When They Took Away My Name: On a Piece of Bulgarian-Turkish Scholarly Research

Abstract

This review examines one of the research studies on multicultural communities in the Balkan macroregion – the Bulgarian-Turkish project Identity and Assimilation, implemented between the Institute of Literature of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences and Gazi University (Ankara, Turkey) under the supervision of Associate Professor Vikhren Chernokozhev and Professor Zeynep Zafer. One of the results of this project is the anthology When They Took Away My Name. “The Revival Process” in the 1970–80s in the literature of the Muslim community (2014), which is composed of fiction and documentary works of more than thirty authors, whose life and work were directly related to the “revival process” in Bulgaria in the 1980s. Most texts are translations from Turkish into Bulgarian, however there are pieces of poetry and prose originally created in Bulgarian. Much of the prose and poetry are accompanied by notes explaining the realities of Turkish culture and some historical facts. At the end of the collection, there is biographical information about each of the authors and a list of their works published in Bulgarian and Turkish. The publication of the book When They Took Away My Name caused a stir in Bulgarian society: it met with enthusiastic approval from some and was attacked by Bulgarian nationalists. The diametrically opposed views confirm the idea of the high interethnic tension that characterizes modern Bulgarian society. Among the main reasons for turning to this period of Bulgarian culture is to highlight the forcible exclusion of representatives of the Muslim community from the sociocultural and literary context of Bulgaria due to political circumstances. The study of the heritage of Muslim poets and prose writers is aimed at determining the specifics of the anti-totalitarian literature of Bulgaria in the era of socialism.