The Turkish Minority in Bulgaria ( 1878 - 1908 )

During the 1988-89 academic year I took the course "Nationalism in European History", taught by Prof. L. Vos in the European Studies Programme at K. U. Leuven. This course turned out to be very interesting and I decided to write my M. A. thesis on "Greek Nationalism" under the supervision of Prof. L. Vos. Later, I decided to continue working with him on nationalism, and we started to look for an interesting Ph. D. subject on this topic. In April 1989, we asked Prof. U. Vermeulen''s opinion. The latter gave me a list of Turkish newspaper published in Bulgaria, and suggested that I should work on the Turkish Minority in Bulgaria during the Principality period, throught the study of Turkish newspapers. This was the beginning of the story.