The Biography of the Repressed Turkology in Bulgaria

Abstract

This article is a review of the book “Turkology in Exile: Mefküre Mollova. A Biographical Study”, authored by Zeynep Zafer and Murie Muratova. Mefküre Mollova (1927–2009) was the first Turkish woman and university professor in Bulgaria, who gained international fame with her research in the field of Turkology. She devoted herself to unexplored issues of Turkish dialectology, related to the Turkish dialects in Bulgaria and other linguistic questions. Mefküre Mollova was among the founders of the Turkish Philology at the University of Sofia. She had worked for only about 7 years (1953–1961), when she and her husband were dismissed from their academic positions. Although unemployed and persecuted in communist Bulgaria, Mefküre Mollova continued to publish her work both in the country and abroad. She published her research in four languages – French, Turkish, Bulgarian, and Russian, but mostly in French. Mefküre Mollova was also the first Turkish poet to publish poems in Turkish periodicals and the only woman who managed to publish an independent collection of poems in Turkish in Bulgaria. In addition, she is the first author of several well-written travelogues. Having gained fame and recognition around the world, in her homeland she and her husband Riza Mollov are forgotten and neglected. Their refusal to collaborate with the communist authorities and to falsify academic research stigmatized them for decades and the autors hope that this book will contribute to correcting this injustice.