Bulgaria to join euro area on 1 January 2026

It’s also more of a generation thing though. The older people are nostalgic about the past and their youth and for a country that experienced 2 decades of very low birth rates that’s the 70s and 80s and those years are under the communist rule and very good years for Bulgaria as the country was experiencing economic boom from computers and electronics manufacturing.

Also, under under the Communist rule supported by USSR, they indoctrinated people into a version of history that Turks are the absolute evil, and Russians are the absolute angels saving them from the ottomans.

I.e. in pre-EU era it was called Ottoman slavery, later they start calling it Ottoman era as it was more accurate as Ottoman’s system was based on collecting taxes and resources from the conquered places when giving them plenty of autonomy. Obviously not ideal but far from slavery.

Unless you were Armenian.

Not at all, Armenians were also an integral part of the Ottoman society and that’s how you still have plenty of Armenian cultural heritage dating back to Ottoman times in modern Turkey. You must be referring to the events around WW1 that led the loss of huge numbers of the Armenians through atrocities committed by the Ottomans which some say that it was a genocide, others say it was poorly managed suppression of a rebellion in a dying empire. Still unresolved issue unfortunately.

On the other hand Bulgarians and Turks teamed in wars after the forming of the new Bulgarian state.

>that Turks are the absolute evil

Devshirme, Janissary corps, Batak massacre? There is huge blood debt that is owed to the Balkans and Armenia by the Ottoman Empire and their successor states.

Tell me about an empire who conquered and held conquered land through asking politely. If you are able to come up with any, Ottomans certainly were not among those sure. That's why people don't like being invaded by empires. What do you think the first and the second Bulgarian Empires did exactly?

BTW Just like the way Bulgarians may not recognize that the Bulgarian Empire had a military and killed people in order to take others stuff and force them into things they wouldn't do unless defeated through slathering each other, Turks also tend not to understand that institutions like Devshirme or Janissary weren't liked by the people subjected to those.

For example In their mind Devshirme was an education program that gave the opportunity to minority children to have great careers and indeed that was the result(they don't think about how those kids were taken into the program).

Similarly Janissary were elite units with lots of sway in the administration, in their minds Janissaries were spoiled soldiers that are hard to satisfy.

Also, all the wives of the sultans were women from minorities. In the Turkish mind they were lucky women with a lot of influence on the empire. An entire genre of soap operas are made around this and they are very popular in the countries that used to be under the Ottoman rule. Including Bulgaria.

> poorly managed suppression of a rebellion

Or a too well managed suppression.

“ We have been blamed for not making a distinction between guilty and innocent Armenians. [To do so] was impossible. Because of the nature of things, one who was still innocent today could be guilty tomorrow. The concern for the safety of Turkey simply had to silence all other concerns.”

> others say it was poorly managed suppression of a rebellion in a dying empire

I don't think many say that at all outside of Turkey/Azerbaijan/Pakistan.

Oh of course. This doesn't invalidates the bad blood. This doesn't mean that I would be sad if Turkey is humiliated and Hagia Sofia becomes once again orthodox church once again. And Istanbul is renamed to Constantinople.

So, you're describing war? The Russians are doing that to Ukraine right now too btw.

The bad blood doesn't make sense, it was an age of the Empires and it was all business and Ottomans didn't do anything particularly different than everyone else did so I don't think that it is fair to say that Ottomans were evil. If anything, under Ottoman rule despite the atrocities minorities kept their language and culture unlike the people subjected to Western imperialism in Africa or Americas. One can even argue that Ottomans were relatively gentle.

Let's hope that we never go back to these days. Imperialism is evil and I'm sorry that Erdogan and other autocrats are trying to revive those days. I also agree that it was very offensive for the christians to turn Hagia Sofia into a mosque again(was a museum till recently) and I would love to see it becoming a church again.

Also, let's stop renaming stuff. If you like Istanbul you can move to Istanbul, if you want to own istanbul you can purchase a property in Istanbul.

True, I'm also inclined to believe that it started as a suppression attempt that ended up being a genocide as "an easy solution" to make a problem go away as the dying empire wasn't able to contain it.

I recall reading the communications of some Ottoman officials trying to cash out the life insurance policies of the Armenians. Pure evil, honestly.

Could be, I agree. I'm inclined to believe that it become a genocide once the incompetent administrators failed to address the core reasons and thought that it would be easier to make these troubles go away by killing everybody.

Yep, and if Ottoman empire did evil things, Russian empire wasn't historically any better. At least Turks mostly stay inside their own borders these days, while Russians haven't changed one bit.

In that sense the Holocaust was also the "easy solution" to "make the problem go away" when deporting Jews (and other minorities) became too much of a hassle for the Nazis.

They didn't start with the idea of "let's kill everyone", it built up from the 1930s process to deport "undesirables", when it became too much work they decided to kill everyone instead.

Genocide is genocide, doesn't matter the seed that started it.

Sure, nazis even called it “the final solution”.

The difference is that the the ottomans didn’t have an anti-armenian culture going on and the Ottoman rule wasn’t being legitimized over stuff like “fighting a war against sleazy Armenians who infiltrated us”. It was quite the opposite, with rise of the nationalism in Europe minorities in the empire were the “anti”.

Ottomans didn’t do that because they believed in the inherent evil of the Armenians but because they were responding to those nationalistic movements. The distrust towards Armenians developed with the rebellions that were supported by Russia etc. Armenians weren’t targeted for their Armenianness. In other words none of this would have happened if there were no rebellions. It was done to address a specific problem, can you say the same for the holocaust? Was Hitler trying to address actual troubles that the Jewish minority caused?

Do you know who were/are targeted? The Alawites, it about the people would say things similar things like an anti-semite would say for the Jews. It’s also how you get instantly cancelled in Turkey.

Luckily something like this will never happens today, especially in a civilized country.

> Still unresolved issue unfortunately.

The Armenian genocide is very much a resolved issue. No serious historian denies the genocide any more than he denies the holocaust.

> Tell me about an empire who conquered and held conquered land through asking politely. If you are able to come up with any

This is not what it's about. It's not about the Turks being evil and Bulgarians et al being angels. It's about the fact that Turks refuse to accept responsibility.

Let me give you an example. I'm Romanian. There are many uneducated folks you'll meet in Romania who deny we killed hundreds of thousands of Jews in WW2. But no serious politician, historian, public figure, or educated person denies that.

The same is not true in Turkey. Pretty much everyone denies the Armenian Genocide.

All of us have shameful periods in our history, but some of us at least have the decency to not deny it.

But, of course, how could you see the genocide as evil when you can't even come to grips with the older Devshirme, a practice where boys were abducted, mutilated (circumcision), forced converted to Islam, executed if they were found praying to Jesus, and trained to fight and kill their own countrymen.