Professor Matanov, as you already know, the idea behind our conversations with leading specialists who possess solid historical expertise is to discuss past events that can help us make sense of the present. We hope these discussions will have genuine relevance for understanding certain modern-day processes that undeniably have analogues in the past.
Of course such discussions make sense—for at least two reasons in my view. First, we do not really know what “historical experience” means. Some people are convinced it consists of analysing whether the past will repeat itself or not, which is rather simplistic. Accumulating historical experience, in my opinion, means thinking in tried-and-tested ways about critical situations, seeing how they were—or were not—resolved in the past. That is the experience that accumulates.
The second reason—linked to the global crisis you mentioned in our preliminary talks—concerns the extent to which contemporaries actually perceive such a crisis. People in the past certainly lived through crises, but they did not necessarily recognise them as such because they lacked information. Our modern sense of crisis is created by the excess of information that overwhelms us. Being instantly informed about a plane crash in the Philippines and the ordeal of those on board, or about earthquakes and erupting volcanoes around the globe, makes people empathise with those tragedies; from that empathy grows the feeling of a global crisis.
In this sense, one cause of the “global-crisis” feeling is information overload—and the information is mostly “bad,” since modern journalism treats bad news as news, whereas good news is “not news.” The barrage of negative information leaves the impression that the contemporary world is heading for disaster, while the past was some sort of idyll. That is certainly not the case. I can state with confidence that our grandparents, who lived through hard times and whose lives were in many respects more difficult than ours, actually enjoyed a calmer existence precisely because they lacked information—their minds were not “bombarded” by every conceivable news item. This is what we must grasp; otherwise our endeavours lose their point.
In connection with what you have just said, do you think that what we nowadays call “geopolitics” existed on the Balkans in a similar form in the past? How would you position the major political players, and what interests did they pursue in the Balkan region?
First let me add a clarification: if one looks only at a map of the Balkans, one gains a certain impression; if one looks at a map of Europe, a different one; a map of Eurasia, yet another; and a global map, a fourth. Europe is a very small continent, and all European states are tiny from a global standpoint. The Balkans are even smaller, and the Balkan states smaller still. One cannot compare any European country with Kazakhstan, India, China or Colombia—or with any other large state. The region is small; therefore one would not expect a steppe empire like that of the Mongols to arise here. It simply cannot happen: there are insufficient resources, territory or people.
As for “geopolitics,” certain configurations do repeat. Whether we speak of Byzantium–Hungary or the Ottoman Empire–Europe, the Balkans always remain on the periphery or in the middle zone of that geopolitical tandem/clash. To me that is a recurrent situation from which we can draw conclusions. Already in the Early Middle Ages the Balkans display a bipolar geopolitical model: Bulgaria–Byzantium. Later a different bipolar model emerges with different actors: Byzantium–Hungary (representing Central Europe). The same two-pole model appears again with the Ottoman Empire and the Habsburg lands, or Christian Europe. In modern times the pattern seems to repeat, though with slightly different players: Turkey–Europe. I mention all this to confirm my point that the Balkans have been peripheral for most of their historical development, with all the consequences that follow.
They were probably very important—and not peripheral—during periods of nomadic invasion from the East, when the region somehow blocked the further advance of nomads. When that barrier “lets them through,” trouble follows: when Bulgaria let the Hungarians slip, they settled in Central Europe—though that is an exception; when the Roman Empire let the Huns slip, they too settled there. But in principle Early-medieval Bulgaria guarded that gateway into Europe. When that function can no longer be fulfilled, the Balkans become peripheral again. In fact, this is nothing to lament. Not only Bulgaria or the Balkans are peripheral. What, for instance, is the position of Denmark? Many other countries enjoy ample prosperity yet are also peripheral. The fact that we are not at the centre of global historical events should not cause low self-esteem. I would say we should aim not to stand in the very centre of history, but to be a prosperous periphery.
It is clear that, in the clash between the great geopolitical players, the Balkans remain on the periphery. Does that, however, continue to be the case when the Balkans are fully integrated into one of the great empires? Do they still remain peripheral, or does something change?
Purely on the map, they are still peripheral. What, for example, are the Balkans to the Ottoman Empire? Naturally, some areas—those forming the hinterland of the capital—cannot, by their very location, be peripheral; but the Morava valley or the Lower and Middle Danube region remain a periphery. The situation is a little different, because during constant conflict the military campaigns pass through that periphery, which therefore has to be equipped with roads, bridges, and so on. I recall that when Sultan Mehmed II began systematic campaigns toward the Western Balkans and the Adriatic in the second half of the fifteenth century, he built all the bridges that until recently were still in use—heavy lorries could not destroy them. Such is, for instance, the bridge at Nevestino on the Kyustendil–Dupnitsa road, which functioned until quite lately. In such cases at least the campaign route cannot be peripheral—it becomes a kind of centre. A similar situation prevails when the Balkans form part of Byzantium: they are still a periphery.
From a modern viewpoint one might think the state is omnipotent, but medieval states, however powerful, were not omnipotent and could not control their entire territory. The Byzantine–Ottoman model dominant in the Balkans presupposes centralism, rule from a single centre. If we had a European model, where decentralisation prevails, we might speak differently. Philosophically, decentralisation is an attempt to overcome precisely that clash between centre and periphery, in which the periphery remains uncontrolled. When a region separates from the centre, it sets off on its own path, following its own requirements; it ceases to be a periphery once it becomes a centre itself.
If your question points to the future—since we are clearly in a process of integration—I would say this: with the proviso that no one can forecast ten or fifteen years ahead, I personally think integration will probably occur. We are moving one or two steps behind the European continent—that is, for us integration still lies ahead, and it is above all mental. We still think with the ideas of the National Revival, which aim more to separate us from our neighbour than to unite us. Those views obviously have to be overcome, just as the French and Germans overcame centuries of enmity. The Balkans too will probably follow that path of overcoming historical conflicts—technological time is needed for it to happen. There are, of course, forces that pull backwards. Some people make their way by generating hatred toward a neighbour, recalling historical moments that stir hostility in the present. That must not happen—I am firmly convinced history does not repeat itself. What repeat are our patterns of thought, which is not bad, but history itself cannot replicate identically.
We agree that overall we are heading toward a more positive scenario. Looking back over the past hundred years, we can actually see steady “improvement” compared with the past, yet that process will likely take a long time still. It seems, however, that in historical terms what hinders the Balkans is that they never experienced the Enlightenment. That appears to obstruct the very comprehension of the idea of a “social contract.”
We could go even farther back in time: the Balkans also missed what Europe went through during the Middle Ages. In principle our region has never led Europe’s development; it has always stood at an intermediate level, with various nuances, of course. Mountainous Albania is very backward, mountainous Montenegro likewise; but coastal Albania is highly developed, and coastal Montenegro as well, and so on. Overall, though, we cannot be leaders—we have not gone through many historical epochs. As for the Enlightenment, Romanticism seems to suit us better.
Regarding the social contract—in its Balkan variant it is rather more rudimentary, for thought here places the institution at the centre, considering it more important than society and individuals. That Byzantine-Ottoman model—putting the institution in the centre—is, in my view, unproductive and should be overcome in the future.
That model, by all appearances, worked well in those times!
Yes, that model worked in the era of the national revolutions, when what you study and learn has to tell you: “You are different from the Serbs, you are different from the Romanians, you are different from the Greeks, you are different from the Turks!” Yet when we sit together at the same table to eat and drink, we realise we are not different at all; we like the same things, and in practice no profound differences exist—rather, our upbringing teaches us to be different. Unfortunately, in our region the notion that the state is everything is still quite strong. That is why we find it hard to integrate into the European Union, because here the idea of absolute sovereignty prevails—a notion that is essentially Balkan-Revivalist. In other words, we are reluctant to surrender any part of the sovereignty that underpins European integration..
It is evident that the idea of an all-embracing leader has never been alien to Balkan societies.
Yes. In practice, anyone who can persuade society that he is its saviour and will lead it to some new transformation—keeping the notion of an ever-alive “new revolution”—will succeed. Yet in fact we are not talking about a revolution, but about continual self-improvement, at least in my humble view, because revolutions mean living constantly amid permanent change, and people cannot endure that. Historically, for example, Simeon (893–927) ought to be considered great, both from a straightforward historical perspective and from a Bulgarian national one, because he conducted incessant wars—though no one is concerned with what war meant for the man who had to go and fight. I often cite the tale “Saint George’s Miracle with the Bulgarian,” which shows the scale of wartime losses: “From one village,” it says, “fifty of us set out to fight the Hungarians; only two came back.” I have never encountered a legend of popular glorification of Simeon, whereas his son Peter (927–969), who does not stand out especially in our historical consciousness, was canonised by the Church and is more esteemed by the people, because he secured peace. The people value peace more than the permanent warfare offered by the “great” ruler.
Here we touch on something else: professional historians are in a very disadvantageous position vis-à-vis public opinion, because the public loves to be presented with heroic scenes, while anyone engaged in documentary research knows that documents do not reveal heroism—they reveal everyday life, and everyday life cannot be heroic. We picture, for instance, the assault on Çatalca as some enthusiastic charge, but we do not imagine those lads from Yambol and Elhovo wading through half a metre of water and mud while they are mown down like flies; nor do we imagine how many fell in the attack on Adrianople. Society thirsts for heroism, yet we cannot provide it when what we read in documents and other historical sources reveals no heroism at all. In that sense, Bulgarian society still has a journey to make before it understands that history is a science, not a panegyric.
Obviously this thirst for heroism is also a direct result of generations of historians who wrote history with an educational purpose.
Yes—Paissii’s legacy is exactly that. Bulgarian society has not yet overcome the stage that all nations should have left behind in the twentieth century with the rise of new scholarly schools; it still believes history must glorify. That is why false mythologems are created—even in some modern history textbooks. A telling example is the “bundle-of-sticks” mythologem, which is totally un-Bulgarian and whose origin is well known: who invented it, where it was taken from, and where it was inserted—it appears in the first history textbook for the Plovdiv Boys’ Gymnasium in 1882, and it is in fact an Aesop fable. Yet Bulgarians do not understand themselves as a nation of will, a nation of the future, or a nation of community, but as a historical nation—one that must have a common historical past, which can only be heroic. That points to an un-outlived Romanticism, an un-completed National Revival, in my opinion.
We noted that the Balkans cannot be a leading force in Europe’s historical development and even lag behind. A telling example is the absence of separatist processes of the kind we see in Western Europe. How would you explain manifestations of Balkan separatism at certain historical moments, and do you think its long-term failure is again due to adopting foreign ideas wholesale—without the political elite or society showing their own initiative and innovation?
Because the future is hard to predict, we cannot know whether this backwardness might one day turn into an advantage. A drawback of being a periphery is that it readily adopts foreign models. In the Balkans—and in Bulgaria—two long-term models have prevailed: the Byzantine and the Ottoman. Both are undeniably statist. Consequently, Bulgarians absorbed from each—first in a state epoch, later in a non-state epoch—the notion that the state can only be centralised and ruled from a single centre. It is no accident that Bulgaria alone embraced the Greco-Roman concept of a capital city; the Western Balkans had none and are, in that sense, more Central-European than we are. Hence, unlike Central and Western Europe, we face a clash between reality and the model: reality demands one thing, the model blocks it.
Reality calls for separation from the centre: communications are weak, instant linkage of regions is impossible, and they can develop only once they differentiate themselves—that is essentially the idea behind European separatism, differentiation for local development. When local development reaches a certain level, one can move toward absolutism—that is, toward reunification. Here that mechanism is broken: centralism has long dominated because of imported state models, and separatism appears only in moments of state crisis and is viewed as negative, as something that violates the model. Unsurprisingly, in Bulgarian discourse separatism meets extreme disapproval; it is thought to threaten the unitary state, whereas Germans or Spaniards, for example, regard it as normal—they have lived with it. In our region the external statist model still prevails, hampering the much-proclaimed regional autonomy and its realisation. Whenever autonomy with local decision-making is mentioned in Bulgaria, it is always linked to some form of political separatism.
The future is unpredictable, but I hope that within fifteen or twenty years integration will be complete. Some Western Balkan regions are so developed that the issue hardly arises; others are so backward that integration is urgently needed. There is also fear of, say, Albanian irredentism, which is utterly misplaced; even if all Albanians united, they would not exceed the average size of a normal Balkan state—indeed they would be smaller than Bulgaria, far smaller than Serbia, only slightly larger than Croatia, and so forth. Even if that happened, it would not be so terrible.
Because Albanians—and people linked with Islam in general—were mentioned, we would like to hear your opinion on the great civilizational clash of the Middle Ages, if we can call it that: the conflict between Christianity and Islam. How do you see the role of the Balkans in this conflict?
The Balkans are once again a periphery; they are not at the centre of the civilizational clash, which I am convinced did occur. The outcome of that clash depended on which of the two civilizations—each founded on its religion—had developed the greater capacity to defend itself. The Christian world lost at that moment because it was too comfortable, too unready for self-sacrifice, for things to turn out otherwise. We are again on the periphery and not at the centre of this clash. It might never have happened if the geopolitical line had not shifted. Had Turkic peoples continued to arrive from the north-Pontic steppe—peoples who were not Muslim—things would have gone so far that they would have settled, infiltrated, been Christianised and adapted, as happened with the Cumans, Pechenegs and Uzes. The point is—and this proves how interconnected we all are, now as in the past—that Byzantium lost the front at the Straits. If it had not, we would not be speaking of Islam in the Balkans at all today. We would be talking about dispersed Cumans and their adaptation and Christianisation, for which we have plenty of evidence, but we would not be talking about a civilizational clash.
On the other hand, if the Balkan states—especially those with mixed populations—were richer, the problem would also have been solved very quickly. Poverty, as is well known, breeds fundamentalism. If Bulgaria could invest in the mixed or Muslim areas and become a country acceptable to live in rather than something to flee, then there would be no problem at all. Albania and Bosnia, I believe, are the key states in terms of the Islam-Christianity clash. I read former Turkish Prime minister Davutoğlu’s book on strategic depth quite carefully, and I think that if Turkey has any Islamic plans for the Balkans, they are linked primarily to Albania and Bosnia, where Turkish influence is clearly well received. Once again, everything hinges on what will happen in future—and to a great extent on the development of Turkey itself, the biggest player in the Balkans, and on what form of Islam it will adopt.
It is noticeable that the Balkan states—or their parts that belong to the peninsula—roughly maintain a balance of populations between five and ten million. European Turkey has, as far as I know, eight million inhabitants—about as many as Bulgaria; Romania’s Balkan part has roughly the same; the Serbs appear the most numerous because of the densely populated Morava corridor; united, the Albanians number about five to six million; the Greeks are approximately as many as the Serbs. Thus, a demographic balance and parity are maintained, showing that the Balkans distribute their otherwise motley population quite evenly. Much will depend on the future course of Turkish Islam.
Do you think current political trends are reflected in the historical narrative that is being promoted today?
History has always mirrored contemporary views of the past—there is no doubt in my mind. In the nineteenth century people looked at history one way; in the twentieth century, another; in the twenty-first, they will almost certainly view it differently again. History is not a technological science, of course, yet technological development matters greatly. If the twenty-first century truly becomes the age of hydrogen fuel, as some predict, our view of the world’s geopolitical situation will change: Saudi Arabia will lose its pedestal as a wealthy state, Iran too, and other priorities will emerge—something that will probably alter our entire outlook.
If we, as historians, had written a world history thirty or forty years ago, China would have appeared somewhere on the periphery; today it occupies a far more central role, preserving millennia-old statist traditions, thanks chiefly to the present geopolitical landscape. In every case, what happens in the present influences the historical narrative. Even in Bulgaria, issues were treated one way during the “Revival Process” and quite differently afterwards.
Another topic currently being bandied about in the public sphere is migration, which is treated as a unique process whose historical dimensions— even within the Balkans—seem to be forgotten.
In my view, migration becomes “unique” only when there is an established frontier and that frontier is furnished with physical barriers; only then does it turn into a phenomenon. When no fixed border exists, as in the Middle Ages, migration is relatively free: some people flee from Bulgaria into Byzantium, others cross the border seasonally. Once border fences are erected, neither option is possible, and migration therefore turns into a problem.
There is also another issue: the world’s demographic imbalance. Because the marriage pattern in part of the world differs from Europe’s, and because Europe’s population is ageing, we witness something like historical osmosis along the boundary between the two worlds—one undergoing demographic over-pressure, the other a demographic crisis. In that sense migration is entirely natural and to be expected.
Exactly the same thing happened in the mid-fourteenth century—though I do not wish to force analogies, as the situation was different. Even so, in the mid-1300s the Turkish-Muslim world, relying on natural population growth, was not hit as hard by pandemics, whereas the Christian world—especially the Balkans—suffered severely. A demographic imbalance arose, and without it I personally cannot explain the Ottoman advance. In the fifteenth century the historian Doukas put it plainly, though he is seldom quoted: “The Turks became so many that they are now more than we are.” His statement should be accepted as credible, for he was on Lesbos with the Gattilusio family and saw events at first hand.
Thus migration is not a modern phenomenon. Some people lacking historical perspective imagine this is happening for the first time. The truth is that migrations have always existed, though their impact on societies and states has varied.
Precisely in this context we would like to ask what impact, in the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period, the entry of Islamic culture through Muslim incursions had on perceptions of “the other,” the outsider. Do you see a difference in how medieval Balkan society viewed, say, the Cumans—whose migrations lacked ideological and religious charge? That ideological charge is probably also behind present-day attitudes toward Muslim migration. In China, for example, migrations likewise occur, yet they draw far less attention.
Yes—the latter cases are rather different. In both America and China migration cannot take place the way it can from Asia into Europe, along the vertical axis of the geographic landscape. Chinese cannot migrate into Inner Mongolia, nor toward the sea—their movement is internal, just as it is in America. Some people explain Europe’s forward surge in earlier centuries by its ability to offload population pressure through migration. If, say, Finland suffered a potato failure and famine, the population could board ships and sail to America, relieving the strain, whereas nothing of the sort was possible in China.
It is one thing when people arrive in your territory as shamanists: they can be Christianised easily, even in the first generation. Shamanism is rooted in folk culture and oral tradition, not in a written text, so the clash always proves unfavourable to the traditional faith. When Christianity and Islam collide, two world religions with written cultures confront each other. The Islam brought by newcomers is hard to assimilate, and those newcomers are equally hard to Christianise.
What you say makes us wonder to what extent what we view as historical reconstruction is actually the product of an ideology propagated by former rulers (and preserved in written sources), and what, by contrast, really happened on the lower level where direct contact occurred between newcomers and the autochthonous population. It seems to us that at least two very distinct layers can be observed for the early phase of the Ottoman conquest. From the Muslim side, on the one hand, there existed an ideology that embraced the idea of holy war in Islam—an ideology that found its counter-thesis in a Christian context. Yet on the everyday level the people who settled in Christian territory and interacted with the local population—if they were Islamised at all—followed rather a form of so-called “popular Islam,” perhaps closer to “crypto-shamanism” than to doctrinal Islam. In this sense it is worth studying both layers of that contact, or conflict, separately; otherwise we end up with a one-sided picture that is not universally valid for the process.
On the other hand, Orthodoxy—which was pervasive in the lands invaded by the Muslim newcomers—seems to have created a more favourable environment for the spread of Islam. In the West, by contrast, in Catholic Central Europe, once the Ottoman incursions became more permanent, a mechanism was set in motion at the everyday level to create a military frontier. There the clash with the Catholic world generated a completely different ideological foundation, which is why the sixteenth century unfolded as an entirely ideologised form of confrontation.
These issues warrant very thorough and specialised investigation. I shall try to systematise my views in three points. Orthodoxy failed to provide an adequate ideological response to the Islamic invasion for one very simple reason. In my opinion the responsibility lies with the ideologues of Hesychasm—Gregory Palamas, Gregoras and others—who preached an idea expressed roughly as follows: “Just as the Emperor does not go himself to behead criminals but hires executioners, so God punishes us for our sins by sending us trials, and the Ottomans are precisely such a trial.” In other words, one must accept the Ottoman advance with humility, endure it, and then be spiritually reborn; becoming a truer Christian, one may continue to live. Shamanism is attested in the early Ottoman milieu from the very beginning of the fourteenth century, when they first set foot on the Balkan Peninsula. In the letters of Thomas Magister the Ottomans’ first landing on Balkan soil—as allies of the Catalans—is recorded, and he describes purely shamanistic practices among them. Later John Kantakouzenos, who knew them well, likewise speaks of such practices. No successful conqueror in the world has destroyed everything. Halil İnalcık was right to call the Ottoman conquest conservative. He cites the Arianiti family, who led a revolt only five or six years before the earliest known Ottoman land survey (defter) of the Sanjak of Arvanid was compiled—yet that register shows the family granted the revenues of a very large ziamet, as though it were forgotten that they had recently spearheaded an uprising against the Ottomans. The Ottomans were successful conquerors in the sense that they did not demolish existing structures; on the contrary, they adopted, improved and made them efficient, and thus achieved much of their conquest. This was not merely a military takeover: for Bulgarian territory, for instance, we cannot point to even one pitched battle. What Stefan Zahariev writes about the Rhodope Mountains might be taken as evidence, but it is largely legendary. In the strict sense there was practically no battle at all. The mechanism of conquest in the Bulgarian lands was different: it consisted in appropriating the local heritage through its integration. This is a striking example of how a professional historian states something that society flatly refuses to accept.
Here, however, we collide with another issue. For a long time historiography stressed integration, while the darker side of conquest—forced seizure of territory, massacres, and so on—remained in the background. Perhaps the moment has come to strike a balance and present a more even-handed picture of the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans, with both of its faces.
Of course—no conquest can occur without bloodshed and violence; that is something natural. We may set aside, for now, the problem of how events were perceived differently by different observers, and thus assessed differently in various historical sources. Nor need we mention that later folk memory and popular mythology interpret the events in yet another way. Moreover, work with historical documentation can never yield conclusions about heroism. There is no room here for mutually exclusive theses: obviously we must seek balance in order to craft a more truthful historical narrative.
If you allow, let us return to the clash between Christianity and Islam and to the question of whether it becomes more consciously felt once, as you have noted, permanent frontiers are established. When a clearly defined political border exists, does it not shape perceptions of “the other,” the different one? Is that not precisely when the differences become more fundamental?
I agree completely. This is an excellent example from which we can draw historical lessons for the present. I recall a telling episode in the memoirs of Professor Balabanov: while a student in Vienna, he wanted to return to Macedonia, which at that time was still within the Ottoman Empire. The Ottoman consulate in Vienna was closed, so he went to an Austrian greengrocer and asked him to stamp his tezkiere (travel pass). Balabanov then recounts how he was welcomed by the Turkish border guards, who let him cross without any problem and even told him they looked forward to his return. In other words, they did not care at all whose stamp was in the document; such absence of concern made peaceful coexistence possible when no rigid border existed.
Once the barbed-wire fence (klion) went up, everything changed and perceptions of “us” and “the other” became ever sharper. I would even say that the psychology of the fence surpasses religious opposition once it shifts onto the plane of “we versus you.”
Actually, don’t you think we are taking a reality from the sixteenth century—in Ottoman terms the period when the very idea and concept of empire is fully realised, the empire becomes Sunni, borders acquire a more finished form, it begins to be clear exactly where “the other” is—while at a lower level this is the era of the so-called “confessionalisation” process, observed both in the West and here—and trying to project that reality back onto the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries?
That is a very common mistake: to project today’s notions onto the past—today’s patriotism into the past, and so on. We wonder why Stefan Zahariev is not troubled by the capture of Dorkovo, whereas we are somehow irritated by the way it was taken. Returning to the start of our conversation: we are accustomed to being within an imperial structure. That is our mindset. It stems from the fact that for a very long time we really were part of empires. On the one hand we dislike Byzantium, the Ottoman Empire, Russia, and, in more recent times, America; yet we still adopt their developmental models. Psychology changes with difficulty; it is quite conservative. In any case, that is what great historical craftsmanship consists of: being able to penetrate the spirit of an era rather than “modernise” it.
At the end of our conversation, we would like to ask for your forecast about the future. How does a medieval historian see what lies ahead?
On a global scale, much depends on what the world’s main fuel will be, as I already mentioned. If it is hydrogen, as some claim, then over the next twenty or thirty years the world will change radically—the Middle East will no longer be a centre of financial power, and so forth. I would like to see a more optimistic scenario come true as well: the Balkans will integrate, overcome their differences, apply the French-German model of reconciliation; little by little we will stop hating this group or that, and religious affiliations will become normal in the modern sense of the word. I see no other realistic path, because the Western Balkans possess relatively limited potential and Europe can integrate them. In that integration it is essential to leave behind the Revival-era notions of “us versus them.”
It is also crucial that the states survive—whether Bosnia, Macedonia, and Kosovo will endure is an open question at the moment. If those states do not survive, a tectonic shift will occur and integration will probably be delayed, though not cancelled entirely. For us Bulgarians, the optimistic scenario includes overcoming negativism, for it seems to me we suffer more from pessimism than from any real evil. And let us not forget that we are approaching the end of the “Moses cycle.” When that cycle ends, I believe things will change considerably, because by then a third or fourth generation will have grown up in a free environment. In that sense I can say with conviction that, on the whole, I am a realistic optimist about the future.