Event Description
Turkish drama in Bulgaria began long before the television broadcasts. Bulgarian lands were ravaged for hundreds of years by invasions, incursions and empires, and freshest in Bulgaria’s national conscience is the Ottoman Empire, a presence of five centuries.
After flirting with monarchy and fascism following independence in 1878, Bulgaria was stabilized between 1944 and 1989 by socialist rule, which enacted an aggressive assimilation campaign in accord with its nationalist agenda: to turn Bulgaria’s diverse ethnic and religious mosaic landscape into a minimalist work. Macedonians and Turks were declared to be Bulgarian overnight, speaking Turkish and all Turkish media was made illegal, and Pomaks and Turks were stripped of their birth names and forced to take on Bulgarian ones. Even Roma wedding music was illegal, as Middle Eastern rhythms were discomforting in Bulgaria’s return to Europe.
State-sanctioned cultural production about the barbaric Turks abounded to reaffirm Bulgaria’s national identity as a European country with modern European potential that was crippled by the Ottomans. Hostile stereotypes were reproduced through mass media to impart the bitter history of Bulgarians under Turkish rule. Bulgarians underwent intensive national identity “treatment” through these media texts, as they learned the suffering of their predecessors in socialist Bulgaria agenda-setting doses.
These media texts constructed the predominating images of Turks and Turkey until 2008, when the importation of Turkish television series for Bulgarian consumption began, met with an unprecedented popularity that carried them to prime time and has dominated ratings since. How could Turkish drama become popular in Bulgaria, after 500 years of imperial Ottoman history and aggressive socialist reproductions of hostile Turkish stereotypes? What is the public discourse on this paradoxical development? Finally, what are the implications of Turkish transnational media flows to the geopolitics of the region? This talk grapples with these questions by historically and multimodally analyzing Bulgarian public discourse. |
