“THE BULGARIAN SALONICA”
Institute of Balkan Studies & Centre of Thracology,
(Bulgarian Academy of Sciences) Bulgaria
Abstract: The Balkan Wars put an end to the Bulgarian presence in Salonica, but not to the Bulgarian imagination relative to the city. Almost until the second decade of the 20th c. Ottoman Salonica used to be a bigger, richer and more modern city than the Bulgarian capital. It evoked much feeling and interest among Bulgarians, who saw in it many economic, political and cultural opportunities. For Bulgarians, however, Salonica was primarily linked with their freedom fighting, so its image is dominated by themes of death and self-sacrifice, of fear and courage, of prisons and concentration camps. To them it is simultaneously a city of prisons and a city of light, a city of youth and nostalgia, of education and pogrom, of economic opportunity and wasted effort.
Keywords: Bulgarians, Salonica, Collective Memory, Macedonian Question
THE ROLE OF BULGARIANS FOR THE SPREAD OF NATIONAL, ANARCHIST AND SOCIALIST IDEAS IN OTTOMAN SALONICA
Issue 2018 N 3
Institut of Balkan Studies & Centre of Thracology
(Bulgarian Academy of Sciences)
Abstract: Salonica was the centre of the national idea in the Ottoman Empire, which distinguished it essentially from the cosmopolitan Ottoman cities along the Asia Minor coast. The Bulgarians had a significant role to play in the political and ideological ebullience that had gripped the city in the first decade of the 20th century. Its representatives were among the most prominent proponents of the national, socialist and anarchist idea that inevitably influenced the Jewish community in the city. Even though its Jewish population did not identify itself with the national-liberation aspirations of the Christian population, the proximity of the Balkan nation states and particularly of Bulgaria had a tangible effect on the city and predetermined its fate.
Keywords: Ottoman Salonica, Bulgarians, Jews, Nationalism, Anarchism, Socialism
TRADE NETWORKS AND NATIONAL IDENTITY IN SALONICA IN THE 1860s AND 1870s
Etudes balkaniques (Sofia) 2017 N 3
Yura Konstantinova, Institute of Balkan Studies & Centre of Thracology
Abstract: The article examines the process of separation of the Bulgarian community in Salonica from the Greek one in the 1860s and 1870s. Based on the example of the relationships between the Robev brothers and their Greek and Bulgaria trading partners, it examines the arduous and ambiguous course of national identity establishment in the period of disintegration of the Ottoman Empire. In the case of the Bulgarians in Salonica this process was further delayed by their small numbers in the city and by the tough competition on the part of the European and Jewish merchants to which they were exposed. The text features the different national choices made by individual families and by the different generations in order to trace the mechanisms that led to the establishment and consolidation of the Bulgarian national community in the city.
Keywords: National Identity, Merchants, Networks, Salonica, Robev Family
BECOMING EUROPEAN-LIKE: THE BULGARIAN COMMUNITY IN SALONICA IN THE EARLY 20TH CENTURY
Etudes balkaniques (Sofia) 2016 N 3
Abstract: The aim of my research is to highlight the similarities and differences in the modernization process of the various communities in Ottoman Salonica. The article focuses on the change in the mentality of the small Bulgarian community in the city in the early 20th century. In this case I attempt to trace the ways in which the European cultural influence reaches the Bulgarians in the city and to outline the chronological framework of this process.
Keywords: Bulgarians, Salonica, Gymnastics, Theater, Modernization