At the intersection of Borders and Ethnicities: A Case Study Of Identity Formation Among The Pomaks in bulgaria, greece and turkey  “No Balkan Muslim identity is more contested, more wrapped in multiple intertwining twisted webs of myth and history than the Slavic-speaking Muslims or “Pomaks” of the Southern Balkan range” Mary Neuburger, 2000, p. 68. One of the biggest mysteries of my childhood was the secret language that my mother, aunt and grandmother spoke when they were talking about something that they did not want the children to hear. I remember being curious and impatient and yelling them: “Turkish please, Turkish!” I tried to learn to speak it but it was too difficult to remember the words and it did not have any written form.  The language was Pomak or “Pomakca” as we say in Turkish. My perplexity was not only due to inability of understanding the language but also due to the fact That my grandmother whose mother tongue was Pomak always insisted on being Turkish and when asked about she told that Pomaks was not good people. It was not even easy to understand who Pomaks were. There were Pomaks who came from Greece, Bulgaria, Romania, Albania but they were none of these nationalities and perceived them as “others”. Yet, like my grandmothcaer, they talked about Pomaks as “others” as well. Most of them were talking about the places they left when immigrating to Turkey always with a great longing and they would return immediately if only there was not the bad memories of “gavurun zulmu” meaning “the cruelty of infidels”.  Years later, I started to make a research about Pomaks to solve this childhood puzzle but more importantly to understand who really the Pomaks were.  What many online inquires and trips to the library has proved was that this question was confusing for everyone else. Standing at the crossroads of language, ethnicity and religion, the identification of Pomaks as a minority has been highly controversial.  Throughout the Balkans, the case of Pomaks has not only challenged the nationalist versions of the history and assimilation campaigns but also the  established understanding of the notions such as ethnicity, identity, group boundaries, kin vs host-states within the scholarly debate surrounding them.  Despite the intellectual curiosity and perplexity that it creates among the scholars, even the use of the traditional name Pomak triggers a sharp criticism and a derogatory look in general public. They could only be “Muslim Bulgarians” for Bulgaria, “Slavic Speaking Greeks” for Greece and “Slavicized Turkish Brothers” for Turkey. Accepting their Pomakness without any ethnic, religious or linguistic hyphenation seems to be hardest of all for the Pomaks themselves as well as the nation-states surrounding them.  After all, Pomaks has never been a self-proclaimed nation or ethnic group with a solid distinct mass group consciousness.(Neuburger, 2000; Eminov, 1997; Omer, 2004) In the conflict-ridden politics of Balkans where the ethnicities, nationalities or identities seldom match the territories that confine them in nation-states, like any other minority Pomaks has always been treated as the “other within”. Many local discourses of co-existence have been dictated by contesting nationalisms, between which identities were defined and contrasted, primarily from the outside. In other words, official identities ascribed to Pomaks have been tied to seemingly solid classificatory boundaries; yet, these boundaries themselves created questions about Pomakness which itself could not easily be classified. The rigidity of ethnic classifications, initially questioned by Barth and Cohen is tested in this case as well. (Barth, 1969; Cohen, 1974) The manipulation of the ethnic boundaries employed by the nation-states in accordance with political considerations, foreign policy issues, and of course also economic interests as well as corresponding reactions of Pomaks in terms of shifting self-and group-identities demonstrate the porous and dynamic nature of ethnicity and identity. (Brunnbauer, 2001; Demetriou, 2004; Michail, 2003) This paper is an investigation aimed at discovering the political and sociological survival strategies that this minority group has developed under the heavy pressure of the nation-states enclosing them and the underlying the reasons that lead them to choose one comprehensive pattern of de-assimilation: “Turkification” regardless of the host-state that they reside in. The examination of Pomakness as a troubled identity helps to clarify the ways in which power, domination and state policy intersect with and limit the options available for self and group identification. The first section is aimed at briefing the reader about the history, geography and general attributes of the Pomak as a minority. The next section, section three portrays the case of Pomaks in the three states: Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey by examining the political and social developments over the last two centuries. The fourth section an attempt to map out the underlying reasons behind the Turkification by analyzing the relative cases of Pomaks in the previous section. The concluding section is discussion about the future of Pomaks under the newly emerging dynamics of EU membership in the area.

 

 

As the introduction reveals, Pomakness is a highly contested identity which leads to very subjective historical, geographical and anthropological documentation biased by the competing nationalist projects.  Nonetheless, a careful meta-analysis of the existing resources and crossreferencing is likely to reveal highly reliable information.