The purpose of the paper is to examine the process of political mobilization among the Muslims in Bulgaria in the period 1878-1908 with a particular focus on their initiatives for participation in parliamentary politics. In 1878 Bulgaria became an autonomous principality under Ottoman suzerainty. It had a significant Muslim community of about 600,000 who towards 1900 accounted for 15% of its population. The newly established Bulgarian state became a constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary system and its laws granted universal suffrage to all its male subjects including the Muslims. While certain Bulgarian political figures did not hide their perception of the Muslims as a foreign element who had no place in Bulgarian legislature, other more pragmatic politicians treated the large Muslim community as potential voters who could play a decisive role in winning an election. Such individuals actively sought to attract Muslim support for their political parties during election campaigns by promising to work for issues of interest to the community and even supporting Muslim parliamentary candidates. At the same time the Muslims did not remain passive and, seeking to make the most of such overtures, some of them entered the realm of Bulgarian party politics with considerable enthusiasm. The drive for political participation assumed new dimensions from the mid-1890s onwards as a result of the spread of the Young Turk opposition organization to Bulgaria and the emergence of a cultural and political reform movement among the local Muslims. One of the publicized aims of this movement was to make political participation a “national enterprise” for the community rather than the priority of a few individuals serving their own personal or party interests. In such a way the supporters of the movement began to challenge openly the established Muslim leadership who had traditionally served as the community’s representatives. The paper examines in some detail the ensuing debates and struggles between these two camps, as well as their relationship with the Bulgarians. At the same time it challenges the established view that the local Muslims were an inert mass with little interest in politics and instead casts them as an agent who actively sought to use all limited resources at its disposal in order take its respectable place in the new Bulgarian state. The paper is based on Bulgarian and Ottoman archival sources, Muslim journals published in Bulgaria and the proceedings of Bulgarian parliamentary meetings.

Emigration of the Ottoman Greeks from Orthodox Russia to Muslim Anatolia in the 19th Century: The Case of Giresun The successive defeats of the Ottoman Empire against Russia in the nineteenth century resulted in the migration of the millions of Muslims from Balkans and Caucasia to the remaining Ottoman lands, particularly to Anatolia. These Muslim immigrants left everything behind and desperately migrated for a new future with their fellow Muslims in Anatolia. A considerable literature gives detailed description of this story. However, none of the studies on the subject mentions that the immigrants to Anatolia were not all Muslims, but they also included Christians. That is to say, upon the Russian expansion in Caucasia and Crimea during the early and late nineteenth century, the Christian subjects of the Ottoman Empire in the region, particularly Greeks and to a lesser extent Georgians and other local Orthodox populations left the region with their Muslim neighbors. Contrary to what is usually supposed, these Christian communities did not all welcome the invading Russian armies, i.e. their fellow Christians, and a number of them headed towards the Ottoman lands on the south. As known, the migration of Muslim immigrants from the Balkans and Caucasia have considerably changed the traditional structure of Anatolia. Likewise, even if just a little, the Greek immigrants made a similar effect on the local Greek society in Black Sea region, by carrying their culture to the region. Thanks to the new comers, the social and demographic structure of the Greeks in the region showed a noticeable change. Although there were the cases that the immigrants came into conflict with local Muslims and Christians and with authorities, they also achieved joint undertakings with them. As the number of Greek immigrants increased, the Ottoman government established villages, schools and churches, allocated lands to them to settle and cultivate, and subsidized them with needed tools and materials. Within this framework, this study firstly examines the migration of Orthodox Greeks to Anatolia by analyzing the basic motives behind their puzzling preference of Anatolia. It also investigates the inclusion of the Greek immigrants into the Ottoman social life and their relation with local communities and authorities, in the case of Giresun (Kerasounde), a coastal town in eastern Black Sea region. The study mainly bases on the Ottoman official documents, census records, court and land registers as well as other related sources such as family memories and grave stones.

This paper analyzes a less-known institution of the single party regime: Hars Komitalar?, which might literally be translated as “Culture Committees,” established in the early 1930s as a party unit attached to the General Secretariat of the Republican People’s Party (CHP). While the early republican politics of culture, acculturation, and Turkification have been investigated to a great extent within the context of such single-party institutions as People’s Houses, and Village Institutes, the Cultural Committees have not been studied yet in any way. Like similar institution and party units, these committees were intended to acculturate ‘a nation in the making’ and shape the peripheral population in accordance with a set of social and cultural norms promoted by a modernizing state. Devoted to disseminating the cultural projects of the state, the main task of the Committees in question was exclusively oriented to ‘teach’ the Nusayri Arab population of Çukurova so-called their real identity: Hittite Turks, or Eti Türkleri, therefore, to assimilate them into Turkishness, an effort which exemplifies the obsession of the single-party regime, like all modern political entities, with ethnic and religious origins and differences, which became undesirable and something to be copied with. For the single-party regime, which fictionalized an official Turkish history at the time in the service of nation-construction, the Nusayri Arabs were in essence the Turks who adapted to speak Arabic because of the lack of national consciousness and unity, as an integral ideal of the regime. To assimilate them to Turkishness and to modernity, the Culture Committees deployed various methods including construction of primary schools, Turkish language campaigns, adult education, village visits, encouragement of marriage between Turks and Nusayris, solidarity festivals (tesanüd bayramlar?), and similar kinds of propaganda for “national consciousness.” Exploring the goal and activities of the committees through their interactions with the Arab population, this paper also aims to investigate the use and implications of the concept of culture in the early Republican politics, and discuss how culture is a medium in and through which power relations are constituted. Based on the research conducted in the Republican archives in Ankara, it links the Culture Committees to the broader context of the population politics and process of making-citizen in the single-party era. However, indicating the failure of the committees, this paper will also seek to discuss how the capacity of single-party regime and the complex nature of societal and cultural projects can be reconsidered.