Reconnecting Cultures in the Balkans
In the villages that nestle amid southern Bulgaria’s remote, scenically spectacular, economically underdeveloped Pirin and Rhodope Mountains, Pomaks—Bulgarian Muslims—are reclaiming their name. Marginalized under 45 years of communism, they saw Pomak become “a word you had to feel guilty about,” says Mehmed Boyukli, a leading Pomak analyst. Now, he says, “with the Internet, the term has become acceptable. It has become a symbol of all the cultural heritage we have preserved.” And although they are the largest of the several Balkan Muslim communities, Pomaks are not the only ones using open borders and, more recently, social media to rediscover common cultures in the Balkan nations that were carved out of the Ottoman Empire following World War I.
With the opening of borders in the late 1980’s and the advent of social media, young people like Saleika Groshar of Breznitsa, Bulgaria—who is 22 and has never known communist rule—are forging newly pan-Balkan Muslim identities. She adores traditional folk music, and she administers the Facebook group “Pomaks, Torbeshi and Gorani: Three Names, One People.” She has made friends among Gorani—a Muslim ethnic group living in southern Kosovo and northern Albania—with whom she chats and exchanges audio files of local folk music. “They are learning Bulgarian and I’m learning Gorani,” she says.
Though it is early for such claims, these cultural shifts appear to be reknitting ties that were cut in the late 19th- and early 20th-century transformations of the western Ottoman Empire into the nation-states of Bulgaria, Albania and Yugoslavia. Before then, Ottoman governance had been based on the concept of millet—communities defined by their Muslim, Jewish or Christian faith and allowed to govern themselves according to their own laws. Their respective millets provided Ottoman subjects with their primary source of identity until they began gaining national identities in the 19th century. Within the Ottoman Empire all Muslims—whether Turks or Albanians, Arabs or Slavs—belonged to the Muslim millet, and their language, geographic origin and ethnicity were secondary.
The establishment of new Christian Balkan states in the 1800’s left the Muslims in those territories isolated, and they were seen by the new governments as potentially subversive minorities. In the 20th century, communism brought at least four forced-assimilation campaigns in Bulgaria alone, the first in 1912, the last only in 1989, promulgated under the guise of “restoring” Christian identities to people assumed to have become Muslims centuries ago under Ottoman duress. But following the collapse of communism in Eastern Europe, and the opening of borders by the expanding European Union, it is now on-line social media tools that are most powerfully changing how Balkan Muslims see themselves and how they relate to each other.
“All of a sudden the borders opened all around us, and we discovered that there were other islands of cultures just like ours, with people who are just like us,” says Boyukli, who also lives in Breznitsa, a town well known for both its traditional Pomak culture and its online Pomak activism. “We realized we weren’t alone.”
Boyukli says that the more Balkan Muslims learn about each other, the more the names for Muslim ethnic groups feel artificial. Pomaks, for example, live not only in Bulgaria, but also in northern Greece and in western Turkey, where they are largely assimilated.
The Pomaks residing in Bulgaria speak Bulgarian, and diaspora groups speak the languages of their new countries.
In Kosovo and Albania, Torbeshi and Gorani both speak Nashenski, a south Slavic language that Bulgarian-speakers can partially understand. Torbeshi live in Kosovo and Macedonia; Gorani live in Albania, Kosovo and Macedonia. In Bosnia, there are also Muslim “Bosniaks,” who are seen as cousins, distant both linguistically and culturally; they identify themselves as Bosnians first, rather than as Muslims.
Outsiders are generally unaware of the nuances of such distinctions. Officially, Gorani means simply the people living in the province of Gora, which was divided in 1928 between Albania and Yugoslavia. Torbeshi and Gorani have a common language and think of themselves as the same people, distinguishing between Torbeshi and Gorani only when speaking with outsiders. The name of their language, Nashenski, literally means “ours-ish,” from nash, meaning “our.” They call an individual of either group a nashenets—“one of ours.” According to Bulgarian ethnographer Veselka Toncheva, the weight of marginalization is unmistakable: To define oneself as “us” means viewing everyone else as “them.” But this distinction is starting to change.
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