Women's experience in the asimilation process in Bulgaria 1984-89

The period of 1984-1989, which is also conceptualized as "revival process" in the international conjuncture is the period when the Bulgarian administration, which is a dominant group, as a state policy evaluated the Turks of Bulgaria in a different category and, tried to suppress, convert and expel (such as emigration, exile) them from the country as much as possible with different practices defining as assimilation. In this period (covering the dates from 1984 to 1989), the country's government tried to control and suppress the Turks of the region, which it transformed into a subordinate group, through various methods such as violence, threats and punishment, (just as it applied to other ethnic groups such as Pomaks and Gypsies), in a regional and historical sense. The literature has discussed, analyzed and conveyed the process in the context of the Turks of the region. However, the place of women in this process, which is the main source of motivation for the emergence of this study, has not been adequately examined. In the literature reviews, it has been understood that the existing studies reveal the assimilation itself, the groups it affects, its relationship with immigration and its results in detail, and that it is shaped in a structure independent of women. The study deals with how Turkish women experienced the assimilation process in Bulgaria, how they perceived and managed the process, and how they remember and commemorate it; On the other hand, it strives to both reveal the invisibility of the relevant women's group and make invisible women visible. For this purpose, the oral history method, which is becoming more and more widely used, has been applied to make visible those who are on the sidelines in history. The method was applied to a group, who were partially reached through snowball and purposive sampling techniques, consist of immigrants from Bulgaria. In the selection of the participants (herein called the narrator), attention was paid to the fact that they were women who had a direct experience of the assimilation process while in Bulgaria and then migrated to Turkey, who were able to express themselves well and were aged (50+). A total of 14 interviews were conducted with female narrators, three of which were pre-interviews and one of them was in the form of two sessions. The findings were analyzed at the level of discourse; As a result of this, it has been seen that women can develop micro practices such as tactics, resistance, even in the most desperate situations that interrupt daily life such as assimilation, and thus they can resist the domination that exists on them.