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Introduction
On Sunday, January 19, 2017, the newly-elected fifth president of the Republic of Bulgaria, Rumen Radev, took the oath of office during an official ceremony at the Parliament where he addressed the Patriarch Neophyte of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church (BOC) and other officials. Although addressing the patriarch was not unusual behavior for a Bulgarian head of state, Radev was fiercely criticized by Lyutvi Mestan, the leader of Political Party DOST.1 This party was established in 2016 by Mestan and other former members2 of the Movement for Rights and Freedoms (MRF) representing a large part of the Turkish and Muslim population of Bulgaria in national politics after the fall of the Communist regime in 1989. Mestan himself, before being ousted from the MRF in December 2015, was its second chair after the well-known politician, secularist Ahmed Doğan who resigned while remaining “honorary chairman.” Mestan (2017) criticized Radev because, while the president correctly “turned with due respect to all officials and institutions, including His Holiness the Patriarch of the BOC,” he “failed to show respect to the heads of other religious confessions in the Republic of Bulgaria,” notably to “the spiritual head of approximately one million Muslims in Bulgaria Dr. Mustafa Hadzhi.” In Sofia, some urban liberals, human rights activists, and journalists defended Mestan’s position, accusing the president of favoring the patriarch.3
Yet, why did many citizens of an otherwise secular state interpret the speech of President Radev as normal and not as intolerant? Although most of the people are neither “church-goers” nor devout believers, religion remains an essential part even of many non-believers’ identity, which distinguishes the Balkans from Western patterns of religion. This symbolic emphasis on the Orthodox Church can hardly be explained only with a “politicization” or an “instrumentalization” of religion but is rather a socio-structural phenomenon which strongly influences identity construction. Is the foregrounding of a Bulgarian “constituent nation”4 defined in both ethno-linguistic and religious terms something inherent to a continuous Orthodox Christian tradition from Medieval times? Or, is it rather a legacy of the more recent Ottoman experience which, despite the long “de-Ottomanization” (Lory 1985) and “de-Islamization” (Öktem 2011) of the Balkans, remained socially relevant by subtly continuing the patterns of the millet system? How do...