Анхиало, 1906: Политическата икономия на един етнически конфликт
Anchialo, 1906: The political economy of an ethnic clash

Summary/Abstract: The paper examines the microeconomic aspects of ethnic confl icts. The particular case in focus is the immediate historical context and the outcomes of the anti-Greek pogrom in the Bulgarian town of Anchialo (since 1934 Pomorie) in July 1906. The events had signifi cant repercussions and unleashed long-term and large-scale processes whose implications reach far beyond their local signifi cance. What happened there and then conveys typical characteristics of the intimate economic mechanics of ethnic clashes. It reveals the political economy of competing groups, e.g. the assets and institutions used in the struggle for achieving positions of power and economic domination. The events of 1906 in Anchialo provide an insight into the market disruptions which confl icts, and in particular outbursts of violence, engender. They reveal the motivation and the driving forces behind mass phenomena such as emigration of large groups of national minorities (in this case the Greek minority), which in the end resulted in the ‘Bulgarisation’ of an important geographical area. Many of the consequences of the Anchialo’s pogrom spread after the end of the World War I. They accelerated the policies aiming to achieve as fully as possible ‘ethnic cleansing’ and homogenization of the nation-state. The paper sketches some impacts of those policies on the Greek community in Anchialo and more generally on the economic activity of the ethnic Greeks in Bulgaria. The purpose is to capture the reality of what it meant to make business being Greek in Bulgaria during the inter-war period. The research is based on the archives of various Bulgarian institutions which provide suffi cient details of the events; data collected by the National Statistical Offi ce and the local branches of key fi nancial institutions; the complete archive of Krai newspaper which was the only printed periodical of the Bulgarian community in Anchialo from 1904 until 1911.

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