Conversion to Islam as a Trope in Bulgarian Historiography, Fiction and Film

A personal note frames this paper. In the spring of 1999, while teaching a course on Balkan history at Harvard University, I was invited by Anastasia Karakasidou to introduce a Bulgarian film in the series of Balkan historical films she had organized at Wellesley College. For lack of any other, but also because I thought it would provide a good basis for discussion on both national interpretations of an imperial past as well as lead us to contemporary issues (it was the beginning of the bombing campaign against Yugoslavia with the news and pictures of refugees streaming out of Kosovo), I showed the film Time of Violence. Set in the 17 century, it portrays the alleged mass conversion of Bulgarians in one part of the Rhodope mountains. The show itself went well but a few days later the student newspaper published the vehement and denunciatory protest of a young woman, a Turk from Bulgaria, who felt deeply offended by the display of what she thought a hypernationalist film. Sensitive as I am to both excesses of nationalism in general, and to the plight of the Bulgarian Turks in the 1980s in particular, I admit that I did not expect such a reaction, and was genuinely surprised at what seemed to me to be an emotional though understandable overreaction. Part of it was that I had introduced the show with what I believed was the proper historicizing and contextualization, and this proleptic act on my part kept me from apprehending the coming reaction. I should have known better. Of course, much as we would like to be understood for what we say (when we are the authors) or for how we interpret (when we are the mediators), the process of reception has its own laws, described with fancy terms like intertextuality, the dialogical principle etc., or with less fancy ones, like that a reader simply comes to the text with one’s own existential and intellectual baggage. And yet, is there something immanent in the text (whether verbal or visual), that always elicits or unleashes a certain reaction (even though the degree might be different)? Is this something locked and frozen within a