Marking Time Along the Bulgarian-Turkish Border

Abstract

As a minority group, the Turks of Bulgaria faced a cruel paradox: in Bulgaria during 1984-1989, they were persecuted by the government because they were ‘Turkish’; in Turkey, the symbolic homeland to which they migrated en masse in 1989, they were marginalized by the local population on account of being ‘Bulgarian’. More than 300,000 Turks fled Bulgaria in 1989, and, although more than half of those immigrants have returned back to Bulgaria after the downfall of the Bulgarian communist government, economically induced migrations from Bulgaria to Turkey have continued apace in the 1990s. This article offers an ethnographic account of these transborder movements and their shifting meanings centered around three immigrants whose crossings have followed different paths: a post-1989 migrant looking for temporary work in Turkey who plans to return to Bulgaria in a couple of years; a 1989 immigrant who left Bulgaria because of the assimilation campaign and settled permanently in Turkey; and a migrant who was forced to leave Bulgaria in 1989 and decided to go back after nine months in Turkey. These narratives of arrival and return, timed by a complex configuration of personal desire, political and economic necessity, and national border regulations, tell tales that complement but also complicate standard accounts of migration conveyed by dates and numbers.

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