Suchergebnisse

In May 1989, two series of demonstrations in Turkish villages of northeast Bulgaria was followed by a massive gathering of more than 50,000 Muslim Turks in the town of Shumnu in the same area. The Turks had converged to Shumnu from the surrounding villages and smaller towns in order to protest the forced changes of names and the bulgarization imposed by the government of Todor Zhivkov, then undisputed ruler of Bulgaria. The demonstration was put down in the usual brutal Bulgarian way; some twenty to thirty-five demonstrators were killed and hundreds were injured. However, the Turks had made their point; they were not going to give up, however fierce the official terror, their Islamic identity and culture.