Berin Aptoula
Leader Todor Zhivkov: De Facto Paradigm
Author's Note: Leader Todor Zhivkov believed Bulgaria’s ethnic Turkish minority were Bulgarians who got Turkified under Ottoman rule. In 1984, he launched the Revival Process: a forced assimilation campaign. This, he said, was to convert Turks back to Bulgarians. During this campaign, Turks went by Slavic names, mosques got abandoned, and speaking Turkish was forbidden. In 1989, he announced that those who didn’t want to stay in Communist Bulgaria could leave for Turkey. This mass exodus of Turkish people became known as the Big Excursion.
“[Todor Zhivkov’s] real face was revealed in the autumn of 1984. Between 1981 and 1983, that is, at a time when mutual visits at the level of heads of state were being made, the names of ‘Gypsies speaking Turkish’ in Bulgaria were changed by force.
… Bulgaria has transformed itself into a ‘red fascism,’ that is, it has become a perverted regime.”
— Bilâl N. Şimşir, The Turks of Bulgaria
We’re on the balcony for a smoke. The hill across my building looks bigger, greyer than ever. There’s no kids on top of it though, just rusted swings, holed car tires. The bottom of the hill would have pretty girls and slender guys with their Volgas parked next to our benches, but they’re not there today. They weren’t there yesterday, or the day before that. Ma’s come home with peaches and strawberries from the bazaar telling me her favorite vendor girl with the gap teeth wasn’t there and a bearded man’s replaced the freckled boy she’d buy her plates from.
Now, we go out for a smoke when we’re done talking or when the furnace stops working because why be cold indoors when you can be cold outdoors and have a smoke or when there’s nothing good on the TV? What’s there besides the news telling us we’re perverted in every way in all its definitions? Then comes on our Soviet cartoons like the wolf chasing the hare or the old dreamy narrator telling us about the queen who thinks love doesn’t exist.
I’m picking at the pebbles on the balcony’s ledge and that’s when I tell him,
Shoot yourself? he asks. Man, you don’t own a gun.
There’s no gun, I say. There’s a relief in hearing myself say I won’t kill myself.
Why a gun? Why not say you won’t overdose on pills? Pills are more accessible.
I thought he’d say, Glad you’re out of your bout of death, good for not relapsing, not point out the lack of guns in my home. There’re no guns, but you can do a lot of things in this home that can lead to death, you know. I helped my pa burn his letters to the Western world in the furnace and he’s hung himself down in our building’s basement where we keep our winter kompot. Who’s to say I can’t go in the furnace myself and do the same? I can be those burnt letters, letters of a name, a name that wasn’t mine.
Both a freelance cartoonist and writer, Berin Aptoula (@pilldroid) is working on an MFA in Creative Writing at Adelphi University. If you’re ever looking for her or find yourself in need of miscellaneous new wave facts, check your local discotheque for an androgyne grooving under the alias BALKAN VILLAIN.