Word: bulgarians
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...humanity spills out. Many kneel to kiss the ground. Others weep as they unload furniture, suitcases and sacks stuffed with possessions and pile them on the station platform. Military marches and battle cries of the Ottoman Empire blare from loudspeakers. A man shakes his fist at the distant Bulgarian hills and shouts, "Long live Turkey! This is the happiest day of my life...
...there is little happiness in Kapikule as ethnic Turks continue to flee from a draconian assimilation campaign waged against them by the Bulgarian Communist regime to a homeland that is hard-pressed to give them asylum. Refugees tell of five grim years of escalating pressure -- their schools closed, their language outlawed, their music silenced and their names changed for Slavic ones. Worst of all, in their view, Muslim worship was banned, a repression extending literally from the cradle to the grave: circumcision was forbidden, and Turkish burial grounds closed...
...Bulgarian government claims that the country's 1 million ethnic Turks -- one-ninth of the total population -- are descendants of Slavs converted to Islam under the Ottomans, who ruled from the late 14th century to the late 19th century, and it wants them to revert to their origins. But the Turkish minority regards itself as a remnant of the Ottoman Empire. "Our ancestors settled in Bulgaria when it was the empire's Balkan province," explains Huseyin Hafizoglu, 60, a schoolteacher whose home was near Plovdiv. "My family has been there for more than a century. But our country is still...
...group does nothing to hide its official name -- the Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female Vocal Choir -- but the copy on the label and jacket doesn't exactly brag about it either. Le Mystere is so much more mellifluous and -- no getting around it -- mysterious. Just like the music itself, in fact. The wonder of both Le Mystere excursions is provided by the range of the voices and the surprise of the melodies. The music sounds African, Middle European and otherworldly, like a collision around a sharp mountain turn between Peter Gabriel's score for The Last Temptation of Christ...
...Week," and the band is hardly shy around sentiment. Its version of the French original that was the basis for the shudder-inducing My Way has enough panache, never mind schmaltz, to rate a permanent slot on the juke at any local Irish bar. Right next to the Bulgarian women, more than likely...