Uncertain Identities: Bulgarian Muslims between Historical Trauma and Resilience
Uncertain Identities: Bulgarian Muslims between Historical Trauma and Resilience

Summary/Abstract: No Muslim identity in the Balkans is as contested and disputed as the identity of the Bulgarian Muslims (Neuburger, 2000: 181), also known also as “Pomaks” (both appellations are controversial). Bulgarian Muslims “are a religious minority. They are Slavic Bulgarians who speak Bulgarian as their mother tongue, but whose religion and customs are Islamic” (Poulton, 1993: 111; see also Georgieva, 1998: 287; Brunnbauer, 1999: 39). They inhabit mainly mountainous regions in Bulgaria, Greece, Turkey, Macedonia, Albania and Kosovo (Georgieva, 1998: 287). The largest and most compact population of Bulgarian Muslims lives in Bulgaria, mostly in the Rhodope Mountains; the present paper is devoted to this group. The cultural expressions and identities of Bulgarian Muslims are marked by considerable internal heterogeneity. Their mutually exclusive collective identities relate identification to language (Bulgarian identity) or religion (Turkish identity, identification as “Muslims” or identification as Pomaks in the ethnic sense). Accordingly, their identities are defined as marginal, hybrid, shifting, fluid, hesitating and multiple (Brunnbauer, 1999: 38; Karagiannis, 2000: 149–153; Benovska-Sabkova, 2006; Benovska-Sabkova, Nedin, 2016). Drawing on years of fieldwork among Bulgarian Muslims, the present work aims to conceptualise the understanding of uncertain identities. Theoretically, I draw on uncertainty-identity theory (Hogg, 2007: 69–126) on the one hand and the notion of unstable identities (Eriksen, Visentin, 2024: 47–56) on the other. I define uncertain identities as a specific concept in the context of global uncertainty in the world of late modernity. The empirical methods are based on: a) observations from repeated short field trips (lasting one week to ten days) among Muslim Bulgarians in the Middle and Western Rhodopes between 1996 and the present day, and on the sixty two autobiographical interviews collected during this period; b) archival sources; c) virtual ethnography in the form of research on specialised Muslim/Pomak groups on Facebook. The analysis reveals a correlation between the severity of state repression against Bulgarian Muslims and the individual and collective trauma generated, on the one hand, and the precariousness of collective identities, on the other. The economic insecurity/precarity of almost a century in the Rhodopes has been transformed among Bulgarian Muslims into an opportunity for positive change. This is a recent factor influencing identities through the labour migration of Bulgarian Muslims to Western Europe following Bulgaria’s accession to the European Union in 2007.

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