Theodora Dragostinova

This project studies the Greeks in Bulgaria and their transformation from an affluent and culturally renowned minority into a marginalized refugee population in their "recovered motherland." The community is examined in the context of the disintegration of the Ottoman Empire and the consolidation of the Balkan states in the twentieth century. The unique diasporic experience of the Bulgarian Greeks situated them between the priorities of the Bulgarian and Greek governments, so that they balanced multiple interests in the expression of their group identity. I refine crude interpretations of national loyalty that see people as embedded in primordial national identities and emphasize the instability and plasticity of national allegiances and their evolving nature over an extended time-period.

This project examines multi-nationality and national indifference among the Greeks in Bulgaria by analyzing practices of multilingualism, religious conversion, the manipulation of citizenship, and national side-switching between Bulgarians and Greeks. The ambiguity of nationhood is explored in the context of the conflicting national agendas of Bulgaria and Greece in the twentieth century. The goal is twofold: to scrutinize how belonging to a particular (self-proclaimed or ascribed) nationality influenced people’s decision to emigrate, and to ask how the experience of displacement shaped the national loyalties of the population. Throughout the study, the official policies of national homogenization are juxtaposed with ordinary people’s responses to the demands of the nation-state.

“Spoils of War” focuses on one thousand children in the Balkan borderlands to tell the stories of displaced children and divided families during the Balkan Wars and World War I. War callously yet routinely split children from their families. Peace did not bring easy family reunification because wartime violence had shattered familial and individual connections. The involvement of governments and international organizations created new dilemmas, as conflicting understandings of volition, compulsion, age of adulthood, and parental consent challenged what constituted lawful guardianship, adoption, or marriage. “Spoils of War” analyzes who was considered a child, what the repatriation of minors entailed, and how post-1918 family reunification worked to interrogate overlapping questions of international norms, national sovereignty, and individual rights; shifting notions of citizenship and belonging; and gendered ideas of family life and agency. By embracing microhistorical approaches, this book seeks to recover the “archival whispers”—not quite voices—left by children in the archives and to piece together their fragmented stories of trauma, resilience, and perseverance.