| In 1989, more than 300,000 Turks fled the assimilation campaign launched by the communist government in Bulgaria and immigrated to Turkey. The arrival of these immigrants was officially hailed as the homecoming of "ethnic kin" (soydas), who, having ensured the survival of Turkish existence in the Balkans for centuries, were finally "returning." For many, however, the imagined homeland, Turkey, failed to supersede their lived homeland, and more than half of the 300,000 immigrants went back to Bulgaria, some within a year of their arrival, others after their retirement. Since 1990, migrations once again from Bulgaria to Turkey are undertaken by seasonal migrants, mostly women, who hope to ameliorate their living conditions in Bulgaria by working at temporary jobs in Turkey.; This dissertation seeks to unmask the ambiguities surrounding the appropriation of the Bulgarian Turkish immigrants as "ethnic kin" and the construction of Turkey as their homeland. In doing so, it critically reexamines the relationship between ethnicity and territory within the scholarship on nationalism in general and on "return" migrations in particular. I demonstrate how the Turkish immigrants from Bulgaria are appropriated as "ethnic kin" and marginalized as the "Bulgarian" immigrants. I argue that the paradox of simultaneous exclusion and inclusion is not something unique to the reception of these immigrants, but rather, it is one manifestation of the broader logic of Turkish nationalism. The official designation of the 1989 immigrants as soydas denotes ethnic sameness and connotes cultural similarity. When the immigrants arrived, however, it turned out that these alleged paragons of ethnic purity had different habits, manners, and speech; they also had different assessments of their past homeland and history, including their communist past. The immigrants were thus precariously poised on the edge of Turkish national culture: within it as "ethnic kin," yet outside it as "the Bulgarian" immigrants. This dissertation provides a historical and ethnographic account of how soydaS, as a term of national appropriation, dictates the terms of belonging for the Bulgarian Turkish immigrants, and how the immigrants cope in response. |
