Thracian Bulgarians

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Thrace - Location on a modern map of the region. Western Thrace - today Northeast Greece, Eastern Thrace - today European part of Turkey, Northern Thrace - today Southern Bulgaria ( Rhodope Mountains and Upper Thracian Plain )

As Thracian Bulgarians and Bulgarian Thracian ( Bulgarian тракийски българи , often only Тракийци / Trakijzi, Turkish Trakya Bulgarları ) are in Bulgaria in the strict sense, the Bulgarian refugees from the territories of Thrace (→ Adrianople Vilayet ) in what is now northeastern Greece and northwestern Turkey after the Ilinden-Preobraschenie uprising (1903), after the treaties of Sèvres and Neuilly-sur-Seine (1919), Lausanne (1922) and after the Balkan Wars (1912-1913) and the World Wars . According to information from Thracian associations of displaced persons , more than 60,000 ethnic Bulgarians, mainly from Eastern Thrace , were accepted as refugees in the Bulgarian Black Sea district of Burgas alone . Together with the Bulgarian refugees from Macedonia (→ Macedonian Bulgarians ) they make up a quarter to a third of the current Bulgarian population in Bulgaria.

In a broader sense, the inhabitants of today's Bulgarian part of the Thrace landscape in Bulgaria also refer to themselves as Bulgarian Thracians.

history

Thracian Bulgarians from Demir Hisar, near Didymoticho (1913)
Thracian Bulgarians from Bulgarkoy (1925)

In the course of the "Russo-Turkish War of Liberation" from 1877–1878 and the subsequent Peace of San Stefano , the Ottoman-Turkish rule over Thrace formally ended . The first Thracian Bulgarians fled from Eastern and Western Thrace from the advancing Turks when, after the Berlin Congress (1878), it became known that the region would remain in the Ottoman Empire.

Once in Bulgaria, the refugees at the initiative organized Petko Wojwodas and the brothers Dragulewi and founded on May 12, 1896 in Varna the "Edirne displaced Association - beach Template" (Bulgarian "Одринско преселенско дружество - Странджа" / Odrinsko preselensko drujestwo - beach saddle ). Edirne was the largest city in the area and the center of a vilayet from which they were expelled. Mladen Scheljaskow became chairman. The Macedonian association “Pirin Planina”, which had been founded in Burgas a year earlier by expelled Bulgarians from Macedonia, served as a model .

The real mass exodus and the first wave of refugees did not take place until 1903 after the bloody suppression of the Ilinden Probraschenie uprising, when the Turkish government sent an army of 350,000 soldiers and a large number of Turkish militants ( Başı Bozuk ) to meet the 26,000 insurgents . 5,000-15,000 civilians were among the fatalities. 200 villages were razed to the ground, 12,000 houses burned, 70,000 people were made homeless, tens of thousands fled to neighboring countries, etc. a. 30,000 to Bulgaria.

The second and largest wave of refugees occurred in 1913 in the course of the Second Balkan War. The Bulgarian army had withdrawn from Eastern Thrace (southeastern Bulgaria, north of the Midia - Enoz line ) and Western Thrace and fought on the Western Front against Greeks and Serbs. The restoration of Turkish control over Eastern Thrace by the Turkish army with the support of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa - an Ottoman special organization, was followed by the expulsion of the entire remaining Bulgarian population (displaced groups speak of approx. 400,000 Bulgarians) in this area. A few years later the Turks committed similar actions against the Armenian population (→ genocide of the Armenians ).

In Western Thrace, the Islamic population ( Pomaks and Turks) allied themselves with the Greek and Jewish against the Bulgarian to form the short-lived provisional government of Western Thrace (proclaimed at the end of August 1913). They were supported by Greece with weapons, and by the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa with officers and irregulars (Başı Bozuk). The Provisional Government had its seat in Gyumjurdschina (today Komotini ) and pursued the creation of a unified, Islamic and all-Turkish state and the expulsion of the Bulgarian population of Thrace.

Ruins of Feres after the 1913 battle

At the same time, the Greek Navy attacked the coastal cities on the Aegean Sea and subsequently took them. A little later, however, Greece ceded the region around the cities of Feres and Dedeagatsch , which were meanwhile overcrowded with Bulgarian refugees from Western Thrace and Asia Minor, to the provisional government of Western Thrace, with the aim of the negotiations between the Ottoman Empire and Bulgaria, which were ongoing in Constantinople at the same time influence so that there is no peace between the two countries. In the days and weeks that followed, the Bulgarian refugees were driven to Bulgaria by Turkish vendors, supported by associations of the Teşkilât-ı Mahsusa, and many Bulgarians died. In the battle for Feres, in which the city was completely destroyed, a few dozen Bulgarian Komitaji , under the leadership of Dimitar Madscharow , tried to defend the refugee convoys against the Turkish overwhelming power and Greek Andarten .

Typical female costume of the Thracian Bulgarians

When the Bulgarian Orthodox Church listed its members in the European part of Turkey after the war, it had around 3,000 believers compared to around 400,000 before the outbreak of war. That is why in Bulgaria one speaks of the tragedy of Thrace to this day . The Angora Peace and Friendship Treaty (Bulgarian Ангорски договор / Angorski dogowor, from Angora, the old name of Ankara ), signed on October 18, 1925 between the Kingdom of Bulgaria and Turkey and later ratified by both sides, regulated one Compensation for the loss of property belonging to the Bulgarian population who were expelled from Eastern Thrace and Asia Minor in the course of the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913. However, the implementation of the treaty by Turkey on this point is still pending. This problem was included in the agenda of the EU accession negotiations with Turkey by the European Parliament in 2008. In the protocol, the European Parliament calls on the Turkish government, among other things, to accelerate the compensation process for the Bulgarian refugees from Thrace. According to official data from the Bulgarian government from 1983, payments of 10 billion US dollars from the Turkish state are still outstanding.

In 2010 the Bulgarian government announced that it would consider its right to veto compensation for the Thracian Bulgarians in the event of Turkey joining the EU.

Culture

Nestinarstvo (Bulgarian Нестинарство, a kind of fire walk with a religious background) was widespread among the Thracian Bulgarians . Today this custom can only be found in some villages in the Strandschagebirge .

Typical musical instruments used by the Thracian Bulgarians are the string lute Gadulka , the longitudinal flute Kaval and the bagpipe Gajda .

See also

literature

Web links

Commons : Thracian Bulgarians  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Thracian organization "Anthim the First" (Bulgarian) ( Memento from March 29, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  2. ↑ Ulrich Büchsenschütz: Nationalism and Democracy in Bulgaria since 1989 in Egbert Jahn (Ed.): Nationalism in late and post-communist Europe. Volume 2: Nationalism in the nation states , Verlag Nomos, 2009, ISBN 978-3-8329-3921-2 , p. 573
  3. ↑ Hüsein Mehmed: The Pomaks and Torbeschen in Moesien, Thrace and Macedonia . Sofia 2007
  4. ↑ Hüsamettin Ertürk, İki Devrin Perde Arkası, İstanbul 1957, pp. 115–116.
  5. ↑ See: Ljubomir Miletitsch: Разорението на тракийскитеѣ българи презъ 1913 година (Bulgarian Razorjawaneto na trakijskite balgari prez 1913 godina); Ljubomir Miletitsch: История на Гюмюрджинската република (Bulgarian; German translation of the title: "The History of the Gyumjurdschina Republic"); Stajko Trifonov: Thrace. The administrative structure, political and economic life in the years 1912–1915 ; Memories ( Memento from July 1, 2008 in the Internet Archive ) by Dimitar Madscharow
  6. ↑ http://www.socialistgroup.eu/gpes/pressdetail.do?id=80825&lg=en  ( page no longer available , search in web archives )  Info: The link was automatically marked as defective. Please check the link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.@1@ 2Template: Dead Link / www.socialistgroup.eu  
  7. ↑ http://news.ibox.bg/news/id_1991960601 Interview with MEP Evgeny Kirilov
  8. ↑ http://www.bourgas.org/bourgas-news-13208-bg.html Interview with MEP Evgeni Kirilow
  9. ↑ bulgaria.actualno.com ( Memento from 7 July 2012 in the web archive archive.today ) Interview with MEP Marusja Lyubcheva
  10. ↑ The requests of the Thracian Bulgarians were included in a report of the EU newspaper article on the website of the newspaper Dnevnik
  11. ^ "Bulgaria puts price on Turkey's EU membership" , EUobserver ; Божидар Димитров очаква $ 20 млрд. от Турция под заплаха от вето за ЕС , mediapool.bg