Banya Bashi Mosque in Bulgaria's capital Sofia is one of Europe's oldest Muslim places of worship. Built in the 16th century, it serves as a reminder of almost 500 years of Ottoman rule over the country.

Bulgaria is home to the largest Turkish community in the Balkans. Around 500,000 ethnic Turks live in the southeastern European country of 6.5 million, making up about 8% of Bulgaria's total population, according to a 2021 census.

Most are descendants of Turkish settlers who came to Bulgaria with the Ottoman conquest in the 14th and 15th centuries. Many settled in the southern and north-eastern provinces of Bulgaria. Members of this ethnic minority, who largely subscribe to Sunni Islam, still speak Turkish, unlike the Bulgarian-speaking Muslims known as Pomaks.

Long history of cultural exchange

There are also Muslims among Bulgaria's approximately 750,000 Roma. And more Muslims have immigrated from the Middle East and Afghanistan since 2015. A 2017 survey by political scientist Evgenia Ivanova of Sofia's New Bulgarian University found that 89% of Bulgarian Muslims identify as religious. But this does not necessarily translate to piousness.

"Across Bulgaria, religiosity is relatively low," says Marina Liakova, a sociologist with the University of Education in Karlsruhe, Germany. She is an expert on migration and religion in Bulgaria. "For Christians and Muslims, it is more of a cultural religiosity."

While most Muslims observe the fasting month of Ramadan, going to the mosque on Fridays is uncommon, Liakova says. It is likewise rare to find Bulgarian Muslim women wearing headscarves, she adds.

"During the 500 years of Ottoman rule, Christians and Muslims influenced each other culturally, linguistically and culinarily," explains the researcher. "In everyday life, both groups live together like neighbors in friendly coexistence."

Yet attitudes towards Islam have also hardened of late owing to the recent arrival of Muslim immigrants from Syria and Afghanistan, says Liakova, reminding some, she says, of the time of Ottoman rule.

Ethnic cleansing under communism

In 1984 and 1985, communist dictator Todor Zhivkov forced ethnic Turks to give up their names and adopt Bulgarian names instead. The aim of this effort, officially known as the "rebirth process," was to destroy the ethnic identity of Bulgaria's Turkish population.

Following protests, more than 360,000 Turkish Bulgarians were deported to Turkey in 1989, making it the most extensive ethnic cleansing campaign in Europe since 1945 — a campaign that communist Bulgaria cynically referred to as "the great excursion."

The army sealed off and invaded entire Turkish villages. Somewhere between several hundred and up to 2,500 Bulgarian Turks were murdered during this period, according to estimates by human rights organizations.

The post-communist 1991 constitution enshrined the rights of all ethnic and religious groups in Bulgaria. That said, the Orthodox Church still enjoys a privileged position as the country's "traditional religion." The country's history of forced assimilation and ethnic cleansing remain sensitive issues.

In 2012, the parliament in Sofia issued a landmark declaration clearly naming and condemning past human rights violations and calling on the judiciary to take action. But nothing came of it; not a single perpetrator was brought to trial, let alone convicted.

Bulgaria 'flying under the radar'

"There is no political willingness for a reappraisal [of the past]," says Tomasz Kamusella, a historian and expert on southeastern Europe who teaches at Scotland's St Andrews University. "Many of those who are in power today were involved in the ethnic cleaning back then. Nobody wants to open that can of worms."

Dictator Todor Zhivkov is still revered as a "great European statesman" in Bulgaria today, Kamusella said, with little awareness among political elites of the role he played in past crimes.

"The events were traumatic for the Turkish minority and Bulgarian society as a whole," says sociologist Liakova. "They are hardly ever talked about, not even in families. Only a few journalists and scientists work on this topic."

Property belonging to Bulgarian Turks was confiscated in the course of the ethnic cleaning campaign. In 2023, the grand mufti of Bulgaria's Muslim community, Mustafa Hadji, reportedly sought to reclaim mosques and property that had been expropriated under the communist regimebut his efforts were in vein. 

Neither the European Union nor Turkey are exerting pressure on Bulgaria to confront its past. "Bulgaria is flying under the radar," Kamusella told DW. Turkey mainly uses its influence to shape Islam in Bulgaria in accordance with its own interests through the Diyanet religious authority, which finances new mosques and regulates imam training.

Political representation fractured

Bulgaria's Movement for Rights and Freedoms party (DPS), the country's third-largest political force, saw itself as a mouthpiece for the country's Turkish minority. 

The DPS has certainly advocated for better infrastructure in minority settlements. But according to Kamusella, it has always avoided sensitive issues: the difficult past questions of identity, restrictions on the approval of mosque construction, and the fact that Turkish is not a language of instruction in Bulgaria's state education system.

In July 2024, the DPS split. Oligarch and media entrepreneur Deljan Peewski took control and renamed the party "DPS-New Start," while long-time chairman Ahmed Dogan founded the new Alliance for Rights and Freedoms party. At that time, there were also allegations of electoral fraud and vote buying by Peevski, the first ethnic Bulgarian to head the DPS.

The list of allegations against Peevski is long: it ranges from bribery and influence peddling, embezzlement, and mafia connections to intimidation of opposition figures. He has been under US sanctions since 2021. The anti-government protests since November 2025 were also directed against Peevski, who, although not part of Prime Minister Rossen Shalyaskov's conservative GERB party government, supported it in parliament.

The DPS is "just as much a part of Bulgaria's corruption- and scandal-ridden political system as the others," Kamusella said.

This article was originally published in German.