34 years ago, on May 24, 1989, the mass exodus of around 350,000 Bulgarian Turks began, victims of a forced assimilation policy of the communist regime under Todor Zhivkov from 1984-1985. Around 800,000 ethnic Turks were forced to give up their Turkish names and adopt Christian-Slavic names. The restrictions began as early as the 1960s, when Turkish lessons were suspended at state schools in 1964 and the Faculty of Turkish Philology at Sofia University was forced to close in 1974.
Under martial law, the communist rulers sent heavily armed army and police units to southern Bulgaria, where the majority of the Turkish minority lived, to force the inhabitants to adopt Bulgarian names, issue new identity cards and renounce their Islamic faith. The use of the Turkish language in public was banned and previously valid minority rights were abolished. The Turkish minority resisted the policy of ethnic cleansing with protests against the Todor Zhivkov government. Numerous demonstrators were arrested, imprisoned and tortured. 40 demonstrators are said to have been killed in clashes with Bulgarian security forces.
Many of the Turkish victims of the Bulgarianization campaign could take it no longer and in May 1989 thousands of Bulgarian Turks made their way to Turkey. By rail, on trucks, buses, cars and tractors, many of these desperate people fled to the neighboring country of their ancestors, which gave them refuge. The laws on forced assimilation enacted by the communists were later reversed and the Bulgarian parliament passed a declaration in 2012 condemning forced assimilation and describing the mass exodus of Bulgarian Turks as ethnic cleansing.