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Exilia: The Blogging Teenager Who Dispeled Myths about Bulgaria’s Turks

17 07 2007  Ethnic Turkish girl is using the net to tell her fellow countrymen what life is like on the bridge between two different cultures.

By Krasimir Krumov in Shumen

“I have learned that if I suffer from being different, I won’t accomplish anything,” Nazmie writes in one of her blog posts, signed with the name Exilia.

“I have began discovering there can a be good side to this. I know an additional language, two cultures up close and am always somewhere in the middle,” she adds.

Nazmie Halim is 18 and lives in Kaspichan, a small town in north-eastern Bulgaria. As her name suggests, she belongs to Bulgaria’s sizable Turkish minority. But in her blog, where she writes about teenage love angst, friendships, and disappointments, she writes under the name Exilia, which she feels suits her.

As a member of the younger generation of Bulgarian Turks, Nazmie has inherited her family’s and her community’s collective history.
At the same time, as her blog points out, she inhabits an in-between-space between two languages, religions and cultures; between two countries even. Her blog is one way to maneuver through that space.

While she doesn’t remember the traumatic forced assimilation campaigns of the 19870s and 1980s and the mass exodus they prompted, Nazmie is aware of her own family’s experience.

According to the last census from 2001, 746,664 people, or nearly 10 per cent of Bulgaria’s population, identify themselves as ethnic Turks. Altogether, about 12 per cent of the population declared themselves as Muslims.

The Shumen district, where Kaspichan is located, is an area where many Turks are concentrated. The 2001 census said nearly 30 per cent of its inhabitants identified themselves as ethnic Turks and 35 per cent as Muslims.

Between the early Seventies and mid-Eighties, ethnic Turks here felt the full force of the so-called “Vuzroditelen”, or revival, process. The term refers to the policy of forced integration, most notably through having to change their Turkish names into Bulgarian ones.

This was followed in 1989 by the “Great Excursion”, the ironic name given to the exodus of around 370,000 ethnic Turks from Bulgaria, after the Sofia government suddenly opened the border with Turkey and “liberalized” the visa regime for Bulgarians wanting to leave.

Around 155,000 of those who left eventually returned after the fall of the communist regime. And by 1991, the more than 600,000 remaining Bulgarian Turks had all reverted to their old Turkish names.

Halim belongs to the last generation of ethnic Turks that lived through the “Big Excursion”. She was only a baby when her family left the country. But she has inherited family memories of the trauma.

When her family sold or gave away their belongings and moved to Turkey in May of 1989, she and her twin sister were not even one year old.

Her parents, she writes in her blog, “spare me many facts from the past, from 1989. This year is mentioned all the time but always in passing, always briefly. I didn’t know what it means.” Of the time spent in Turkey, her parents tell “only good memories,” she adds.

Eight months after they left, when Bulgaria’s communist regime crumbled, her parents were among the many exiles who decided to return. Their children were often ill and they were barely able to pay for medical services, which were not available to them for free in Turkey.

The decision to return to Bulgaria was finally made after her grandfather lost his eye in a work accident. “Grandfather Halim insisted the most that we return to Bulgaria,” she tells me. “Every night, he packed his bags and said, ‘Tomorrow we go!’”

As a small child, she could not follow the turbulence that accompanied the first years of democracy in Bulgaria. But when she started school in the mid-Nineties, she made an important discovery. She had once had another name.

She learned that her parents had named her Natasha. Because the “Vuzroditelen” process was at its height, they had not even considered a Turkish name. Finding that out was a big discovery. “I was really happy,” she says. “Somehow I felt equal to the others.”

One of the rare occasions she found her self asking her parents about this unhappy period in their lives was after seeing the 2005 feature film “Stolen Eyes”.

Initially, she went to see the film because of Nejat Isler, a popular Turkish actor, who is in the film, and not because of its “theme.”

But one scene touched her in particular. Against a background of Bulgarian folk music, it showed Bulgarian Turks being forced to change their names and afterwards to dance the “horo”, a traditional Bulgarian folk dance, on the town’s main square, together with members of the police.

After the film, she had questions that demanded answers. “‘Was it really like that?” she asked her mother. “She smiles and says, ‘Don’t cry, it is all in the past,” she recalls in her blog. “My father said it was much worse than the way it was represented in the film but he doesn’t go into details. It’s good that he doesn’t.”

When Halim started school she was also confronted with her ignorance of Bulgarian, as her family spoke only Turkish at home. “They were talking to me in Bulgarian and it all seemed like a big joke. I thought they were torturing me on purpose,” she remembers.

By the end of second grade she had grasped the language. But then she began understanding other things, too. In history lessons about the Ottoman period, “when the teacher was reading and explaining about some massacre… the whole class without exception would turn towards me and ask me why with their eyes. Obviously it was my fault.”

In keeping her online journal, Halim has brushed with conflict. One entry, entitled “Concerning one priest”, caused an internet row. The critical comments she made about a Bulgarian Orthodox clergyman were unexceptional. What made them contentious was the fact that they came from a Muslim.

One response read: “You are a Muslim; that’s why you’re bothered by the priest. It is normal, because for you he is a ‘gyaur’.” The word is a derogatory Turkish term for an infidel.

In her response, Halim insisted that that she always tried to see both sides of the coin. She freely admits she is not completely free of prejudice herself but adds: “I’m working on it.”

What makes her indignant are inconsistencies. One classmate, she says, claimed Bulgarians were tolerant towards other ethnic groups but “was outraged by the fact that her Turkish classmates were speaking in Turkish in school and it should not be like that”.

Halim’s blog helps to shatter some of the ethnic, religious, gender and class stereotypes prevalent in Bulgarian society, not in a purposeful way, but in passing, as she writes about daily life.

The blog has become a tool of self-discovery for its author, as well as a means to help others find more about a much misunderstood community living in their midst.


Krasimir Krumov is a correspondent for Monitor national daily from Shumen. Balkan Insight is BIRN`s online publication.

This article was created with the support of the US State Department and is part of the special package “Minorities in Bulgaria.”