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Suleyman, Who Used To Be Yulian, and His Grandson Michael

17 07 2007  Pressures on people in Bulgaria to change their Christian names into Muslim ones, or vice-versa, are still strong.

By Georgi Kulov in Slashten

Suleyman Alenderov was once called Yulian Alenderov. But then he decided to run as mayor for a Pomak [Muslim] village in the western Rhodope Mountains. “Without a Muslim name, it would be unthinkable to win an election in a Pomak village like Slashten,” he explains.

But recently, Alenderov had a problem. He had to organise one of the most important events in the life of his seven-year-old grandson - his circumcision. He found a splendid orchestra for the ceremony. But he couldn’t gather enough guests.

Though popular as mayor, many local Muslims would not come to the circumcision of a boy with a Christian-sounding name like Michael. They think it indecent to involve someone with such a name in a traditional Muslim ritual.

If Michael’s parents were still living in their native region, they would have called him Mehmed. But they went to work in Spain, and, as they explain: “With a Muslim name, we would have had difficulties integrating in rural Spain”.

“Lately, having a Muslim name in Europe has become a burden,” Alenderov says. “Islamic believers are associated with terrorism and Al-Qaida.” He accepts his daughter’s motives for giving her son a “safer” Spanish name like Michael and does not understand why his compatriots do not share his views.

Alenderov believes his community should accept such practices, as economic emigration from the region is taking the locals all over Europe. Many people from the area face the same problem when they try to integrate into foreign communities.

The mayor says the population in the area of Chech, home to his village, has shrunk rapidly as a result of this emigration. Each settlement has been losing 400-500 people or more. The population of Slashten itself has dropped from 2,600 to only 1,000 people over the past few years. “We don’t have enough children to fill the school,” he complains.

Pomaks are widely seen as ethnic Bulgarians whose ancestors converted to Islam under the Ottomans. Official statistics list 330,000 in Bulgaria, mainly living in the Rhodope Mountains in the south. Some insist they are not Slavs, however, but a Turkic people who settled in Bulgaria before the Slavs reached the Balkans in the 5th and 6th centuries.

Their history has often been fraught since Bulgaria regained its independence in the late 19th century, with the authorities making several attempts to convert them to Christianity.

The first took place after the Turko-Russian war of 1877-1878. Another drive followed the Balkan wars of 1912-1913. During the Second World War, more than 200,000 were forced to change their names.

The Communists resumed this policy in 1972, when the ruling party ordered all Pomaks to adopt Bulgarian names. Those in Chech resisted strongly and after the regime collapsed in 1989, they were the first to demonstrate in front of parliament, demanding the return of their Muslim names.

Today, many older people are deeply unhappy at the thought of Muslim Bulgarians again adopting Christian names, this time under economic rather than political pressure.

One way they can resist the trend is by not attending the ceremonies of “infidels”. Another is by banning burials in local cemeteries of people lacking Turkish or Arab-sounding names.

Emi Yulianova, Michael's mother, thinks this traditionalism is absurd. “In Turkey, many people have local names and have abandoned the traditional names accepted by the Koran,” she says. “This started under [former head of the Turkish republic] Ataturk and creates no problems there.”

But in Bulgaria, such ideas are accepted with more difficulty. It is partly because Muslims are less certain of their identity. “Our people are confused,” says Mehmed Bakalov, a Pomak leader from Gotse Delchev, in southern Bulgaria. “Some believe they are Turks, while others call themselves Bulgarians, or Pomaks.”

Momchil Petrov, a Pomak author from Kurdzhali, tries to unite all these versions in his book, The Pomaks, where he suggests that his people may be “proto-Bulgarians” – people of Turkic origin who later intermarried with the Slav incomers.

Petrov’s theory is popular amongst the younger generation of Pomaks, among people who like the idea of having a specific identity that does not compromise their Bulgarians identity.

Mayor Alenderov, meanwhile, maintains that a person’s character does not depend on the way his or her name sounds. “Michael, Mihail or Mehmed, you are who you are,” he says.


Georgi Kulov is a journalist from the Nov Zhivot newspaper in Kurdzhali, Bulgaria. 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.”