Bulgarisation

Bulgarisation (or Bulgarization, Bulgarianisation or Bulgarianization; Template:Lang-bg) is a term used to describe a cultural change of the spread of Bulgarian culture within various areas in the Balkans.

The modern use is in connection with the attempt of the former communist regime in 1980s to assimilate the Turkish minority. In the Republic of Macedonia it is used regarding the perceived Bulgarisation of the Slavic speaking people inhabiting Pirin Macedonia in the west part of Bulgaria, following a forced Macedonisation policy undertaken by the BKP in keeping with Stalin's plan for creating a Balkan Federative Republic.

Turks

During the Communist period of Bulgarian history, the Turkish minority (mainly in the south-east and north-east) of the country was forced to change their names from Turkish or Arabic to Bulgarian in 1984, during the Todor Zhivkov regime. Turkish culture and language as well as Islamic beliefs were also suppressed. The argument was that the Turkish population of Bulgaria were allegedly Bulgarians forced to convert to Islam during the Ottoman rule.

This violation of human rights met forceful resistance from large-scale protests, international pressure and cases of terrorism. After the collapse of the Zhivkov regime, people were free to revert back to previous names or adopt new Islamic/Turkish names.

In 2003 the Islamic Human Rights Commission claimed that religious discrimination remained a major problem, but this has not been noted by other human rights organizations.

Greeks

Axis occupation zones in Greece during WW II. Almost all of northeastern Greece was under Bulgarian occupation betwen 1941 and 1944.

During the Second World War, Bulgaria shared in the triple occupation of Greece with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. The Bulgarian Army entered Greece on 20 April 1941 and eventually occupied the whole of northern Greece east of the Strymon River, except for the Evros Prefecture on the border with Turkey, which was occupied by the Germans. Parts of this territory (Western Thrace) had been part of Bulgaria between 1913 and 1919 (see Treaty of Bucharest). Bulgaria proceeded to officially annex the occupied territories on 14 May 1941.

Throughout the Bulgarian occupation zone, Bulgarian policy to forcibly Bulgarise as many Greeks as possible and expel or kill the rest. A massive campaign was launched right from the start, which saw all Greek officials (mayors, judges, lawyers and gendarmes) deported. The Bulgarians closed the Greek schools and expelled the teachers, replaced Greek clergymen with priests from Bulgaria, and sharply repressed the use of the Greek language: the names of towns and places changed to the forms traditional in Bulgarian, and even gravestones bearing Greek inscriptions were defaced.

Large numbers of Greeks were expelled and others were deprived of the right to work by a license system that banned the practice of a trade or profession without permission. Forced labour was introduced, and the authorities confiscated Greek business property and gave it to Bulgarian settlers. By late 1941, more than 100,000 Greeks had been expelled from the Bulgarian occupation zone. While many of the Bulgarian settlers had themselves fled the occupied territories following WWI, settlers were also encouraged to settle in Macedonia by government credits and incentives, including confiscated houses and land .

Gagauz

According to Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, people from the Gagauz ethnic group remaining in Bulgaria were noted to have been Bulgarianised at the end of the 19th century.

Macedonian Slavs

After the BKP seizes power in Bulgaria following the coup-d-etat on 9 September 1944, its leader Georgi Dimitrov planed the creation of a Balkan Federative Republic, an idea proposed by Stalin. The proposed republic would have included Yugoslavia and Bulgaria. Bulgaria would have ceded its part of the geographic area of Macedonia (also known as "Pirin Macedonia", consisting of the province of Blagoevgrad), and would have received in return negligible territories along the western border (The Western Outlands), lost after the First World War.

In keeping with this plan, in the late 1940s a policy of "Macedonisation" was undertaken in Bulgarian Macedonia, in keeping with Stalin's concept of a Macedonian nation. When collecting census data, authorities only allowed inhabitants of Pirin to declare themselves Macedonians. This process was undertaken forcefully, with Georgi Dimitrov being most responsible.

As a consequence, in 1947 Bulgaria and Yugoslavia signed a treaty of friendship and cooperation. Soon after that, in 1948, due to the Tito-Stalin split, the treaty was annulled, and the Macedonisation campaign was stopped (though it took until until 1958 for it to be entirely abolished). For a while, the BKP and the Bulgarian state keep silent on the so-called "Macedonian question", until 1963, when at a special meeting of the Central Committee of the BKP, Todor Zhivkov declared the policy as greatly misguided.

This explains how from virtually none in previous censuses, Macedonians appeared at 169,544 souls in 1946, dropping to 9,632 in 1965. In the 2001 census, 5,071 declared their ethnicity as Macedonian (3,117 in the Blagoevgrad region). In the 1960s and 70s there were a number of political trials of people charged with activities based on “Macedonian nationalism.”