Bulgarian Forced Assimilation Policy and the So-Called ‘Revival Process’ Towards Turks and Muslims in Bulgaria 40 Years Later: Documents, Studies and Memories

The article is aimed at building on the existing studies devoted to the last stage of the assimilation policy directed at the Muslim population in Communist Bulgaria during the second half of the 1980s. The 40th anniversary of the forced change of the given Turkish–Arabic and Persian names of this population is an occasion to revisit this dark period of the recent past. This study focuses on the short- and long-term consequences of the political measures, which became known as the ‘Revival process’ (1984/1985–1989). For the first time, the author presents new written sources, including analytical and field reports commissioned by the Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party and prepared by Bulgarian scholars during the second half of the 1980s, as well as later collected biographical data related to Muslims affected by the events, derived through an (auto)ethnographic method of research among Turks, Crimean Tatars and Muslim Roma.