Bulgaria claims race purity

Press, 3 February 1986, Page 12

Bulgaria claims race purity

From “The Economist,” London

Bulgaria has mobilised its scientists in an effort to support its Government’s claims that the country’s 800,000 or so ethnic Turks are in fact full-blooded Bulgarians. An article in a national daily, “Otechestven Front,” has analysed the results of “anthropological tests” supposedly conducted over the last 30 years by anthropologists from the Sofia Institute of Morphology in three districts which contain many members of Bulgaria’s Turkish, Macedonian and Greek minorities.

The scientists’ finding: the Bulgarian nation is pure and uncontaminated, and has remained unchanged since the Middle

Ages. According to the anthropologists, the Bulgarian people took shape in the ninth and tenth centuries as a blending of Slavs, Thracians and Asiatic tribes. This mixture evolved into a homogeneous entity, the people now called Bulgarians. The foreign invasions of the past 1000 years left no racial mark, it seems. The implication is that members of the Turkish minority are merely Bulgarians who happen to speak Turkish. Experts at the Bulgarian Institute of Brain Research — Yugoslavia’s Tanjug news agency reports — have meanwhile been studying the Bulgarian brain.

Their preliminary findings, just released, show that it has been toughened by centuries of hardship and has developed its own peculiar way of thinking.

But the researchers also found evidence to suggest that Bulgarians are not using their grey matter enough. The institute’s director is said to have called on “owners of Bulgaria’s 9 million brains to keep thinking as much as possible.” They might start by reflecting on the validity of the sort of research into racial purity which went out of fashion with Nazi Germany.

Copyright — The Economist.