Since ancient times, Bulgaria has been a crossroads for population
movement. Early settlement occurred mainly in the most fertile
agricultural lands. After World War II, however, Bulgarian cities grew
rapidly at the expense of rural population in concert with state
industrialization policy.
Administrative Subdivisions
In 1991 Bulgaria was divided into nine provinces (oblasti--sing.
oblast). These administrative units included the city of Sofia
(Grad Sofiya) and eight provincial districts: Burgas, Khaskovo, Lovech,
Mikhaylovgrad, Plovdiv, Razgrad, Sofiya (the region outside the city),
and Varna. Each province was named for the city that was its
administrative center. Excluding the city of Sofia, the provinces
encompassed territories ranging from 9.5 percent of the country to 17.2
percent, and their population ranged from 7.5 percent to 14 percent of
the national total. The eight provinces were divided into a total of 273
communities (obshtini--sing. obshtina); the city of
Sofia was divided into districts (raioni--sing. raion).
Because this system was established in 1987, references to another type
of district, the okrug (pl. okruzi), remained common
in the early 1990s. The new government that took office in 1991
announced that yet another change was needed in Bulgaria's political
subdivisions because the 1987 system reflected the discredited policies
of the Zhivkov regime.
Settlement Patterns
The first settlements sprang up in Bulgaria very early in the area's
history. The biggest and most numerous villages appeared on fertile
lands such as the Danubian Plateau, the Dobruja region, and the Maritsa
and Tundzha river valleys. Settlements also took hold at very high
altitudes (up to 1,500 meters in the Rhodope Mountains and up to 1,200
meters in the Balkans), but only in areas where it was warm enough to
grow grain or other crops. During the rule of the Ottoman Empire, many
Bulgarians were forced to move into villages at higher altitudes. After
Bulgaria became independent in 1878, many people returned to the lower
altitudes, but most of the upland villages remained. The process of
urbanization began at that point, but it progressed slowly because of
wars, lack of employment in population centers, and the emigration of
the ethnic Turks who had supported the economies of some cities during
the Ottoman era. The massive industrialization of the communist era
again stimulated temporary settlement at high altitudes for mining or
forestry. Generally, only the highest areas in the Rila, Pirin, and
Rhodope mountains remained comparatively unsettled. These regions became
known for their national parks and seasonal resort areas.
Cities
Bulgaria's cities grew much more rapidly after 1944. In 1946 only
Sofia and Plovdiv had populations numbering over 100,000. By 1990, there
were ten cities having populations exceeding 250,000: Burgas, Dobrich
(formerly Tolbukhin), Pleven, Plodiv, Ruse, Shumen, Sliven, Sofia, Stara
Zagora, and Varna. In 1990 nearly one-third of Bulgaria's population
lived in the ten largest cities; two-thirds of the population was urban.
Although the urban birth rate declined after the mid-1970s, largescale
migration from rural areas to cities continued through 1990. At the same
time, migration from cities to rural areas more than doubled from the
1960s to the 1980s, mainly because more mechanical and service jobs
became available in agriculture during that period. In cities such as
Sofia and Plovdiv, where industrialization started earliest, the
population stabilized and the repercussions of rapid population growth
slowed down in the 1980s.
The population of the average Bulgarian city grew by three to four
times between 1950 and 1990. The rapidity of this growth caused some
negative trends. The cities often lacked the resources to serve the
needs of their growing populations: in particular, housing and social
services could not grow fast enough. The cities' great need for social
resources in turn diverted resources from smaller, more scattered
population centers. The overall rural-to- urban migration pattern caused
shortages of agricultural labor, especially in the villages surrounding
large cities. The government discouraged new industries from locating in
outlying areas because of the lack of workers.
Sofia was founded by the Thracians and has remained an important
population center for 2,000 years. Its location in a basin sheltered by
the Vitosha Mountains was strategically and esthetically desirable.
Long-established communication routes pass though Sofia, most notably
the route from Belgrade to Istanbul. Sofia's climate and location caused
the Roman Emperor Constantine to consider the city when he selected an
eastern capital for his empire in the early fourth century. Hot springs,
which still exist today, were an added attraction. After it became the
Bulgarian capital in 1879, Sofia became the administrative, educational,
and cultural center of the country. Because of Sofia's rapid postwar
growth (it grew by 36 percent between 1965 and 1986), in 1986 its city
government closed the city to all internal immigrants except scholars
and technical experts.
Plovdiv, the country's second most important city, was founded in the
fourth century B.C. by Philip of Macedonia. Its exposed location on the
route from Belgrade to Istanbul gave the city a violent history that
included several instances of capture and devastation--both by
non-Christian invaders and by Christian armies during the Crusades. At
the end of the twentieth century, Plovdiv remained an important
commercial city. More rail lines radiated from Plovdiv than from Sofia,
and the city had a university, important museums and art treasures, and
an old town center with a unique mid-nineteenth century architectural
style. Part of old Plovdiv was declared a national monument.
The three main port cities were Varna and Burgas on the Black Sea and
Ruse on the Danube River. A relatively young city, Burgas gained most of
its size in the late 1800s. Until the 1950s, it was the most active
Bulgarian port. Varna, which was founded by Greeks in the sixth century
B.C., eclipsed Burgas by attracting the naval academy and the chief
naval base and acquiring most of Bulgaria's shipbuilding industry. Ruse,
founded by the Romans in the first century B.C., grew into a major
industrial center and transportation hub after World War II. The first
bridge across the Danube between Bulgaria and Romania was built just
north of Ruse.
Internal Migration
The urbanization of Bulgaria began with independence from the Ottoman
Turks, but the process did not become widespread until the massive
industrialization of the communist era. In 1900 city dwellers composed
barely 20 percent of Bulgaria's population, and in 1945 they made up
only 24 percent. By the end of 1990, however, more than 6 million people
lived in the cities while fewer than 3 million lived in the villages.
Bulgarian demographers predicted that 75 percent of the population would
live in cities by the year 2000.
During the 1950s and 1960s, when the industrialization process was
most intense, most Bulgarians who moved were of working age, had a basic
education or less, and wished to obtain new jobs in industry. Fully 85
percent of internal migrants in the early 1960s went to work in an
industry. The trend of moving to locations with industrial jobs
continued at a reduced rate in the next decades, and migrants in the
1980s tended to be younger and better educated than those of earlier
years. The migrant population generally included more women than men.
This reflected women who moved to join the work force as well as women
who married and moved to join their husbands.
About two-thirds of migrant Bulgarians relocated within the same
province, so no region showed a marked population decline. The decline
in village population, however, concerned demographers, who feared that
villages would be completely vacated and the country's population
distribution severely skewed. By 1990 this had occurred most noticeably
in the southeastern and southern regions, but a similar trend was
evident in the northwest.
As workers continued to leave, village populations aged
demographically. The share of villages with an average population age
above fifty increased from 23 percent in 1956 to 41 percent in 1985.
Natural growth in villages, negative after 1975, fell to negative 6
percent in 1985. Some villages recorded no births for an entire year. As
the younger population decreased, schools and health facilities closed.
This in turn drove more people to leave their villages.
Meanwhile, demographers and sociologists encouraged younger
Bulgarians to return to the villages. Generally, those who followed this
advice because of housing shortages, transportation problems, or
pollution in the cities found hard, uncongenial work, a lower standard
of living, and scant public services and recreation. Many village
workers were forced to raise animals to supplement their regular income.
The beginning of democratization in 1990 sparked much debate about
whether the rural standard of living would rise if the government's
agricultural privatization program could stimulate agricultural
activity.
Foreign Citizens in Bulgaria
During the Zhivkov era, Bulgaria signed several friendship treaties
with other Comecon nations to ease the exchange of workers. In the
1980s, for example, a large number of Bulgarians worked in the
construction and timber industries of the Komi Autonomous Soviet
Socialist Republic (Komi ASSR) under an exchange agreement with the
Soviet Union. Workers were expected to return to their own countries
when their contracts ended, but they did not always do so. For example,
some Vietnamese construction workers sent to Bulgaria under Comecon
agreement in the 1980s remained, and in 1991 the Vietnamese population
of Bulgaria was 11,000. Because they arrived completely unprepared for
life in Bulgaria and began working after only one month of training and
language courses, the Vietnamese who remained in Bulgaria generally
received the hardest and lowest-paying jobs and often became involved in
criminal activity. In 1991 several violent incidents involving
Vietnamese provoked calls for their repatriation. In response, the
government made plans to expel all resident Vietnamese from Bulgaria in
1992.
Population Trends
The 1985 census recorded Bulgaria's population at 8,948,649, an
increase of 220,878 over the 1975 census figure. At the end of 1990, the
Central Statistical Bureau had estimated an updated figure of 8,989,172,
including about 100,000 more women than men. However, the estimates for
1989 and 1990 did not account for major emigrations in those years:
first the massive emigration of Turks in 1989, then the emigration of
ethnic Bulgarians in 1990. Adjusting for emigration figures, the
population figure actually decreased between 1985 and 1990. Bulgaria's
1989 population density figure of eighty-one people per square kilometer
made it one of the least densely populated countries in Europe.
Bulgaria's rate of population growth began a steady decrease in the
mid-1920s, and the trend accelerated thereafter. Before World War II, a
man's status in his community was determined by how many children
(especially sons) he had. Women who did not marry, or who married but
had no children, were seen as failures. As the country became more
urbanized, however, such traditional views gradually disappeared. Large
families were no longer the economic necessity they had been in
agricultural society, and extra children became a burden rather than a
boon. As women became more educated and less accepting of the
traditional patriarchal family norms, their attitude toward childbearing
changed. In 1990 the majority of Bulgarian women believed two children
ideal for a family, but because of economic and social conditions, their
personal preference was to raise only one. By the 1980s, this change in
attitude had begun to prevail even in villages and with less-educated
women. In 1985, 75 percent of Bulgarian women indicated that they would
not like to have any more children. Families with three or more children
became a rarity, and women who opted for more than two children had a
lower standard of living and were generally less respected in society.
Although few social planners advocated a return to the large families
of the past, Bulgarian policy makers were dismayed that the population
did not increase. During the Zhivkov era, the mass media and scholarly
journals expressed concern that the nine millionth Bulgarian had not yet
been born, and that families were unwilling to have two children instead
of one. By 1985 population experts were urging that 30 to 40 percent of
families have three children to make up for those which had none or only
one. Meanwhile, although the 1973 Politburo had affirmed a family's
right to decide how many children to have and when they should be born,
in the 1970s and 1980s contraceptives were not available in sufficient
quantity for family planning. Strict restrictions on abortions
established by the Zhivkov regime were repealed in 1990. Partly because
contraceptives were in short supply, abortions had surpassed births by
1985 despite the restrictions. Until 1990 bachelors and unmarried women
had to pay a 5 to 15 percent "bachelors' tax" depending on
their age. In a more positive step, laws provided family allowances for
children under sixteen. The age limit for the family allowance was
raised to eighteen in 1990 for children still in school.
In 1990 Bulgarian demographers recorded a negative growth rate
(negative 35 births per 1,000 population) for the first time. At that
point, the number of live births per woman was 1.81. Demographers
reported that the figure must increase to 2.1 to maintain the country's
natural rate of population replacement. Mortality figures in Bulgaria
were also much higher than those of the developed European countries.
The most alarming demographic trend of the late 1980s, however, was
substantially greater emigration totals. The 1989 Turkish exodus caused
by the Zhivkov assimilation campaigns had a severe impact on the
Bulgarian labor force. Then, in 1990, economic reform brought harsh
living conditions that stimulated a wave of emigration by ethnic
Bulgarians. As of March 1991, some 460,000 Bulgarians had emigrated,
bringing the total number of Bulgarians living abroad to about 3
million. The majority of the �migr� population remained in nearby
countries (1.2 million in Yugoslavia, 800,000 in other Balkan countries,
and 500,000 in the Soviet Union). Smaller numbers went as far as the
United States (100,000 to 120,000), Canada (100,000), Argentina
(18,000), and Australia (15,000).
Throughout its history, the Balkan Peninsula was a homeland for many
diverse ethnic groups that were able to preserve their national
identities despite being shifted among the jurisdictions of powerful
empires. In modern Bulgaria, the opposite has been true: the largest
minority ethnic group, the Turks, remained in territory that their
Ottoman ancestors had occupied. After the fall of the Zhivkov
government, Bulgaria moderated its minority policy substantially to
improve delicate relationships with neighboring countries such as Turkey
and Yugoslavia.
Government Minority Policy
The 1893 census listed the following nationalities and religious
groups in order of prevalence: Eastern Rite Orthodox Bulgarians, Turks,
Romanians, Greeks, Gypsies, Jews, Muslim Bulgarians, Catholic
Bulgarians, Tatars, Gagauzi (a Turkishspeaking people of the Eastern
Orthodox faith), Armenians, Protestant Bulgarians, Vlachs (a
Romanian-speaking people in southwest Bulgaria), and foreigners of
various nationalities, mainly Russians and Germans.
Migrations and boundary changes after the two world wars reduced the
list somewhat; few Greeks and Romanians remained in Bulgaria by 1990.
However, Bulgaria's communist leaders often tried to deny the existence
of minority groups by manipulating or suppressing census data or by
forcibly assimilating "undesirable" groups. In 1985, at the
height of the last anti-Turkish assimilation campaign, a leading
Bulgarian Communist Party official declared Bulgaria "a one-nation
state" and affirmed that "the Bulgarian nation has no parts of
other peoples and nations."
After the fall of Todor Zhivkov in 1989, all the minorities in
Bulgaria progressed somewhat toward self-determination and freedom of
expression. New minority organizations and political parties sprang up,
and minority groups began publishing their own newspapers and magazines.
Non-Bulgarian nationalities regained the right--curtailed in the Zhivkov
era--to use their original names, speak their language in public, and
wear their national dress. In 1991 significant controversy remained,
however, as to how far the rights of minorities should extend.
Legislators making policy on such issues as approval of non-Bulgarian
names and Turkish-language schools faced mass protests by nationalist
Bulgarians, who successfully delayed liberalization of government policy
on those issues.
Bulgarians
Bulgarians have been recognized as a separate ethnic group on the
Balkan Peninsula since the time of Tsar Boris I (852-89), under whom the
Bulgars were converted to Christianity. Early historians began
mentioning them as a group then; however, it is not clear whether such
references were to the earliest Bulgarians, who were Asiatic and
migrated to the Balkan Peninsula from the Ural Mountains of present-day
Russia, or to the Slavs that preceded them in what is now Bulgaria. By
the end of the ninth century, the Slavs and the Bulgarians shared a
common language and a common religion, and the two cultures essentially
merged under the name "Bulgarian".
Acceptance of the Eastern Orthodox church as the state religion of
the First Bulgarian Empire in A.D. 864 shaped the Bulgarian national
identity for many centuries thereafter. The Bulgarian language, which
was the first written Slavic language, replaced Greek as the official
language of both church and state once the Cyrillic alphabet came into
existence in the ninth century. National literature flourished under the
First Bulgarian Empire, and the church remained the repository of
language and national feeling during subsequent centuries of occupation
by the Byzantine and Ottoman empires.
Ottoman rule was the most formidable test of Bulgarian ethnic
identity. The Ottoman Turks forced many of their Christian subjects to
convert to Islam, and the Turks differentiated their subjects only by
religion, not by nationality. The latter policy meant that the empire
usually considered the Bulgarians as Greeks because of their common
Orthodox religion. Turkish recognition of the Greek Orthodox Church gave
the Greeks the power to replace Bulgarian clergy and liturgy with Greek,
further threatening Bulgarian national identity. Under the Ottomans,
some Bulgarians who had converted to Islam lost their national
consciousness and language entirely. Others (the Pomaks) converted but
managed to retain their old language and customs.
During the Ottoman occupation, the monasteries played an important
role in preserving national consciousness among educated Bulgarians.
Later, during the National Revival period of the nineteenth century,
primary schools and reading rooms (chitalishta) were
established to foster Bulgarian culture and literacy in cities
throughout Bulgaria. The vast majority of uneducated peasants, however,
preserved their customs in the less accessible regions in the mountains.
Traditional folk songs and legends flourished there and became richer
and more widely known than the literature created by educated
Bulgarians.
Bulgarian is classified as a South Slavic language, together with
Serbo-Croatian, Slovenian, and Macedonian. One of the oldest written
languages in Europe, Bulgarian influenced all the other Slavic
languages, especially Russian, in early medieval times. In turn the
Bulgarian language was enriched by borrowings from other civilizations
with which it came into contact. Besides 2,000 words from the
pre-Cyrillic Old Slavonic language, Bulgarians borrowed religious terms
and words used in daily life from the Greeks; vocabulary relating to
political, economic, and day-to-day life from Turkish; and many Russian
words to replace their Turkish equivalents as Ottoman influence waned
during the National Revival period. In the postwar era, many West
European words began to appear in Bulgarian, especially in technological
fields.
Turks
Because of their status as former occupiers, the Turks have had a
stormy relationship with Bulgaria since the beginning of its
independence. In 1878 Turks outnumbered Bulgarians in Bulgaria, but they
began emigrating to Turkey immediately after independence was
established. The movement continued, with some interruptions, through
the late 1980s. Between 1923 and 1949, 219,700 Turks left Bulgaria. Then
a wave of 155,000 emigrants either were "expelled" (according
to Turkish sources) or were "allowed to leave" (according to
Bulgarian sources) between 1949 and 1951. The number would have been far
greater had Turkey not closed its borders twice during those years. In
1968 an agreement reopened the BulgarianTurkish border to close
relatives of persons who had left from 1944 to 1951. The agreement
remained in effect from 1968 to 1978.
The biggest wave of Turkish emigration occurred in 1989, however,
when 310,000 Turks left Bulgaria as a result of the Zhivkov regime's
assimilation campaign. That program, which began in 1984, forced all
Turks and other Muslims in Bulgaria to adopt Bulgarian (Christian or
traditional Slavic) names and renounce all Muslim customs. Bulgaria no
longer recognized the Turks as a national minority, explaining that all
the Muslims in Bulgaria were descended from Bulgarians who had been
forced into the Islamic faith by the Ottoman Turks. The Muslims would
therefore "voluntarily" take new names as part of the
"rebirth process" by which they would reclaim their Bulgarian
identities. During the height of the assimilation campaign, the Turkish
government claimed that 1.5 million Turks resided in Bulgaria, while the
Bulgarians claimed there were none. (In 1986 Amnesty International
estimated that 900,000 ethnic Turks were living in Bulgaria.)
The motivation of the 1984 assimilation campaign was unclear;
however, many experts believed that the disproportion between the birth
rates of the Turks and the Bulgarians was a major factor. The birth rate
for Turks was about 2 percent at the time of the campaign, while the
Bulgarian rate was barely above zero. The upcoming 1985 census would
have revealed this disparity, which could have been construed as a
failure of Zhivkov government policy. On the other hand, although most
Turks worked in lowprestige jobs such as agriculture and construction,
they provided critical labor to many segments of the Bulgarian economy.
The emigration affected the harvest season of 1989, when Bulgarians from
all walks of life were recruited as agricultural laborers to replace the
missing Turks. The shortage was especially acute in tobacco, one of
Bulgaria's most profitable exports, and wheat.
During the name-changing phase of the campaign, Turkish towns and
villages were surrounded by army units. Citizens were issued new
identity cards with Bulgarian names. Failure to present a new card meant
forfeiture of salary, pension payments, and bank withdrawals. Birth or
marriage certificates would be issued only in Bulgarian names.
Traditional Turkish costumes were banned; homes were searched and all
signs of Turkish identity removed. Mosques were closed. According to
estimates, 500 to 1,500 people were killed when they resisted
assimilation measures, and thousands of others went to labor camps or
were forcibly resettled.
Before Zhivkov's assimilation campaign, official policy toward use of
the Turkish language had varied. Before 1958, instruction in Turkish was
available at all educational levels, and university students were
trained to teach courses in Turkish in the Turkish schools. After 1958,
Turkish-language majors were taught in Bulgarian only, and the Turkish
schools were merged with Bulgarian ones. By 1972, all Turkish-language
courses were prohibited, even at the elementary level. Assimilation
meant that Turks could no longer teach at all, and the Turkish language
was forbidden, even at home. Fines were levied for speaking Turkish in
public.
After the fall of Zhivkov in 1989, the National Assembly attempted to
restore cultural rights to the Turkish population. In 1991 a new law
gave anyone affected by the name-changing campaign three years to
officially restore original names and the names of children born after
the name change. The Slavic endings -ov, -ova, -ev, or -eva could now be
removed if they did not go with one's original name, reversing the
effect of a 1950s campaign to add Slavic endings to all non-Slavic
names. The law was important not only for Turks, but also for the
minority Gypsies and Pomaks who had been forced to change their names in
1965 and 1972 respectively. In January 1991, Turkish-language lessons
were reintroduced for four hours per week in parts of the country with a
substantial Turkish population, such as the former Kurdzhali and Razgrad
districts.
Macedonians
Beginning with the withdrawal of the Ottoman occupation, the region
known as Macedonia was divided among two or more European states. The
entire region was never included in a single political unit. In 1990
Macedonia included all of the Yugoslav republic of Macedonia, the Pirin
region of southwest Bulgaria, the part of northern Greece bordering the
Aegean Sea and including Thessaloniki, and a very small part of eastern
Albania. The Macedonian language, in which no written documents are
known to have existed before 1790, had three main dialects. One dialect
was closest to Serbian, one most resembled Bulgarian, and a third, more
distinctive group became the basis for the official language.
The region's location in the middle of the Balkans and its lack of
defined ethnic character made the dispute over the existence and
location of a separate Macedonian nationality and control over its
territory one of the most intractable Balkan issues of the late
nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In general Bulgaria and Greece
asserted that the Macedonians within their jurisdiction were ethnically
indistinguishable from the majority population. Yugoslavia saw the
Macedonians of all jurisdictions as a distinct ethnic group. But,
beginning with independence in 1878, Bulgarians also claimed various
segments of non-Bulgarian territory based on the ethnic Slavic
commonality of the Bulgarians and the Macedonians. Residual claims on
Macedonian territory were a primary reason for Bulgaria's decision to
side with Germany during both world wars. In the division of territory
after World War I, most of Macedonia became part of the Kingdom of the
Serbs, Croats, and Slovenes (later the Kingdom of Yugoslavia), and was
renamed "South Serbia." After World War II, Yugoslavia
strengthened its hold by making Macedonia a separate republic and
recognizing the Macedonians as a distinct nationality.
The Bulgarian position maintained that leading patriots such as Gotse
Delchev and Iane Sandanski (who had fought for Macedonian independence
from the Turks) and cultural figures such as the Miladinov brothers (who
promoted education and the Slavic vernacular during the National Revival
period) were products of Bulgarian culture and considered themselves
Bulgarians, not Macedonians. In 1990 many people in the Pirin region
identified themselves as Bulgarian, but some opposition Macedonian
organizations such as Ilinden (named after the 1903
IlindenPreobrazhensko uprising for Macedonian independence on St.
Elijah's Day) sought recognition by the Bulgarian government as a
minority separate from the Bulgarians. This position was based on the
assertion that Macedonians were a separate nationality with a distinct
language and history.
No reliable data showed how many people in Bulgaria, or in all of
Macedonia, considered themselves Macedonian or spoke a Macedonian
dialect in 1990. Those who considered the Slavs in Macedonia as
Bulgarians cited statistics for the whole region at the time it was
first divided after World War I. At that time, 1,239,903 Bulgarians, or
59 percent of the population, were listed. The Bulgarians were a
majority in both Yugoslav (Vardar) Macedonia (759,468 people) and in
Bulgarian (Pirin) Macedonia (226,700 people). Later Bulgarian censuses,
however, showed sharply varying numbers of Macedonians according to what
political agenda was to be supported by a given census. The 1946 census,
for example, identified over 250,000 Macedonians, reportedly to back
President Georgi Dimitrov's short-lived plan for federation with
Yugoslavia. Then, between the censuses of 1956 and 1965, the number of
Macedonians dropped from 187,789 to 9,632. After that time, the
Bulgarian census ceased identifying citizens by nationality.
Gypsies
Although Gypsies are known to have lived in Bulgaria since the
fourteenth century, most of the Gypsy population arrived in the past few
centuries. The last known group was forced to settle in 1958, having
remained nomadic until that time. The Gypsy population was divided into
three groups. According to the 1965 census, the last that enumerated
Bulgarians by nationality, 42.5 percent were Orthodox and spoke
Bulgarian; 34.2 percent were Orthodox and spoke Romanian or Romany, the
Gypsy language; and 22.8 percent were Muslim, spoke Turkish, and
considered themselves ethnic Turks. Estimates in 1990 put the Gypsy
population at about 450,000, some 10 percent of whom lived in the
southeastern city of Sliven.
The Gypsies had a long history as one of Bulgaria's most
disadvantaged and maligned nationalities. They were the focus of
official name-changing campaigns in every postwar decade between 1950
and 1990. Despite their numbers, Gypsies did not contribute much to
Bulgarian society because only about 40 percent of them attained the
educational and cultural level of the average Bulgarian. The other 60
percent lived in extremely disadvantaged conditions, isolated from the
mainstream of society by the Gypsy tradition of preserving ethnic
customs and by Bulgarian government policy. Government programs to
improve the lot of the Gypsies usually meant construction of new,
separate Gypsy neighborhoods rather than integration into Bulgarian
society. Housing in Gypsy neighborhoods was always poor and overcrowded.
In 1959 when a new neighborhood was built in Sofia, 800 people moved
into 252 apartments. Each apartment had one and one-half rooms and no
kitchen or inside plumbing. By 1990 about 3,000 people lived in these
same apartments.
The education of Gypsies who spoke Romany was inhibited because the
language has no alphabet or written literature. Gypsy children were
exposed to Bulgarian only in school, hampering completion of studies for
many. The illiteracy rate among Gypsies was believed to be still quite
high in 1990, although no statistics were available. According to the
only known literacy figures for nationalities, given in the 1926 census,
8.2 percent of Gypsies were literate compared with 54.4 percent of
Bulgarians overall. The Gypsy community exerted little pressure on
students to finish school; many dropped out before reaching legal
working age, increasing the tendency to marry and begin having children
early.
In 1990 about 70 percent of Gypsy workers were unskilled and worked
as general laborers, custodians, street cleaners, dishwashers, or in
other minimum-wage occupations. About 20 percent of Gypsies worked at
skilled jobs. The small Gypsy intelligentsia, which included musicians,
scholars, professionals in various fields, and political figures, tried
to influence their countrymen to gain more education and job skills.
Pressure also was exerted for elimination of separate Gypsy
neighborhoods and official replacement of the derogatory Bulgarian word tsiganin
with rom, the Romany word for Gypsy.
Other Minorities
Because of official suppression of nationality statistics, little
information was available on less numerous minorities in Bulgaria
between 1965 and 1990. Most of the Tatar population (6,430 in 1965) had
migrated from the Crimea to the cities of the Dobruja area in the
nineteenth century. The Greek minority (8,241 in 1965) comprised
political �migr�s from Greece and the remainder of a population in
southern Bulgaria that had been largely forced out of Bulgaria by
government oppression and violence between the world wars. The Armenian
population (20,282 in 1965) was mostly added between 1896 and 1924
during the massive emigration of Armenians from the Ottoman Empire. The
Armenians were concentrated in the cities, especially Sofia and Plovdiv.
In 1946 some 44,209 Jews remained in Bulgaria, which had conducted no
large-scale persecution despite its wartime alliance with Nazi Germany.
But the 1950s saw massive emigration of Jews to Israel, leaving only
5,108 in Bulgaria by the time of the 1965 census.
Bulgaria - RELIGION
The Bulgarian Orthodox Church, which played a crucial role in
preserving Bulgarian culture during the Ottoman occupation, remained
central to the sense of Bulgarian nationhood even under the postwar
communist regimes. In spite of the official status of Orthodoxy,
Bulgaria also had a tradition of tolerance toward other Christian
religions. Tolerance of Islam, however, remained problematic under all
forms of government because of that religion's historical identification
with the occupation and subjugation of Bulgaria.
Eastern Orthodoxy
In 1991 most Bulgarians were at least nominally members of the
Bulgarian Orthodox Church, an independent national church like the
Russian Orthodox Church and the other national branches of Eastern
Orthodoxy. Because of its national character and its status as the
national church in every independent Bulgarian state until the advent of
communism, the church was considered an inseparable element of Bulgarian
national consciousness. Baptism, before 1944 an indispensable rite
establishing individual identity, retained this vital role for many even
after the communists took power. The power of this tradition caused the
communist state to introduce a naming ritual called "civil
baptism" (grazhdansko krushtvane).
Although communist regimes could not eliminate all influence, they
did undermine church authority significantly. First, the communists
ruled that the church only had authority on church matters and could not
take part in political life. Second, although the constitution made the
church separate from the state, the clergy's salaries and the fees
needed to maintain the churches were paid by the state. This meant that
the clergy had to prove its loyalty to the state. From 1949 until 1989,
religion in Bulgaria was mainly controlled by the Law on Religious
Organizations, which enumerated the limitations on the constitution's
basic separation of church and state.
The number of Orthodox priests declined from 3,312 in 1947 to 1,700
in 1985. Priests associated with the prewar regime were accused of
engaging in illegal or antisocialist activities, supporting the
opposition, and propagandizing against the state. Upon taking control of
all church property, the state had the choice of maintaining churches or
closing them down. Thus, for example, Rila Monastery, the largest
monastery in Bulgaria, became a national museum in 1961.
In 1987 the Orthodox Church had 3,720 churches and chapels, 120
monasteries, 981 regular and 738 retired priests, 135 monks, and 170
nuns. The church was administered by a Holy Synod. Under communist rule,
the synod had the authority to publish limited quantities of religious
material such as magazines, newspapers, and church calendars. A new
translation of the Bible was published in 1982, but in such small
quantities that the size of the printing could not be determined. By
1988 the 1982 edition was being resold at ten times the original price.
After the fall of Zhivkov, the Orthodox Church and other churches in
Bulgaria experienced a revival. Church rituals such as baptisms and
church weddings attracted renewed interest, and traditional church
holidays were observed more widely. Christmas 1990, the first Christmas
under the new regime, was widely celebrated and greatly promoted in the
mass media. By contrast, Christmas had received little public attention
during the postwar years. The government returned some church property,
including the Rila Monastery, and religious education and Bible study
increased in the early post-Zhivkov years. The Orthodox seminary in
Sofia returned to its original home in 1990 and attracted over 100 male
and female students in its first year of operation. The Konstantin
Preslavski Higher Pedagogical Institute added a new theology department
to train theology, art, and music teachers as well as priests. The Holy
Synod planned to publish 300,000 Orthodox Bibles in 1992.
Islam
The Muslim population of Bulgaria, including Turks, Pomaks, Gypsies,
and Tatars, lived mainly in northeastern Bulgaria and in the Rhodope
Mountains. Most were Sunni Muslims because Sunni Islam had been more
widely promoted by the Ottoman Turks when they ruled Bulgaria. Shia
sects such as the Kuzulbashi and the Bektashi also were present,
however. About 80,000 Shia Muslims lived mainly in the Razgrad, Sliven
and Tutrakan (northeast of Ruse) regions. They were mainly descendants
of Bulgarians who converted to Islam to avoid Ottoman persecution but
chose a Shia sect because of its greater tolerance toward different
national and religious customs. For example, Kuzulbashi Bulgarians could
maintain the Orthodox customs of communion, confession, and honoring
saints. This integration of Orthodox customs into Islam gave rise to a
type of syncretism found only in Bulgaria.
As of 1987, Muslims in Bulgaria had 1,267 mosques served by 533 khodzhai,
or religious community leaders. The Muslim hierarchy was headed by one
chief mufti and eight regional muftis, interpreters of Muslim law, all
of whom served five-year terms. The largest mosque in Bulgaria was the
Tumbul Mosque in Shumen, built in 1744.
Bulgarian Muslims were subject to particular persecution in the later
years of the Zhivkov regime. This was partly because the Orthodox Church
traditionally considered them foreigners, even if they were ethnically
Bulgarian. The Bulgarian communist regimes declared traditional Muslim
beliefs to be diametrically opposed to communist and Bulgarian beliefs.
This justified repression of Muslim beliefs and consolidation of Muslim
into the larger society as part of the class and ideological struggle.
Like the practitioners of the other faiths, Muslims in Bulgaria
enjoyed greater religious freedom after the fall of the Zhivkov regime.
New mosques were built in many cities and villages; one village built a
new church and a new mosque side by side. Some villages organized Quran
(also seen as Koran) study courses for young people (study of the Quran
had been completely forbidden under Zhivkov). Muslims also began
publishing their own newspaper, Miusiulmani, in both Bulgarian
and Turkish.
Roman Catholicism
Roman Catholic missionaries first tried to convert the Bulgarians
during the reign of Boris I. They were unsuccessful, and Boris I led the
Bulgarians in their conversion to Orthodoxy. In 1204 the Bulgarian Tsar
Kaloian (1197-1207) formed a short-lived union between the Roman
Catholic Church and the Bulgarian Orthodox Church as a political tactic
to balance the religious power of the Byzantine Empire. The union ended
when Rome declared war on Bulgaria and the Bulgarian patriarchate was
reestablished in 1235. The Catholic Church had no influence in the
Bulgarian Empire after that date.
Nonetheless, Catholic missionaries renewed their interest in Bulgaria
during the sixteenth century, when they were aided by merchants from
Dubrovnik on the Adriatic. In the next century, Vatican missionaries
converted most of the Paulicians, the remainder of a once-numerous
heretical Christian sect, to Catholicism. Many believed that conversion
would bring aid from Western Europe in liberating Bulgaria from the
Ottoman Empire. By 1700, however, the Ottomans began persecuting
Catholics and preventing their Orthodox subjects from converting.
After Bulgaria became independent, the Catholic Church again tried to
increase its influence by opening schools, colleges, and hospitals
throughout the country, and by offering scholarships to students who
wished to study abroad. Prince Ferdinand of SaxeCoburg -Gotha, first
ruler of independent Bulgaria, was himself Catholic and supported the
Vatican in these efforts. The papal nuncio Angelo Roncalli, who later
became Pope John XXIII, played a leading role in establishing Catholic
institutions in Bulgaria and in establishing diplomatic relations
between Bulgaria and the Vatican in 1925.
The communist era was a time of great persecution for Catholics,
nominally because Catholicism was considered the religion of fascism.
Bulgarian communists also deemed Catholicism a foreign influence
because, unlike Orthodoxy, it had no ties to Russia. The logic was that
anything anti-Russian must also be antiBulgarian . Under the communist
regimes, Catholic priests were charged with following Vatican orders to
conduct antisocialist activities and help opposition parties. In 1949
foreign priests were forbidden to preach in Bulgaria, and the papal
nuncio was forbidden to return to Bulgaria. Relations between the
Vatican and Bulgaria were severed at that time. During the
"Catholic trials" of 1951-52, sixty priests were convicted of
working for Western intelligence agencies and collecting political,
economic, and military intelligence for the West. Four priests were
executed on the basis of these charges. In the early 1950s, the property
of Catholic parishes was confiscated, all Catholic schools, colleges,
and clubs were closed, and the Catholic Church was deprived of its legal
status. Only nominal official toleration of Catholic worship remained.
In 1991 about 44,000 Roman Catholics remained in Bulgaria, mostly in
Ruse, Sofia, and Plovdiv. Another 18,000 Uniate Catholics were
concentrated in Sofia. (Uniate Catholics recognize the pope as their
spiritual leader, but practice the Eastern Orthodox rite.) Bulgaria
reestablished relations with the Vatican in 1990, and the Bulgarian
government invited the pope to visit Bulgaria. Uniate Catholics began
assisting Western-rite Catholics in conducting masses in Bulgarian,
making the liturgy more accessible, and prompting predictions that the
two branches would unite. Relations had not been established between the
Bulgarian Orthodox Church and the Roman Catholic Church in 1991,
however, and Catholics blamed official Orthodox intolerance for the
continued rift.
Protestantism
Protestantism was introduced in Bulgaria by missionaries from the
United States in 1857-58, amid the National Revival period. The two main
denominations, the Methodists and Congregationalists, divided their
areas of influence. The former predominated in northern Bulgaria and the
latter in the south. In 1875 the Protestant denominations united in the
Bulgarian Evangelical Philanthropic Society, which later became the
Union of Evangelical Churches in Bulgaria. Besides setting up churches,
the Protestants established schools, clinics, and youth clubs, and they
distributed copies of the Bible and their own religious publications in
Bulgarian. The Union of Evangelical Churches produced the first
translation of the entire Bible into Bulgarian in 1871 and founded the
nondenominational Robert College in Constantinople, where many Bulgarian
leaders of the post-independence era were educated. After independence
in 1878, the Protestants gained influence because they used the
vernacular in services and in religious literature.
The communist regimes subjected Protestants to even greater
persecution than the Catholics. In 1946 church funding was cut off by a
law curbing foreign currency transactions. Because many ministers had
been educated in the West before World War II, they were suspected
automatically of supporting the opposition parties. In 1949 thirty-one
Protestant clergymen were charged with working for American intelligence
and running a spy ring in Bulgaria. All church property was confiscated,
and the churches' legal status was revoked. Most of the mainstream
Protestant denominations maintained the right to worship nominally
guaranteed by the constitution of 1947.
According to estimates in 1991, the 5,000 to 6,000 Bulgarian
Pentecostals made that sect the largest Protestant group. The
Pentecostal movement was brought to Bulgaria in 1921 by Russian �migr�s.
The movement later spread to Varna, Sliven, Sofia, and Pleven. It gained
popularity in Bulgaria after freedom of religion was declared in 1944,
and the fall of Zhivkov brought another surge of interest. In 1991 the
Pentecostal Church had thirty-six clergy in forty-three parishes, with
sufficient concentration in Ruse to petition the government to establish
a Bible institute there.
In 1991 the Adventist Church had 3,500 Bulgarian members, twothirds
of them young people. The Adventist movement began in the Dobruja region
of Bulgaria at the turn of the century and then spread to Tutrakan,
Ruse, Sofia, and Plovdiv. It gained momentum in Bulgaria after 1944.
Under the communist regimes, mainstream Adventists maintained the right
to worship. Some twenty parishes with forty pastors remained active
through that era, although a breakaway reformed group was banned because
of its pacifist beliefs. Some Adventists were imprisoned for refusal of
military service.
Judaism
The Bulgarian communist regimes officially considered Jews a
nationality rather than a religious group. For that reason, and because
nearly 90 percent of the country's Jewish population emigrated to Israel
after World War II, the Jewish society that remained in Bulgaria was
mainly secular. Under the Zhivkov regime, synagogues rarely were open in
Sofia, Samokov, and Vidin. In 1990 the Jewish population was estimated
at about 71,000. At that time, only two rabbis were active, although
several synagogues reportedly were reopened under the new regime. Most
of the Jews in Bulgaria were Sephardic, descended from Spanish Jews who
spoke Hebrew or Ladino (a Judeo-Spanish dialect). A much smaller number
were Ashkenazi, with Yiddish-speaking ancestors. However, very few Jews
in postcommunist Bulgaria remembered their ancestral languages, and
frequent mixed marriages further diluted feelings of Jewish identity.
The Jews of Bulgaria assimilated easily into Bulgarian society, partly
because they traditionally lived in cities and worked as tradesmen or
financiers.
The fate of the Bulgarian Jews during World War II was a source of
Bulgarian pride. The approximately 50,000 Jews then living in Bulgaria
had long been well integrated into the fabric of Bulgarian city life.
Because of this integration, neither society in general nor Tsar Boris
III was inclined to follow the anti-Jewish policies of Bulgaria's Nazi
ally. Boris tried to appease the Nazis by passing comparatively benign
anti-Jewish laws, which nevertheless were protested widely, especially
by the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. Twice in 1943, Boris personally
blocked orders to deport Bulgarian Jews, sending them instead to
so-called labor camps inside Bulgaria. Many Jews also received transit
visas to Palestine at this time.
Bulgaria - SOCIETY
Most manifestations of traditional Bulgarian familial and societal
relations disappeared in the initial postwar wave of modernization, but
some traditions proved surprisingly persistent and survived into the
1990s, especially in parts of western and southwestern Bulgaria.
Although postwar communist regimes nominally emphasized emancipation of
women, strong elements of paternalism and emphasis on traditional female
roles remained in Bulgarian society. By 1990 economic forces had
eliminated traditional extended families and limited the number of
children, especially in urban areas. Some evidence of resurging
traditional relationships was seen in the immediate post-Zhivkov years.
Traditional Society
Traditional Bulgarian society had three classes: the peasants (almost
everyone in the villages), the chorbadzhii (a small wealthy
class that owned large tracts of land and hired peasants to work them),
and the esnafi (skilled tradespeople in towns, who later became
the bourgeoisie). Most references to traditional Bulgarian society
described village or peasant society, because until the communist era
the great majority of Bulgarians were peasants.
The most important institution of traditional Bulgarian society was
the zadruga, an extended family composed of ten to twenty small
families, related by blood, who lived and worked together, owned
property jointly, and recognized the authority of a single patriarch.
The extended family most often included four generations of men, the
wives whom those men brought into the household through marriage, and
the children produced through those marriages. Once a girl married, she
would leave the zadruga of her parents for that of her husband.
No member of the zadruga had any personal property other than
clothes or the women's dowries.
Traditional Bulgarian society was strongly patriarchal. The zadruga
leader, called the "old man" or the "lord of the
house," had absolute power over his family and was treated with the
utmost respect. He was considered the wisest because he had lived the
longest. His duties included managing the purchase and sale of all
household property; division of labor among zadruga members;
and settling personal disputes. Older men within the household could
offer advice, but the "old man" had the final word. Obligatory
signs of familial respect included rising whenever he appeared and
eating only after he had begun and before he had finished his meal. The
"old man's" wife (or the senior woman if he were widowed) had
similar authority over traditional women's activities such as tending
the garden, observing holiday rituals, and sewing. The senior woman
commanded similar respect from zadruga members, but she was
never allowed to interfere in functions designated for men.
When a zadruga broke up (normally because it became too
large for easy management), property was divided equally among its
members. Before the twentieth century, many villages were formed as
outgrowths of an enlarged zadruga. The largest of the extended
family organizations in Bulgaria began breaking up in the 1840s. At that
time, the Ottoman Empire instituted new inheritance laws that did not
take zadruga property patterns into account. A second stage of
fragmentation occurred as the expectation of automatic integration into
the extended family gradually weakened in younger generations: sons
began leaving the zadruga at the death of the "old
man," and newly arrived wives failed to adjust to the traditional
system. As a result of such pressures, smaller households began to
proliferate in the nineteenth century.
The zadruga breakup accelerated after Bulgaria gained its
independence and began instituting Western-style laws that gave women
equal inheritance rights, although in many parts of Bulgaria women did
not begin demanding their legal inheritance until well into the
twentieth century. The disintegration of large family holdings gradually
led to the impoverishment of the peasants as land ownership became more
fragmented and scattered with each generation. The durability of the
extended family was reflected in the 1934 census, however, which still
listed a category of household size as "thirty-one and over."
Furthermore, even after extended families broke up, many peasants
continued to work cooperatively.
The familial system sometimes extended to include godparents and
adopted brothers and sisters--unrelated individuals enjoying the same
status as close relatives. Godparenthood included another set of
traditional relationships that knit village society together. Godparents
kept close ties with their godchildren throughout their lives, and the
godparent/godchild relationship could be transferred from generation to
generation. Godparents were treated with the utmost respect and had an
important role in all important events in a godchild's life, beginning
with baptism. The familial relationship was so strong that a taboo
developed against the marriage of children related to the same family
only through godparenthood.
After the decline of the zadruga, the patriarchal system
continued to flourish in the smaller families, where husbands gained
ownership of family property and all the patriarchal status the old men
once had. The status of wives remained distinctly secondary. Upon
marriage a woman still severed all ties with her family if her husband's
family lived in another village. Thus, couples always looked forward to
the birth of sons rather than daughters because sons always would remain
family members. Men traditionally married between the ages of twenty and
twenty-two; women, between eighteen and twenty. In areas where daughters
were needed as laborers at home, marriage might be postponed until age
twenty-five. Arranged marriages, common until the communist era,
persisted in the most traditional villages until the 1960s.
Only in the twentieth century did men begin to consult their wives in
family decisions. Until that time, wives were expected to give blind
obedience to their husbands. A woman who dared question or interfere in
a man's work was universally condemned. Women waited for a man to pass
rather than crossing his path, and wives often walked with heavy loads
while their husbands rode on horseback. The wife was responsible for all
work inside the house and for helping her husband in the field as well.
Children typically began to share in household work at the age of
five or six. At that age, girls began to do household work, and by age
twelve they had usually mastered most of the traditional household
skills. By age twelve or thirteen, boys were expected to do the same
field work as adults. Alternatively, boys might begin learning a trade
such as tailoring or blacksmithing at six or seven. As the size of
farmland parcels diminished and field labor became less critical, more
families sent children away from home to learn trades. Village boys
apprenticed in cities sometimes became accustomed to city life and did
not return to the village.
Family Life and Modern Society
Throughout the era of postwar communist modernization, family life
remained one of the most important values in Bulgarian society. In a
1977 sociological survey, 95 percent of women responded that "one
can live a full life only if one has a family." From the beginning
of the twentieth century until the 1970s, the marriage rate in Bulgaria
was stable at close to 10 percent per year. The rate was slightly higher
just after the two world wars. The rate fell beginning in 1980, however,
reaching 7 percent in 1989. Slightly more couples married in the cities
than in the villages, a natural development considering the ageing of
the village population. Most women married between the ages of eighteen
and twenty-five, most men between twenty and twenty-five. Village men
and less educated city men typically married before they were twenty.
The first men to marry often were those who had completed their military
service, did not plan further education, and could support themselves
financially. Those who continued their education often delayed marriage
until their late twenties. In choosing their spouses, the less educated
and those from more traditional regions of Bulgaria sought qualities
most highly valued in traditional society: love of hard work, modesty,
and good character. Among the educated classes, values such as personal
respect, commonality of interests, and education were more often
predominant in the choice of a spouse.
Until 1944 divorce was quite rare in Bulgaria, and great stigma was
attached to all individuals who had divorced. After 1944 the divorce
rate rose steadily until 1983, when it reached 16.3 percent. Between
1983 and 1986, however, the rate fell to 11.2 percent. In the 1980s, the
divorce rate in the cities was more than twice that in the villages, in
part because the village population was older. The divorce rate was
especially high for couples married five years or less; that group
accounted for 44 percent of all divorces. In 1991 the rate was
increasing, however, for those married longer than five years.
Concerned about Bulgaria's low birth rate, the government issued new
restrictions on divorce in its 1985 Family Code. The fee to apply for a
divorce was more than three months' average salary, and every
application for a divorce required an investigation. The grounds most
often listed in a divorce application were infidelity, habitual
drunkenness, and incompatibility.
In 1991 the average Bulgarian family included four people. Families
of two to five people were common, whereas families of six or more were
rare. In the larger families, moreover, the additional members usually
included one or two of the couple's parents. In 1980 extended families
spanning three or even four generations made up 17 percent of all
households, indicating the persistence of the extended family tradition.
Although the tradition was more prevalent in the villages of western and
southern Bulgaria than in the cities, many urban newlyweds lived with
their parents because they could not afford or obtain separate
apartments.
Socialist Bulgaria greatly emphasized the emancipation of women. The
1971 constitution expressly stated that "all citizens of the
People's Republic of Bulgaria are equal before the law, and no
privileges or limitations of rights based on national, religious, sex,
race, or educational differences are permitted" and that
"women and men in the People's Republic of Bulgaria have the same
rights." Bulgaria's Family Code also affirmed equal rights for men
and women.
In 1988 Bulgaria's work force included an almost equal number of men
(50.1 percent) and women (49.9 percent). By 1984 nearly 70 percent of
working women surveyed said that they could not imagine life without
their professional work, even if they did not need the pay. Only 9
percent of the women preferred being housewives. However, most men
surveyed in 1988 cited economics as the reason for their wives to work,
asserting that the wives should give up their work if they were needed
at home.
Household chores remained primarily the responsibility of women,
including most working wives. In 1990 the average working woman spent
eight and one-half hours at her job and over four and one-half hours
doing housework: cooking, washing dishes, washing clothes, ironing,
mending, and tending the children. In many households, such tasks were
still considered "women's work," to which husbands contributed
little.
In their social planning, Bulgarian legislators usually viewed their
country's women mainly as mothers, not as workers. Besides the laws
passed in an effort to increase the country's birth rate, legislators
passed laws giving certain privileges to women in the workplace, often
keeping their reproductive capability in mind. Women were prohibited by
law from doing heavy work or work which would adversely affect their
health or their capacities as mothers. The list of prohibited jobs
changed constantly, and women sought such jobs because they generally
offered better pay and benefits. Depending on the type of work, women
could retire after fifteen or twenty years, or after reaching age
forty-five, fifty, or fiftyfive . Women who had raised five or more
children could retire after fifteen years of work, regardless of their
age or type of work. Men were generally offered retirement after working
twenty-five years or reaching age fifty, fifty-five, or sixty. Some jobs
were restricted to women unless no women were available. Without
exception these were low-skill, low-paying jobs such as archivist,
elevator operator, ticket seller, coat checker, and bookkeeper. Other
jobs, such as secretary, stenographer, librarian, cashier, and cleaning
person were considered "appropriate for women." Men in the
workplace often expressed resentment of women in positions of authority.
Social Groups and Their Work
Postwar Bulgarian society was divided into three social groups,
according to type of work. Workers held jobs in the
"productive" manufacturing sector of the economy. Employees
worked in "non-productive" service and education jobs. The
third group was made up of agricultural workers. The
intelligentsia, usually considered a subsector of the employee category,
held professional or creative positions requiring specific
qualifications. In 1987 nonagricultural workers made up 63 percent of
the population; employees made up 18 percent, and agricultural workers
made up 19 percent. The intelligentsia made up 13.5 percent of the total
population in 1985. Both the nonagricultural worker and the employee
category grew about 15 percent between the censuses of 1975 and 1985,
but the number of agricultural workers dropped steadily through the
1970s and 1980s. Of all people in the work force in 1990, only 21.7
percent were rated as highly qualified. Sociologists warned that figure
would have to more than double if Bulgaria were to become economically
competitive with the West.
Most of those registered as workers had jobs in industry. Between
1975 and 1985, the number of workers in the machinebuilding ,
spare-parts and metal-processing industries increased. Other industries,
such as the food industry, the lumber industry, and the fuel industry,
lost workers. Most workers were comparatively young, with little
education and few work qualifications. In 1990 some 66.8 percent of
industrial workers had a basic education or less. However, young workers
were valued because they were considered most capable of adapting to new
technology--a critical requirement for upgrading Bulgaria's outdated
industrial infrastructure.
In the 1980s, employment grew in the trade, supply, construction, and
transportation sectors. But the sectors requiring primarily intellectual
work grew the fastest: research and research services, education, and
administration. After growing by 90 percent between 1965 and 1985,
administration included 26 percent of all employees and was the largest
division of this category. The housing sector was the only component of
the employee category that lost jobs between 1975 and 1990.
The number of agricultural workers decreased markedly from 50 percent
of all workers in 1965 to 20 percent in 1985. As agricultural production
intensified, many agricultural workers were transferred to
nonagricultural jobs. In the late 1980s, however, a shortage of
agricultural workers occurred because so many people had left the
villages. For this reason, labor-intensive farm activities such as
harvesting required recruitment of brigades from schools and
nonagricultural enterprises. Many of the remaining farm workers could
not adapt to new technology. This lack of adaptation inhibited the
modernization and mechanization of agricultural processes.
The democratization that followed the Zhivkov regime raised the
problem of unemployment, unknown in Bulgaria after 1944. As of April
1991, some 124,000 Bulgarians were unemployed, with no sign of
improvement in the midst of economic restructuring, enterprise
shutdowns, and scarcity of raw materials. The highest unemployment rates
occurred in Plovdiv and Sofia. Most unemployed persons were under age
thirty, and over 60 percent were women. Job vacancies continued to
decline in 1991, with most remaining opportunities in low-skilled jobs
or hard physical labor. Persons with the highest level of education,
such as engineers, economists, and teachers, were least likely to find
suitable positions. In 1990 the lack of skilled professional positions
spurred a "brain drain" emigration that further threatened
Bulgaria's ability to compete on technologically oriented world markets.
In the meantime, the country's economy had lost its protected position
as a member of the defunct Comecon, putting more pressure on the
domestic labor force.
Because the national welfare system could only accommodate those who
lost their jobs because of enterprise shutdown, in 1990 the Bulgarian
government began seeking ways to create more jobs. It considered
rewarding businesses that added shifts or offered parttime or seasonal
work, and it encouraged development of small business. One proposed
solution, replacing working pensioners with young unemployed workers,
was unworkable because enterprises found it less expensive to continue
hiring pensioners.
Bulgaria - SOCIAL SERVICES
Until the 1920s, peasants relied on traditional medicine and went to
a doctor or hospital only as a last resort. Traditional healers believed
that many illnesses were caused by evil spirits (baiane) and
could therefore be treated with magic, with chants against the spirits,
with prayers, or by using medicinal herbs. The knowledge of healing
herbs was highly valued in village society. For healing one could also
drink, wash, or bathe in water from mineral springs, some of which were
considered holy. Even in postcommunist Bulgaria, some resorted to herbal
medicine or to persons with reputed extrasensory healing powers.
Herbalists and "extrasenses" resurged in popularity in
Bulgaria after the overthrow of Zhivkov. Because of the skepticism of
conventional doctors, little research was done on the validity of
traditional herbal medicine, but in 1991 doctors began to consider
rating skilled herbalists as qualified specialists.
Beginning in 1944, Bulgaria made significant progress in increasing
life expectancy and decreasing infant mortality rates. In 1986
Bulgaria's life expectancy was 68.1 years for men and 74.4 years for
women. In 1939 the mortality rate for children under one year had been
138.9 per 1,000; by 1986 it was 18.2 per 1,000, and in 1990 it was 14
per 1,000, the lowest rate in Eastern Europe. The proportion of
long-lived people in Bulgaria was quite large; a 1988 study cited a
figure of 52 centenarians per 1 million inhabitants, most of whom lived
in the Smolyan, Kurdzhali, and Blagoevgrad regions.
The steady demographic aging of the Bulgarian population was a
concern, however. In the 1980s, the number of children in the population
decreased by over 100,000. The prenatal mortality rate for 1989 was 11
per 1,000, twice that in West European countries. In 1989 the mortality
rate for children of ages one to fourteen was twice as great as in
Western Europe. The mortality rate for village children was more than
twice the rate for city children. However, in 1990 some Bulgarian cities
had mortality rates as low as 8.9 per 1,000, which compared favorably
with the rates in Western Europe.
Poor conditions in maternity wards and shortages of baby needs
worried new and prospective mothers. Hospital staff shortages meant that
doctors and nurses were overworked and babies received scant attention.
Expensive neonatal equipment was not available in every hospital, and
transferral to better-equipped facilities was rare. In 1990 the standard
minimum weight to ensure survival at birth was 1,000 grams, compared
with the World Health Organization standard of 500 grams.
The number of medical doctors, nurses, and dentists in Bulgaria
increased during the 1980s. Bulgaria had 27,750 doctors in 1988, almost
6,000 more than in 1980. This meant one doctor for every 323 Bulgarians.
Some 257 hospitals were operating in 1990, with 105 beds per 1,000
people.
Like other aspects of society, health services underwent significant
reform after 1989. In 1990 health officials declared that the socialist
system of polyclinics in sectors serving 3,000 to 4,000 people did not
satisfy the public's need for more complex diagnostic services. They
claimed the system was too centralized and bureaucratic, provided too
few incentives for health personnel, and lacked sufficient modern
equipment and supplies. Thereafter, new emphasis was placed on allowing
free choice of a family doctor and providing more general practitioners
to treat families on an ongoing basis. Beginning in 1990, Bulgaria began
accepting donations of money and medicine from Western countries. During
the reform period, even common medicines such as aspirin were sometimes
in short supply. Prices for medicines skyrocketed. Shortages of
antibiotics, analgesics, dressings, sutures, and disinfectants were
chronic.
In November 1989, the Council of Ministers decreed that doctors could
be self-employed during their time off from their assigned clinics.
Doctors could work for pay either in health facilities or in patients'
homes, but with significant restrictions: when acting privately, they
could not certify a patient's health or disability, issue prescriptions
for free medicine, perform outpatient surgery or abortions, conduct
intensive diagnostic tests, use anesthetics, or serve patients with
infectious or venereal diseases. In 1990 the National Assembly extended
the right of private practice to all qualified medical specialists, and
private health establishments and pharmacies were legalized.
Church-sponsored facilities were included in this provision. The 1990
law did not provide for a health insurance system, however, and
establishment of such a system was not a high legislative priority for
the early 1990s.
In 1991 the government created a National Health Council to be
financed by 2.5 billion leva from the state budget plus funds from
donors and payments for medical services. The goal of the new council
was to create a more autonomous health system. Also in 1991, the
Ministry of Health set up a Supreme Medical Council and a Pharmaceutics
Council to advise on proposed private health centers, pharmacies, and
laboratories and to regulate the supply and distribution of medicine.
In 1988 the top three causes of death in Bulgaria were cardiovascular
illnesses, cancer, and respiratory illnesses. An expert estimated that
88 percent of all deaths were caused by "socially significant
diseases" that resulted from an unhealthy lifestyle and were thus
preventable. Strokes, the most prevalent cause of death, killed a higher
percentage of the population in Bulgaria than anywhere else in the
world. In 1985 nearly 58,000 Bulgarians suffered strokes, and nearly
24,000 of them died. The mortality rate for strokes was especially high
in northern Bulgaria, where it sometimes exceeded 300 fatalities per
100,000 persons. In villages the rate was three times as high as in the
cities. Doctors cited unhealthy eating habits, smoking, alcohol abuse,
and stress as lifestyle causes of the high stroke rate.
In 1990 about 35 percent of Bulgarian women and 25 percent of men
were overweight. Sugar provided an average of 22 percent of the calories
in Bulgarian diets, twice as much as the standard for balanced
nutrition. Another 35 percent of average calories came from animal fat,
also twice as much as the recommended amount. That percentage was likely
much higher in the villages, where many animal products were made at
home. Modernization of the food supply generally led to increased
consumption of carbohydrates and fats. In contrast, the traditional
Bulgarian diet emphasized dairy products, beans, vegetables, and fruits.
Large quantities of bread were always a key element of the Bulgarian
diet. Average salt consumption was also very high. In 1990 the average
Bulgarian consumed 14.5 kilograms of bread, 4.4 kilograms of meat, 12.6
kilograms of milk and milk products, 15 eggs, and 15 kilograms of fruits
and vegetables per month.
In the 1980s, Bulgaria ranked tenth in the world in per capita
tobacco consumption. Tobacco consumption was growing, especially among
young people. Each Bulgarian consumed 7.34 liters of alcohol per month,
not including huge amounts of homemade alcoholic beverages. Between 1962
and 1982, recorded alcohol consumption increased 1.6 times.
In 1990 an estimated 35 percent of the population risked serious
health problems because of environmental pollution. In the most polluted areas, the sickness rate increased by
as much as twenty times in the 1980s. By 1990, pollution was rated the
fastest-growing cause of "socially significant diseases,"
particularly for respiratory and digestive disorders. Doctors in the
smelting center of Srednogorie found that the incidence of cancer, high
blood pressure, and dental disorders had increased significantly in the
1980s.
Pollution had an especially adverse effect on the immune systems of
children. In the first few years of the Giurgiu plant's operation, the
number of deformed children born across the Danube in Ruse increased 144
percent. From 1985 to 1990, this number increased from 27.5 to 39.7 per
1,000. Miscarriages, stillbirths, and premature, low-weight births
doubled during that period. The infant mortality rate in Srednogorie was
three times the national average in 1990. Excessive lead in the soil and
water at Kurdzhali had caused a great increase in skin and infectious
diseases in children there. In 1990 environmental authorities named the
village of Dolno Ezerovo, near Burgas, the "sickest village in
Bulgaria" because over 60 percent of its children suffered from
severe respiratory illnesses and allergies.
In 1987 Bulgarian health authorities instituted limited mandatory
testing for human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), which causes acquired
immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS). All prospective marriage partners,
all pregnant women, and all transportation workers arriving from outside
Bulgaria were required to be tested. Hemophiliacs, Bulgarian navy
sailors who had traveled abroad after 1982, and students and workers
visiting vacation resorts also fell under this rule. As of October 1989,
some 2.5 million people in Bulgaria, including about 66,000 foreigners,
had been tested for HIV, and 81 Bulgarians were diagnosed as HIV
positive. According to government figures, six of that number had
contracted AIDS. Foreigners diagnosed as HIV positive were ordered to
leave the country. Bulgaria estimated it would spend over US$4 million
to treat AIDS and HIV-positive patients in 1991.
Bulgaria - Education
Before the National Revival of the mid-nineteenth century, education
usually took the form of memorization of the liturgy and other religious
material. Supporters of the National Revival movement were instrumental
in establishing and supporting Bulgarian schools in the cities--first
for boys, and later for girls as well. These activists also introduced
the chitalishta. Often located next to a school, the chitalishta
served as community cultural centers as well as reading rooms. The first
schools, which began opening in the early nineteenth century, often did
not go beyond a basic education; students wishing to continue their
education had to go abroad.
The educational system established after Bulgaria gained its
independence retained the same basic structure through 1989. The 1878
Temporary Law on National Schools established free compulsory education
in primary school for both sexes. The schools were designed to teach
reading, writing, and basic arithmetic. In practice, not everyone
received that education, but the law gave the villages an incentive to
open new schools. By the turn of the century, one-third of all Bulgarian
villages had primary schools. In the early days, the immediate demand
for a large number of teachers meant that many new teachers had little
more education than their students. Later reforms specified a seven-year
standard education with a curriculum based on a West European model.
Some peasants, especially uneducated ones, withdrew their children from
school because they believed the classes were unrelated to peasant life.
This led to the offering of textbooks and prizes as an incentive for
students from poorer families.
Communist rule in Bulgaria brought forth a new approach to education
as a means of indoctrinating Marxist theory and communist values.
Literacy was promoted so that the communist-controlled press could be
disseminated throughout society. New classes for both adults and
children aimed at providing as many as possible with a high-school
education and abolishing illiteracy. Schools switched their focus from
liberal arts to technical training and introduced a curriculum modeled
on that of the Soviet Union. Russian language study was introduced for
all, from kindergartners to adults who had already completed their
education. Copies of Pravda, the primary newspaper of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union, were distributed even in isolated
villages. After the overthrow of Zhivkov, however, English became the
most studied foreign language in Bulgaria, and the study of Russian
declined dramatically.
In 1979 Zhivkov introduced a sweeping educational reform, claiming
that Marxist teachings on educating youth were still not being applied
completely. Zhivkov therefore created Unified Secondary Polytechnical
Schools (Edinna sredna politekhnicheska uchilishta, ESPU), in
which all students would receive the same general education. The system
united previously separate specialized middle schools in a single,
twelve-grade program heavily emphasizing technical subjects. In 1981 a
national program introduced computers to most of the ESPUs. The change
produced a chaotic situation in which teaching plans and programs had to
be completely overhauled and new textbooks issued to reflect the new
educational emphasis. This project proved unworkable, and by 1985 new
specialized schools again were being established.
The fall of Zhivkov resulted in a complete restructuring of the
country's educational system. In retrospect Bulgarian educators
recognized that the socialist way of educating was not only
bureaucratic, boring, and impersonal. It also led to disregard for the
rights of the individual, intolerance of the opinions of others, and
aggressive behavior. The centralized system with its regional
hierarchies was therefore scrapped in favor of a system of educational
councils in which every 400 teachers could elect a delegate to the
National Council of Teachers. The first goal of the new organization was
to depoliticize the schools in cooperation with the Ministry of Public
Education.
In 1991 the Bulgarian educational system consisted of three types of
schools: state, municipal, and private (including religious). The grade
levels were primary (first to fourth grade), basic (fifth to seventh
grade), and secondary (eighth to twelfth grade). Children began first
grade at age six or seven and were required to attended school until age
sixteen. Parents also had the option of enrolling their children in
kindergarten at age five. Secondary school students had the choice of
studying for three years at professional-vocational schools or for four
years at technical schools or general high schools. Religious schools
operated only on the high-school level. Specialized high schools taught
foreign languages, mathematics, and music; admittance to them was by
special entrance exams. Special programs for gifted and talented
children began as early as the fifth grade. Special schools also
operated for handicapped children. Children suffering from chronic
illnesses could receive their schooling in a hospital or sanatorium.
Prior to the postcommunist reform era, about 25,000 students dropped
out every year before reaching their sixteenth birthday; another 25,000
failed to advance to the next grade. Under the new system, parents could
be fined 500 to 1,000 leva if their children failed to attend school;
fines also were levied for pupils retained in grade for an extra year.
Public opinion on the educational reform focused mainly on
depolitization. By the 1990-91 school year, new textbooks had been
introduced in many subjects, but many of them were not completely free
of socialist rhetoric. A first-grade mathematics textbook published in
1990 contained the following exercise: "Count how many words there
are in this sentence: 'I am grateful to the Party, for it leads my
country to beautiful, radiant life and vigilantly protects us from
war.'" A newly published music book contained songs about the
party, a communist youth organization, and Lenin. Many teachers likewise
continued to espouse the communist rhetoric in which their profession
had been long and firmly indoctrinated. In late 1990, about 50,000 Sofia
University students demonstrated against poor education and against
continued requirements to attend courses in Marxism. Their protest
caused the university to eliminate compulsory political indoctrination
courses. The 1991 Law on Public Education declared that "no
political activity is allowed in the system of public education."
Depolitization was expected to be a slow process because of the
extent to which the schools had been politicized before 1990. At the end
of 1990, over 90 percent of all teachers were still members of the
Bulgarian Socialist (formerly Communist) Party. For this reason, the Law
on Public Education prohibited teachers from becoming members of
political parties for a period of three years, beginning in 1991.
Because the Zhivkov regime had tinkered often with Bulgaria's
educational system, longtime teachers had developed a cynicism toward
reform of any type. This attitude hampered the removal of the old
socialist structures from the educational system.
Some students married and began families while they were still in
school, and two-student families were not uncommon. Such families often
depended on help from parents because of their low income and because of
a shortage of student family housing. By 1990 most Bulgarian students
worked in their free time, unlike their predecessors in the 1970s and
early 1980s.
Reform also reached higher education. In 1990 a new law on academic
freedom emphasized the concept of an intellectual market in which
universities, teachers, and students must maintain high performance
levels to stay competitive. The law gave every institution of higher
learning the right to manage its teaching and research activities
without government interference. This right included control over
curriculum, number of students, standards for student admissions and
teacher hirings, training and organization of faculty, and the level of
contact with other institutions of higher learning in Bulgaria and
abroad. Students received the right to choose their own professors. The
higher education law was criticized for withholding students' rights and
because the legislature had failed to consult students in the law's
formulation.
In 1991 experts evaluated the state university system as weak in
critically needed technical fields of study. The availability of
interested students was also questioned. In the 1990-91 school year, no
graduate students with enterprise scholarships majored in subjects such
as computer systems, artificial intelligence systems, or ecology and
environmental protection. Graduate programs in critical nontechnical
fields such as management economics, marketing, production management,
and finance also had no students.
After the overthrow of Zhivkov, France and Germany made early
commitments to help Bulgaria carry out educational reforms. In 1991 the
United States began planning a new American college in Blagoevgrad,
where students would be taught in English using American educational
methods. The first 200 students were to include 160 Bulgarians, 20
students from neighboring European countries, and 20 Americans majoring
in Balkan studies. The University of Maine was to supply the teachers.
Plans called for business and economics to be the major areas of
concentration. Affordability was a potential barrier to participation in
this plan by Bulgarian students; the cost was low by American standards,
but far above the average Bulgarian's price range. And the tuition-free
Bulgarian university system was expected to lure many qualified students
from the new university. Nevertheless, Western education assistance was
an important symbolic step in moving the social institutions of Bulgaria
into the European mainstream, from which they had been isolated for
forty-five years.
