 1706. Crossing the mountains from Plovdiv to Drama, he reached Pashmakli (the present-day Smolyan) and wrote the following in his diary: ‘And when we had covered a distance of seven miles in those same mountains and along very arduous paths, we passed through the village called Pashmakli. It is populated by Turks only, but they do not speak their language. Their dialect is, rather, distorted Slavonic mixed with Greek and Bulgarian’ (Tsvetkova 1963). In the age of the Bulgarian National Revival, the Pomaks started attracting the interest of educated Bulgarians. This interest naturally focused on their origins, since their Muslim religion was the only substantial feature that distinguished them from the Pomaks: Muslim Bulgarians 305 Christian Bulgarians. The answer to the question about their origins may have been suggested by local tales and legends, with which the co-existing Christians and Muslims—who spoke the same language and had the same way of life and, in many cases, the same customs, rituals and religious rites—explained their difference of religion. It was Žrst formulated by Zahariev (1973) in his 1870 book Historical–Geographical– Statistical Description of the Tatar Pazardjik Kaza, which included a Chronicle of Father Metodii Draginov from the village of Korova about the forced Islamization of seven villages on the Chepinska River. Several other Bulgarian chronicles from the next few decades attest that the promulgation of Islam among the Rodopi population was accompanied by brutal violence, with people forced to choose between ‘the turban or the head’ as the then popular expression went, i.e. between conversion or death. In Bulgaria, this is the most popular theory of the origin of the Pomaks, recounted in novels, feature Žlms and documentaries. Experts in Bulgarian history and literature have proved that the Chronicle of Father Metodii Draginov, the Rodopi Diary, the Belovo Chronicle and other writings are ‘fabrications invented for a noble purpose’ by National Revival patriots. These claims, however, tend to be a ‘voice in the wilderness’ (Zhelyazkova 1997, 51–2). This has Žred a bitter debate on the Pomak phenomenon, which still recurrently divides the Bulgarian public into ‘patriots’ and ‘traitors’. The former have a simple and easy explanation for the origin of Pomaks, i.e. for the ways, forms and means of their conversion to Islam. They argue that the violence applied by the Ottoman authorities, as a consistent policy, forced thousands of Bulgarians in the Rodopi Mountains, as well as in the Balkan range, to abandon their religion and convert to Islam. In the spirit of classical historiographical romanticism, this very emotional version turns the Pomaks into victims who, however, are contrasted with the respective heroes: their brothers and sisters, parents and children, relatives and neighbours who did not bow to pressure or managed to escape, thus keeping their Christian faith. The romantic formula of victims/heroes, whose main purpose is to demonstrate the identical origins of Christians and Muslims in the Rodopi Mountains, also justiŽes a sort of division into better and not so good Bulgarians. The theories offering more prosaic explanations for the Pomak phenomenon are less known and, as a rule, unpopular. Without denying the use of force, certain scholars stress that the medieval mountain people were heretics—Bogomils. Centuries before the Ottoman invasion, they were in opposition to the ofŽcial Church, and they therefore adopted Islam as an alternative to Eastern Orthodox Christianity after the fourteenth century (Zhelyazkova 1990). According to another theory, after the Žfteenth century the mountains belonged to different vakifs, Muslim religious foundations, which taxed the local population. Muslim converts were entitled to certain tax relief (Moutafchieva 1963). More and more, researchers have been looking for an explanation in the closeness of folk Christianity and folk Islam which, through the tales of dervish sects, offered the people from the mountains a comprehensible explanation for the essence of God, the meaning of life and human suffering (Gradeva & Ivanova 1998). It is obvious that the reasons and factors behind the Islamization of the Pomaks, as well as of the Bosnian Muslims and Albanians, have not been explained in full and will long remain controversial if they are examined only in terms of ‘compulsory’ or ‘voluntary’ conversion. They should probably be considered in the context of the domestic political strategy adopted by the Ottoman Empire towards its numerous and practically uncontrollable population in the high Balkan mountains, of this population’s very difŽcult life under the medieval economic system under which the slightest tax 306 Tsvetana Georgieva relief meant the difference between life or death for particular families or villages in bad years, and of the medieval religiosity of the peasants and the capacity of the Orthodox Church to conŽne it to an Orthodox framework, etc. The recurrent heated debates dealing and associated with the origins of the Pomaks show that this is certainly not simply a theoretical issue. It has political dimensions too. Two of these are particularly important and outline two fundamental and interrelated problematic areas in the Bulgarian reality in general and the contemporary Bulgarian situation in particular. One is associated with state policies regarding the Pomaks, and the other with the contemporary shifts in their identities. The romantic version of the forced Islamization of the Pomaks in the Rodopi Mountains is an essential element of the general political concept of the modern Bulgarian nation-state, which appeared on the political map of Europe as a result of the 1877–78 Russo-Turkish War. It was established on the principle of ‘one nation, one state’ adopted in the European political system and applied throughout the Balkan world. This principle, however, proved to be in total contradiction to the Ottoman imperial legacy. Similar to that of the neighbouring countries, the population of the Bulgarian state was heterogeneous in terms of both ethnicity and religion. This pan-Balkan phenomenon was further intensiŽed by the 1878 Congress of Berlin, which left densely populated territories beyond the Bulgarian borders. In the circumstances, uniŽcation of the entire Bulgarian nation in the Bulgarian state, i.e. attainment of national monolithism, became the main objective of all Bulgarian governments and all Bulgarians. As in the other Balkan states, the mosaic diversity of the population was perceived as one of the obstacles to the attainment of this objective. Often following the lead of their neighbours, Bulgarian governments have over the years developed—or at least tried to develop—a political strategy towards the others: towards those who differ in ethnicity and religion from the Bulgarian Eastern Orthodox majority. The dream of a pure nation free of ethnic and religious minorities, populating the largest possible territory—claimed to be ethnic territory on the basis of the medieval historical legacy—is the long-term objective of the different and antagonistic forms of Balkan nationalism. It accounts for the general model of Balkan nationalism, of which assimilation of the small ethnic and religious communities into the large majority is a perpetual goal. If we add the tangible Bulgarian loss of territory and population after the Balkan wars and World War I, we might understand the sense of responsibility for the outstanding national problem which is cultivated and maintained in each generation of Bulgarians. It engenders and preserves the viability of the idea of national uniŽcation, which has had different slogans and manifestations in particular historical periods, but which serves as a general set of concepts and mechanisms for the attainment of national unity within the boundaries of the primeval Bulgarian lands.3 The issue of the others, the non-Bulgarian and the not-entirely-Bulgarian others, is an integral part of it. The alternative solutions are sought in two directions. The Žrst is to decrease the largest ethnic community, that of the ethnic Turks, by means of emigration to Turkey. This policy was also applied in respect of the Bulgarian Jews after World War II (Vassileva 1991). The second is to integrate the rest. The Bulgarian state has made numerous hesitant but consistent attempts to overcome the differences that mark out the various small communities and to integrate them into the monolithic Bulgarian nation. The Pomaks—the Muslim Bulgarians—have been a permanent target of this policy of integration. The one nation, one state formula has virtually been extended by the incorporation of another compulsory element—Orthodox Christianity—as the common and compulsory faith. Pomaks: Muslim Bulgarians 307 The different approaches to the project of integrating the Pomaks into the Bulgarian nation are outlined distinctly in the extensive literature on their past and present (Alexiev 1997). There are two main approaches in the vast range of academic, journalistic and literary material. The Žrst, whose authors are mainly Rodopi activists, upholds the thesis of the need of hard and consistent work for better education, improved standards of living and increased involvement of the Pomaks in public and political life. The second calls explicitly or implicitly for a radical solution and their ‘full’ integration into the Bulgarian nation by conversion to Christianity. Incidentally, this idea is not alien to the advocates of the Žrst approach either. There have been repeated attempts to implement it by Christianization and changing Muslim names. The Žrst attempt came immediately after the 1877–78 Russo-Turkish War and was conŽned to one particular region. The second was made during the 1912–13 Balkan wars on the initiative of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church (Georgiev & Trifonov 1995). Both attempts were followed by the virtual annulment of Christianization and restoration of Muslim names under international treaties (Markova 1997). Rodina (Motherland), an organization founded by educated Muslims and Christians in Smolyan in 1937, set out to revive the Pomaks’ ‘love for the Bulgarian people’ without resorting to the use of force and religious conversion. Rather, it recommended and demanded the use of Bulgarian names and of the Bulgarian language in Muslim religious services and the rejection of Muslim elements in traditional costumes, etc. Following this, the Communist regime introduced an about-turn in policies towards the Pomaks. The Rodina was declared a fascist organization and reprisals were carried out against its members. The Muslim names were restored and Muslim clerics were allowed to conduct services in Arabic. This idyll, however, was short-lived. In the late 1950s the authorities developed a new strategy that was supposed to solve the problem of Muslim Bulgarians once and for all. Another name change campaign was launched in the 1970s, and those who refused to accept the advance of ‘Bulgarization’ were subjected to harsh reprisals. Profession of Islam and all associated practices, customs and rites were banned and those involved persecuted. Intensive propaganda at all levels imposed the thesis that the Muslims in Bulgaria were descendants of Islamized Bulgarians. The Pomaks were cited as an example, and pressure on them signalled the start of the so-called ‘Regeneration Process’, which was eventually extended to the Muslim Roma (Gypsies) and the Turks. In the context of militant Communist atheism, the issue was in practice raised on an ethnic rather than a religious basis. The Muslims in Bulgaria were presented as a threat to the future of the state, and violence against them as a natural way to bring about their integration into the monolithic Bulgarian nation. This led to a deep division within Bulgarian society. A large-scale propaganda campaign, mounted with the assistance of, among others, a substantial part of the country’s academic establishment, convinced the majority of Christian Bulgarians that the Muslims were a potential threat to Bulgaria’s future unless they became true Bulgarians, which had come to mean not Christians, but non-Muslims. The majority of Muslims, Pomaks included, responded by isolating themselves within and consolidating their community (Zhelyazkova 1997). This became clear immediately after Todor Zhivkov fell from power on 10 November 1989, which marked the beginning of political and social reform in Bulgaria. Some of the Žrst demonstrations against Communist authority were staged by Muslim Bulgarians, as well as Turks, whose main demand was the restoration of Muslim names and religious freedoms. Quite a few Christian Bulgarians rallied against them. The two antagonistic communities held large demonstrations in SoŽa, Kurdjali 308 Tsvetana Georgieva and a number of Rodopi villages in the cold winter of 1989–90. Notwithstanding the bitterness of the dispute and the persistence of the demonstrators, who remained in the squares in freezing weather for days on end, none of the two parties went beyond the limits of peaceful protest. The mass involvement of the Pomaks in these stormy events, and their adamant demand for the restoration of Muslim names and religious freedoms, were a reaction to Communist pressure as well as a public manifestation of changes in their group identity. Several Želd studies, conducted in the Rodopi Mountains and the area of Lovech by teams of lecturers and students from the University of SoŽa’s Institute of Ethnology, found that these changes were associated primarily with the end of the internal self-isolation of the Pomak community and the assertion of various approaches to their representative identity.4 These approaches are manifested in the verbal designation of the group, which is presented and perceived as a sign of the identity of the individual and of the group to which s/he belongs. As noted above, Pomak (pl. Pomatsi in Bulgarian) is the group name of Muslim Bulgarians, which probably dates from far before the second half of the nineteenth century, when it came into popular use. This is what they call themselves, their dialect, their songs, their customs. It is also what they are called off the record by members of the other groups alongside whom they live: Christian Bulgarians, Turks and Gypsies. Some other names may be even earlier. Ahryani, for instance, is recorded in the 1431 Ottoman register of the Arvanid sanjak. The term is still known in the region but is seldom used. The term ‘Pomak’ has long since acquired pejorative connotations: a person or persons who have betrayed their Christian faith and have converted to Islam, thus changing their identity. This change has become asserted as a distinctive feature at both the individual and group levels, a marker of unstable identity and, hence, of inferiority. The term has long had a pejorative meaning. The Turks in the Rodopi still call local Muslim Gypsies ‘Pomaks’, i.e. people who are not true Muslims, even though there is a special word for the latter in Turkish: dognme. The repeated change of names and religion has intensiŽed the pejorative connotation of ‘Pomak’, and the term is often considered offensive. SigniŽcantly, Christian Bulgarians often use it in the sense of a common, backward person. The derisive implications of the word ‘Pomak’ intensiŽed dramatically after the 1930s, when another term was ofŽcially introduced—Bulgaromohamedanin, pl. Bulgaromohamedani—from Mohamed, the Slav form of the name of the Prophet Muhammad. The idea was to accentuate the Bulgarian origins and erase the memory of the changed identity by preserving the religious component of group identity.5 At present, the majority of Muslim Bulgarians dislike being referred to as Pomaks by people who do not belong to their community. Some, however, reject the term ‘Bulgarian Mohammedan’ as artiŽcial and inaccurate, since the general term for people who profess Islam is not ‘Mohammedan’, but ‘Muslim’. In the course of our Želd studies in the Rodopi, we have established that this destabilization of the group name is combined with a quest for another representative identity designated by another ethnonym. Several men in the villages of Kornitsa, Luzhnitsa and Breznitsa, near Gotse Delchev, identiŽed themselves as ‘Arabs’. This claim was substantiated by historical ‘arguments’: ‘We are peygambers, messengers who have been sent by Muhammad himself to profess the true faith here [in the Rodopi, the Balkans, Europe]. We settled in those lands long before the Bulgarians and before the Turks.’ To ‘prove’ this, they told us how visiting Arab missionaries had discovered an inscription on a gravestone or mosque which, however, had disappeared. This expla- Pomaks: Muslim Bulgarians 309 nation for the ethnonym ‘Arabs’ distances them from Christian Bulgarians in terms of origin, and explains why their native language is Bulgarian—an issue that is relevant to their new identity. They claimed that they had forgotten Arabic because they had been living with Bulgarians for centuries. After long discussions, when tensions visibly subsided, the focus group members identiŽed as Pomaks. They said that they had always got along well with the Christian Bulgarians, with whom they had lived in mixed villages, even though today very few Christian families remained. The violence in the repeated name changes and fear of another change are prompting them to look for a course that would distance them from Christian Bulgarians or, more precisely, from possible manipulations by the Bulgarian authorities.6 When we visited these villages in 1992, we found some elderly people who had had their names changed from Muslim to Christian to Muslim six times. The men argued—not very convincingly—that they wanted the terms ‘Arabs’ and ‘Pomaks’ to become identical so that they could rely on the Arab community for protection once they were integrated with the latter in name. The Arab version was not repeated in this ‘pure’ form in other population centres, but it was well known throughout the region and people would often ask us whether we had been to Luzhnitsa and Kornitsa and heard what the locals were saying. The myth of the peygambers, the messengers of Muhammad, proved quite popular in different versions. Accounts of them were given in particular villages in the Western Rodopi Mountains, were well known in the area of Smolyan and Ardino and prompted ironic comments in Eastern Rodopi population centres. The informants who believed them cited as a rule the aforementioned inscription, saying it had been destroyed by the totalitarian regime because it attested that the village had been populated by Muslims even in the Žrst century BC or the seventh century AD, depending on the knowledge and chronological awareness of the informants. Obviously, a mythologeme based on faith rather than reality is being promulgated among the Pomak community. This mythologeme is meant to accentuate the religious component of the representative identity. It makes it possible to challenge or, rather, to disprove the thesis of the Bulgarian origin of Pomaks and the arguments of their forced Islamization. Some of the informants claimed that all evidence attesting to their Bulgarian origins and forced conversion to Islam in the centuries of Ottoman rule had been ‘fabricated by the Communists’. This mythologeme turns them from inferior to the truest Muslims, messengers of Muhammad himself and performers of a historical mission—which gives them a highly prestigious individual and group identity, relieving them of the inferiority complex spawned by the awareness that they are victims of Islam itself. The second approach to Pomak identity is presented by another formula of ethnic self-identiŽcation: ‘We are Turks.’ This claim is strongest in the town of Yakorouda, but is also made by a number of people in the villages around the towns of Devin and Madan. Our Želd studies in this region were conducted in March and April 1992, a few months before the December 1992 census, in which quite a few Pomaks from the Western Rodopi and around Madan identiŽed as Turks. Their Turkish identity is not substantiated but declared as a fact—without conviction but with determination. However, an explanation is offered for another unquestionable fact—namely, that Bulgarian is their native language and the only language spoken by both the individuals and the community as a whole: ‘The Bulgarians forbade us to speak Turkish, they beat us, and we have forgotten the language.’ Notably, a considerable part of the Rodopi Mountains was incorporated within Bulgaria’s borders in 1912. This means that the present active generation, i.e. the 310 Tsvetana Georgieva people aged 20–50 years, are third-generation Bulgarian citizens. In the villages, there are still people who were born in the Ottoman Empire. They do not speak Turkish either, but this fact does not concern the informants. What matters to them is that an explanation exists, not that it is credible. It is usually substantiated by familiar and irrefutable evidence from the recent past: ‘Until two years ago, they would even Žne our womenfolk for wearing kerchiefs and shalwars, so allowing us to speak Turkish was out of the question.’ The repressions during the so-called ‘Regeneration Process’ are cited in proof of the Turkish identity, since they were also one of the factors for the latter’s formulation. The Turkish identity is demonstrated by the Pomaks who live in the highest mountain villages, at an altitude of 800–1200 m. In these border areas, modernization is slow to arrive and pre-industrial lifestyles are still very much alive. In certain villages, electricity, telephones and roads were introduced less than ten years ago. Traditional culture has been preserved almost intact and is effective at all levels of life. Visitors to these villages are invariably struck by the strange architectural combination of the concrete buildings of the village hall, shopping centre and several four-storey white houses with numerous timber huts, some of which are literally falling apart. These old houses, whose design dates back to the eighteenth century, are occupied by one household made up of several related families. Albeit reluctantly, the adult sons continue to obey their elderly fathers, and their wives their mothers-in-law. Most women are dressed in the traditional female costume: bright shalwars and the obligatory headkerchief. These markers are the visible indicators of preserved and effective models of a pre-industrial world that is very different from that in nearby Pomak villages at a lower altitude, where modernization changed lifestyles and mentality comparatively long ago. Comparisons are inevitable and are conceptualized in terms of poverty. ‘We are poor’, inhabitants of the high mountainous villages claim constantly, accusing the Communist regime of deliberately keep them poor by imposing various restrictions. The strong paternalistic mentality considers state care compulsory, and the absence of state care as proof of hostility. One of the reasons why Muslim Bulgarians in Yakorouda identify as Turks is that ‘the Communist regime did nothing for us’. In the course of the ongoing reform, accusations against the former regime have been readily targeted against the present government and the Bulgarian state in general. The conservative, in the sense of traditional, relations and mentality of the population of high mountainous villages is qualiŽed by their neighbours—Christian and Muslim Bulgarians, Turks and Gypsies—as ‘backwardness’ and, in more Žgurative terms, as ‘ignorance and savagery’. People from lower-altitude population centres remember this transition undergone by their predecessors, but now have the selfconŽdence of contemporary, modern people. They see their own negative image in their neighbours from the high mountainous villages around Yakorouda, Dospat, Devin, Velingrad and Madan and do not hide their contempt. On the contrary, they are blatant about it. Comparisons are almost inevitable, the purpose being to demonstrate how civilized they are and what a modern mentality they have. Women who left their native high-altitude villages after marriage claim that they ‘have ed the old way of life’, joining ‘civilized society’. These bilateral comparisons are bound to develop an inferiority complex in Pomaks from the higher parts of the mountain. Demonstration of Turkish identity changes things, and the markers are reversed. Turkish identity is the key that turns ‘ignorance and savagery’ into a political stance. Informants from those villages say that they were deliberately keeping their traditional pre-industrial way of life in order to avoid being ‘Bulgarized’, to preserve their identity. Their conservatism is a Pomaks: Muslim Bulgarians 311 refusal to adopt the Bulgarian way of life. This formula turns them from backward Pomaks into Turks loyal to their roots. It follows that the Pomaks from the low-altitude population centres have betrayed their roots, becoming traitors—in other words, the Pomaks from the high-altitude villages are heroes. Thus the ‘quest for the roots’, one of the main levers in the Bulgarian strategy of integrating the Pomaks into the Bulgarian nation, proves a convenient tool by means of which some of the Pomaks themselves have rejected this lever. The high-altitude villages in the Rodopi Mountains have been particularly affected by the current general economic crisis in Bulgaria. About 60–80% of the workforce are unemployed. The environment restricts the local economy to potato growing and timber production. Industrial enterprises have long since discontinued operations. Wages in the mines, where some of the men work, are low and seldom paid on time. In the circumstances, the memory of the poor past merges with the fear of a destitute future and pre-industrial poverty is part of everyday life, with arduous and ineffective labour, perpetual malnourishment and recurrent starvation, mass disease and high mortality rates. This is a very recent memory—it reects the childhood of the Pomaks who are now in their Žfties and sixties. SigniŽcantly, in the 1940s they were ready to change their names to Christian names for 7 kg of our. In the context of the present escalating deprivation, the Pomaks from the high-altitude villages in the Rodopi Mountains feel that they have been left to their own devices. In the circumstances, the demonstrated change of ethnic identity may also be seen as a cry for help which, nevertheless, remains unheeded. Some of the informants from the same high mountainous regions, and the same villages, resolutely reject the ascription of Turkish identity. They claim that, contrary to the Pomaks, the Turks are not good Muslims, eat pork and do not fast during Ramadan. They do not want to be Turks because they are proponents of true, pure Islam. They also reject the Arab identity because of the obvious linguistic, cultural and anthropological discrepancies. One of the informants in the village of Kornitsa said that he was sceptical about these ‘imported’ suggestions because they were mere propaganda conducted by Arab missionaries who enjoyed living in the cool Rodopi Mountains, where, unlike their own hot desert countries, both forests and water were plentiful. The majority of Pomaks will not accept identiŽcation with either the Turks or the Arabs. They cannot Žnd a logical explanation for the wide discrepancies between these identities and their own reality. At the same time, the weight of the religious component of their identity is growing, and they are therefore looking for a Muslim ethnic group with which they could identify more closely. Probably this is why in summer 1992 two men from Surnitsa got as far as the Turkey–Iran border without any papers or visas. They wanted to go to Pakistan, hoping that they would Žnd there mountain-dwelling Muslims with whom they might have closer bonds than they had with the Turks, Arabs or Iranians. This story, told by several informants, might not be an isolated case and merits special attention, since it suggests nascent impulses for associating identity with at least two factors: religion and environment. In the Central and Western Rodopi, yet another approach is found in the representative identity formulated in the claim: ‘We are Muslims and that’s all we need. Why do we have to be Bulgarians or Turks?’ ConŽning identity to its religious component alone is all too familiar in the Balkans. In the former Yugoslavia, this deliberately created model has been adopted wholeheartedly by the Bosnian Muslims. The Albanians, however, categorically accentuate the ethnic component of their identity, despite the Muslim world’s intensiŽed religious commitment to them. The propagation of this 312 Tsvetana Georgieva model in the Rodopi Mountains is conŽrmed by a popular myth which ‘explains’ the unity of Balkan Muslims by way of a common ancestor. The story goes that, once upon a time, three Muslim brothers came from Istanbul and settled in three different places. The Žrst went to the Rodopi, the second to Macedonia and the third to northern Bulgaria. This is how ‘the Muslim people procreated’ in the Bulgarian lands. The descendants of the three settlers started building a mosque that would reach the heavens and, to thwart their plans, Allāh changed their languages. This Rodopi version of the biblical story of the Tower of Babel seeks a formula for the integration of Bulgaria’s entire Muslim population on the basis of the common roots, blurring the cultural and linguistic differences. It suggests a way of integrating Muslim Bulgarians with the other Muslim ethnic groups, in which the religious component of identity proves more important than the ethnic. In recent years, this folk motif has been promulgated by propaganda publications which, depending on the place of issue, associate ‘the roots’ of the Pomaks with either Turkish or Iranian history. The unity of the Muslim community and the belonging of Muslim Bulgarians to this community are asserted both verbally and Žguratively. This is obvious in the new mosque frescoes, in which the way the names of Allāh, Muhammad and ¨Alȭ are written appears to be Shȭ¨ite, even though the local residents claim that they are devout Sunnȭs. A fresco in the mosque in the village of Medeni Polyani, near Surnitsa, is a case in point. It depicts the Ka¨ba in Mecca, the mosque in Qum, Sultan Selim Mosque in Edirne and the Demir Baba tekke near Isperih. These signs do not yet mean anything to the vast majority of Muslim Bulgarians because of their lack of qur’ānic and general theological knowledge. However, they may be interpreted as messages to the future generation, to whom they will probably be entirely comprehensible. Another aspect of Muslim Bulgarian identity is discernible in a number of population centres in the Eastern and Central Rodopi Mountains, as well as along the western ridge from Babek to the village of Pobit Kamuk. The problem of identity here is not of dramatic signiŽcance. The locals prefer to identify as Bulgarian Mohammedans. Only elderly people have Muslim names. The young often complain that they are under pressure from their parents when it comes to answering the very personal question of ‘Who am I?’ Threatened with disinheritance, they assume Muslim names, obtain new identity cards and then, having assured their parents that they are true Muslims, change their names (and identity cards) back to their Bulgarian names. This whole performance is carried out with purely pragmatic motives and is recounted as a joke. It is stressed that the choice is made at the personal or family level. Identity is seen as a personal rather than a collective issue and the religious component of identity is of secondary importance. The Muslim religious institutions occasionally attempt to counter this tendency, with certain hodjas refusing to bury deceased with non-qur’ānic names. The threat of a Christian priest ofŽciating at the funeral or interference by the authorities resolves the individual conict, but creates constant tensions. There are generation-based differences in the representative identity. To merge with the majority, quite a few young people focus on the ethnic and ignore the religious component. This tendency is particularly pronounced in the towns. Hardly anyone there identiŽes as Pomak, Bulgarian Mohammedan or Muslim Bulgarian. Informants whose neighbours (Christian Bulgarians, Turks or Gypsies) claim they are Pomaks identify as Bulgarians. Urban migration, which changes the way of life, leads to a break with the community or to a duality in the actual and representative identity. Urban Pomaks are Žrst- or second-generation migrants from the nearby villages.7 The majority of them are permanently in contact, and on very good terms, with their parents, Pomaks: Muslim Bulgarians 313 relatives and neighbours in the villages. They visit them on religious holidays and in the village observe the Muslim norms and everyday practices—which they blatantly ignore in the urban environment. Moreover, many families hide their Pomak origin from their children, and it becomes the parents’ ‘big secret’. This is another clear indicator of a break with the community, of a change or simpliŽcation of identity, again by means of the religious component which, in this case, is conversion to Christianity. Particular individuals, families or larger groups of people are joining the Christian majority by changing their faith in public or in secret. For many Pomaks, this offers a way out of the intermediate group regarded as non-prestigious, and a way of merging with the majority in Bulgaria. This conversion also involves a choice of alternatives offered by various Christian Churches, which are quite active in certain parts of the Rodopi. Most Pomaks convert to Eastern Orthodoxy, with which they are familiar as a result of the several attempts at mass Christianization in the past. A number of active missionaries in the Eastern Rodopi are actually Pomak-born priests. Particularly popular is the Ioan Predtecha [John the Precursor] movement founded by Father Boyan Saruev, who claims that converting the Pomaks is his personal religious mission. Today he is supported by a number of foundations and non-governmental organizations, as well as by the incumbent government of the United Democratic Forces. He has succeeded in converting an impressive number of Pomaks, mostly in the town of Nedelino, in the border region between the Central and Eastern Rodopi Mountains. Various Protestant sects have also been proselytizing among the Rodopi population in the past few years. They have succeeded in converting young people, but are condemned by the middle-aged and elderly from all religious and ethnic communities. People in the area of Ardino complain about the activities of the Alpha and Omega sect, which Christian Bulgarians, Turks and Pomaks say is very aggressive: ‘They buy the souls of the children, while the parents are greedy for dollars and won’t stop them’, claim informants from all denominations. The mixed community of the region perceives the appearance of the new stranger as a threat to the balance in the multi-ethnic and multi-religious local community (Georgieva 1995). The followers of the sect and their parents explain their choice as expressing a desire to change their intermediate identity, like those who incline to the Arabs, and look for stability beyond the Bulgarian reality by associating—at least in religious terms—with the Anglo-Saxon world and leading political powers such as the USA, the UK, Germany and the Netherlands. By changing their religion, individuals want to combine the religious and political mainstays of their individuality and their place in the world. The last approach to Pomak identity is formulated by certain members of the local rural intelligentsia in the Eastern and Central Rodopi Mountains: local teachers, doctors, veterinarians, economists and engineers, etc. The majority of them are Žrstgeneration university graduates. Notably, many of them are sons or grandsons of hodjas, and are therefore regarded as hereditary leaders. They claim that they are Muslim Bulgarians, a deŽnition which they believe fully overlaps with the self-deŽnition of Pomaks. They categorically reject the Turkish and Arab versions of their identity, which they are convinced serve the interests of other countries. They bitterly criticize the general term ‘Muslim’, qualifying it as a manipulation meant to obliterate the ethnic, i.e. Bulgarian, component of their identity. They say that this term attacks the fundamental speciŽcity of their identity—the combination of Bulgarian ethnicity and Muslim religion. This intermediate position is not perceived as instability, but as a historically formed essential feature of the community which disproves the idea of the 314 Tsvetana Georgieva exceptional value of national monolithism. The inuence of this approach may be discerned in a popular tale about the Mother of God, the mother of Muhammad, Gotse Delchev, etc., who revealed the meaning of diversity to her son, who had decided to wipe out the inŽdels (Christians or Muslims, depending on the religion of the storyteller), by pointing out the beauty of her own diverse ower garden. Those Pomaks with modern education feel responsible for their community’s future and say: ‘So far we have defended our faith. Now we have to defend our culture. We are Muslim, but Muslim Bulgarians.’ Obviously, they do not regard the community’s intermediate position as a shortcoming. Their attitude shows that they have overcome—or are overcoming—the group inferiority complex. The Pomak community, regarded as embodying a combination of Bulgarian ethnic and Muslim religious identity, is valued for what it is. The public manifestation of this approach is in the maintenance and publicity of local traditional culture. Folk song and dance ensembles and bands are being established. Folk festivals are held. The intermediate position of the group is demonstrated attractively by using the Pomak Bulgarian dialect and accentuating Muslim elements in the costumes of the performers. Considering the shortage of funding, this activity requires enormous efforts on the part of the organizers, who, however, Žrmly believe that it is worthwhile, since they are building the self-esteem of their fellow villagers. Several years ago, this approach acquired political dimensions in an attempt to found in the town of Ardino a Pomak party, which formulated its objective as the defence of the interests of the entire population of the Rodopi, regardless of religion or nationality, yet at the same time declared its intention of working for the recognition of a distinct Pomak ethnos.8 This extremist objective failed to gain public support and was described as foreign- or, more precisely, US-inuenced. The idea of a Pomak party rippled across the public scene, without leaving tangible marks on the life of the Rodopi Pomaks. The study and analysis of the identity of Muslim Bulgarians show the existence of different, opposing approaches, none of which apparently prevails. Some of these approaches, such as that of acquiring an Arab or Turkish identity, are conŽned in practice to particular micro-regions, but are known to the whole community. Others, such as adopting the Muslim or Christian identity, are widespread across the Rodopi Mountains. It is obvious that both the general state of the community and the impact of a number of external factors will continue to model the identity of both individuals and local groups and, ultimately, of the community as a whole. Along with the spread of various forms of Muslim and Christian propaganda and the impact of Balkan ethno-religious conicts, two internal factors are of exceptional importance in this respect. The Žrst is the activity of state institutions aimed at ending the economic crisis. The gravity of the crisis in the mountain regions keeps individual and public discontent high, prompting a number of individuals to try to Žnd a solution by changing identity. The second is the politicization of the Pomak phenomenon in the election campaign tactics of certain political parties. Recurrent are-ups and constantly maintained tensions, Žred by propaganda centres and party headquarters and targeted at Muslim Bulgarians, have an attractive but short-lived effect and, in the long term, have boomeranged. The most striking example of this is the large-scale organized campaign against the documentary Gori, gori ogunche (Burn Fire, Burn), which many Muslim Bulgarians now see as cumulatively implying their social, cultural and political inferiority, and so negating their identity. Campaigns of this type activate the sense of individual and group instability and boost the desire for a move in different directions, the result of which is hardly predictable. Pomaks: Muslim Bulgarians 315 The Pomak community, formed in a pre-industrial world, has been subjected to various inuences and pressures in the modern period, which have triggered diverse economic, political, social and cultural tensions. Their effect at the macro- and micro-level varies in pace and intensity, destabilizing the traditional model of individual and group identity. The mixed world of the Rodopi Mountains, as well as of the Balkans in general, is probably undergoing yet another metamorphosis, which has made the situation extremely sensitive not only with regard to the Pomak phenomenon, but also in respect of its possible minority differentiation. NOTES 1. Cf. Ivan Vazov’s well-known travel accounts, The Great Rila Desert and In the Heart of the Rodopi Mountains, and K. Jirecek’s Travels across Bulgaria. 2. The Pomaks in Turkey are immigrants who came mainly from Bulgaria and Macedonia under several emigration agreements after 1878. 3. Love for the Motherland, proved by all means, the sacriŽce of one’s life included, is the universally acknowledged supreme realization in life, inculcated by education, literature, the arts and the media, etc. This is a universal phenomenon in the modern world, and the Bulgarians are no exception (Helly 1998). 4. The empirical corpus used in this study was collected by eleven student Želd studies conducted in the Rodopi region under the author’s guidance from 1991 to 1996. It is kept in the archives of the Institute of Ethnology at the Sveti Kliment Ohridski University of SoŽa’s Faculty of History. 5. For a convincing theoretical interpretation of the issue, cf. Krasteva (1998). 6. The three villages in question resisted the name change, and the resistance was quelled by the army, with casualties on both sides. 7. 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