By the time the Ottomans arrived in 1393, Bulgaria had already seen its original Thracian inhabitants absorbed or displaced by Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Slavs and Bulgars. The last, descendents of Attila’s Golden Horde, could even be called distant cousins to the Turkish invaders, since both had their roots in the Siberian steppes. One might have expected Bulgaria to absorb these new invaders and their culture as easily as it had absorbed all who came before. Had the Ottomans conquered a few hundred years earlier, they might well have found a more receptive audience. The Bogomil heresy was in full swing then, and the Bogomils of Bulgaria might well have converted as readily as their brethren in Bosnia.

As it was, a millennium in Byzantium’s close orbit had left Bulgaria an Orthodox Christian country: indeed, the “Old Church Slavonic” which is used in many Orthodox rites is a direct descendent of Old Bulgarian, and the Cyrillic alphabet which St. Cyril used to write to the Bulgars, is still used throughout Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Bulgaria’s armies, weakened by the Black Death, were unable to resist the Sultan; Bulgaria’s Orthodox churches kept a Bulgarian identity alive through five hundred years of Ottoman domination.

As in Serbia, Orthodoxy became a political and ethnic identity, not just a religious denomination. Orthodox Bulgarians looked to the one Orthodox Christian country which survived the Ottoman raids – Russia. Orthodoxy moved away from the Greek which had been spoken in Byzantium and toward a “Slavic” culture, language and religion. One of the leading figures in this was Father Paissi of Hilendar (1722 - 1773), an Orthodox Priest whose ‘Slav-Bulgarian History’ became a popular patriotic gospel. The Ottomans had left the day-to-day governance of their Christian subjects to the local churches. This gave them considerable political power and helped fan the flames which led to the April 1876 uprising against the Ottomans, an unsuccessful rebellion which cost some 29,000 Bulgarians their lives and which led to a Russian invasion in 1878, and later to Bulgarian independence.

With this history, one might expect Bulgaria to be another Yugoslavia, with widespread animosity between Orthodox Bulgarians and their Moslem neighbors. Fortunately, Bulgaria has been able to avoid the worst of the Balkan atrocities. The Communist government repressed Islam even more strictly than Orthodoxy. During the declining years of Zhivkov’s Communist regime Moslems were frequently targeted for repressive legislation: his attempt to force Bulgaria’s Moslems to accept Bulgarian names, combined with official claims that “there are now no Turks in Bulgaria” led a wave of Bulgarian Moslems to seek refuge in neighboring Turkey. It also helped the Moslems, who had before this been notoriously lax in their practices, to establish an ethnic and cultural identity much as the Orthodox had some five centuries past. The fall of Communism brought an end to this forced Bulgarization; Turkish was heard once again and new Mosques began springing up about the country. (Thankfully, efforts at recruitment by Syrian and Iranian radicals were far less fruitful in Bulgaria than in Albania or Bosnia).

In the Balkans Moslems of all stripes are commonly referred to as “Turks.” In Bulgaria many of the Moslems are actually of Turkish descent. Turkish is widely spoken throughout the country, particularly in the southeastern region along Turkey’s border. There is also a population of Bulgarian Moslems, disparagingly known as “Pomoks.” Unemployment among these communities remains considerably higher than the Bulgarian average, but there have been no outbreaks of violence and by some estimates 30% of the 400,000 or so Bulgarian Turks who fled Bulgarization have returned to their native land from Turkey.

Much has been made of the links between Albanian guerrillas and Islamic fundamentalism. Less has been said about Russian organized crime and its ties to Bulgarian gangsters. A country which has long had friendly ties with Russia (and which was at one time considered for membership within the Soviet Union as a “Sixteenth Republic”) and whose culture has always looked to Moscow and Kiev for inspiration is rapidly becoming a hotbed for Russian mobsters. Given Bulgaria’s strategic position, it could well become a major trafficking point for heroin making its way from Central Asia via Russian smuggling routes. Despite all this Bulgaria remains a Balkan success story, whose anti-Islamic activities came about before, not after, Communism’s fall. Both Moslems and Orthodox in Bulgaria presently appear more interested in maintaining public order than in sectarian violence, and so far Bulgaria has remained what Sarajevo might have been.