Muslims, Christians Celebrate Together in Bulgarian Town
Despite the hot sun at midday on July 5, hundreds of people in the small southeast Bulgarian town Belitsa gathered at the central square to eat traditional sweets at a long table, greeting each other with friendly hugs and listening to Bulgarian folk orchestras.
It was the first time that Bulgarian Muslim and Christians had officially gathered together to celebrate Eid-al-Fitr, or Ramazan Bayram in Bulgaria, the end of the holy month of Ramadan.
"We have no problems with our Christians friends. We have never had any problems. We live in togetherness,” Aishe Ismail, who had come with her family from the nearby village of Avramovo, told BIRN.
Despite the long tradition of coexistence between Muslim and Christian Bulgarians in this region, where the communities are roughly equal in size, over the past 25 years the municipality had only organized common celebrations for the Christian holidays of Easter and Christmas.
"Unfortunately, divisions existed in Belitsa – Christians on the one side and the Muslims on the other. I don’t like such things – I like bringing people together,” Radoslav Revanski, the young new mayor of Belitsa, said.
He was delighted that so many people had come for the feast, and promised to turn this new initiative into a local tradition.
Among all the EU countries, Bulgaria has the largest percentage of Muslim compared to its total population.
According to Pew Research Center’s latest mapping of Muslim populations from 2015, the 1.02 million Muslims in Bulgaria form 13.7 per cent of the country’s population.
Most of these Muslims belong to the country’s largest minority, the ethnic Turks. They have a long history of peaceful coexistence with different religious traditions, including Orthodox and Armenian Christians and Jews.
However, despite this tradition of mutual tolerance, in the 1970s and 1980s, during the so-called "Revival Process”, the then ruling Bulgarian Communist Party subjected the Muslim minority to forceful assimilation, which left a deep scar on the country.
Faced by demands to change their names and forfeit their identity, in the summer of 1989, around 360,000 ethnic Turks chose instead to leave their homes and seek refuge in Turkey.
Source: Balkan Insight
