Bulgars debate Turkish massacres against Bulgars

[Crvena zvezda]

This is a strange thing, its quite well known that many Bulgars were terribly massacred by the Turks, and many Bugars harbor, from what I've heard and witnessed firsthand,an abhorrence of Turks in the present, congruently Bulgaria has the largest Turkish miniortiy in the Balkans, I've seen stimates of 2 million Turks in Bulgaria. AND the Bugarians actually sponsor an academic debate about the relatively low deathtoll of 30,000 massacred?? This must be happenning due to the power of the MRF (Movement for Rights and Freedoms, a strong Turkish party that has been influential in Bulgarian politics since the end of communism)

http://www.eurotopics.net/en/presseschau/archiv/aehnliche/archiv_article/ARTICLE16571?EUTOPICS=a826d7c1db4381a6ac8154c6b0925510
Bulgaria - Kapital Monday, April 30, 2007
The debate about a Bulgarian national legend

A heated discussion has broken out in the Bulgarian media about a conference and exhibition organised by the Berlin East European Institute titled 'The spectre of Islam - past and present of anti-Islamic stereotypes in Bulgaria based on the example of the massacre in Batak'. The exhibition is to open mid May in Sofia. The town of Batak is associated with the 1876 April Uprising against the 'Turkish yoke', in which 30,000 people are said to have been killed by Ottoman Turks. The newspaper comments: "In its handling of this subject, which examines our relations with Muslims and also the literature, art and painting connected with the massacre, a group of academics has unwittingly provoked a storm. Among other things the organisers of the exhibition wanted to test the hypothesis of whether the number of victims has been overstated all these years - after all, we're talking about a legend here. Now people are saying they have no right to do this. Here in Bulgaria an academic thesis like this is perceived as an attempt to rewrite Bulgaria's history and as the consequence of a global conspiracy against the poor Bulgarian people... Nationalism has become fashionable in Bulgaria, and many people genuinely believe God is a Bulgarian."