ABSTRACT

The contested place of the Greek population in the Bulgarian national imagination can be traced back to the beginnings of the formation of a modern national ideology in the second half of the eighteenth century. At that time, the two main tenets of the Bulgarian national idea focused on carving out a place for the Bulgarian nation both in opposition to the “political oppression” of the Ottoman Empire and the “spiritual yoke” of the Greek-dominated church and school. They both stifled the formation of a Bulgarian nation. These tenets proved powerful unifiers of Bulgarian national aspirations and frustrations from the 1878 institution of the modern Bulgarian state through the interwar period. Only the 1940s witnessed the end of sizeable Greek presence in Bulgaria. Greek presence faced a series of changes, from the 1885 unification of the Bulgarian principality and the autonomous province of Eastern Rumelia, to the unrest in Ottoman Macedonia and its repercussions in Bulgaria in the 1900s, to the wartime decade, to population exchange during the tumultuous 1920s, to pressures for assimilation and integration in the 1930s.