Features of spiritual culture and historical memory of people in Bulgarian-Turkish village of Slavyanovo

Abstract

The field research in village of Slavyanovo (community of Popovo, Targovishte region, Bulgaria) was held in August 2019. The village was chosen because of its mixed national composition specificity: the basis of Slavic part of the village consists of the descendants of Bulgarians from the Balkan, which came there after the Ottoman-Russian war. Turkish people of Slavyanovo are divided into indigenous people, whose ancestors lived there in Ottoman time, and migrants from Kardzali and other traditionally Turkish regions of Bulgaria, which appeared in the village in the second half of the 20th century. There are several folk versions of the history of migrations, which are significantly different. The task of the study was to collect linguistic, ethnographic and historical material for further analyses of the basic values in the life of the modern Turkish-Bulgarian village, namely: language and communication, tolerance, ancestral memory, history of the homeland, faith and religious denominations, rituals, folklore etc. During the field work we looked at the history of the village and historical memory of its villagers, linguistic situation. The analyses of the data helps us infer, that cultural differences gradually lessen. Also, there are no contradictions between Turks and Bulgarians. We can observe the borrowings and infiltrations of the language elements (given the dominance of the Bulgarian as the state language), while Turks borrow the most frequent words, denoting household objects, and cliched expressions from Bulgarian language.