Bulgaria lives with an ancient and persistent problem: its identity has been shaped less by an effort to understand what it is than by a stubborn flight from what it fears it might turn out to be. Since the late eighteenth century, the national imagination has developed as a project of distancing – from the Orient, from the Empire, from the “backward,” from everything perceived as an obstacle to the longed-for integration into the modern West. At the time, such thinking was unavoidable; all Balkan nationalisms were born in opposition to a vast political structure. What distinguishes the Bulgarian case, however, is that this negation not only survived long after Liberation but hardened into its central psychological axis.

For this very reason, our historical memory contains entire layers that we prefer to consign to mythology. A typical example is an episode transmitted as a semi-legend in various versions: a Bulgarian woman, attacked in her home by two Turks with the intent to rape her, kills them on the spot with a flintlock rifle left behind by her late husband. The next morning, the town erupts in anxiety and anger – some prepare to seek vengeance, others wait to see which way the crowd will turn. At that moment, the qadi appears before the house and calmly, almost matter-of-factly, reminds them of the law: attempted rape is punishable by death, regardless of the perpetrator. The woman is not a criminal; she has acted in accordance with the law. The story ends there, without dramatic aftermath.

This small, almost anecdotal episode reveals more about the complexity of Ottoman reality than the familiar myths drilled into us for years at school. It neither denies violence nor erases tragedy, but it shows that the Empire possessed a legal framework intended to regulate relations among different communities. Above all, it underscores something the Bulgarian national imagination has long trained itself to ignore: that for centuries we lived within a complex social organism in which brute force and law existed side by side – and where the latter was not a mere fiction.

From here a deeper question emerges: why do we refuse to acknowledge this complexity? The answer is relatively straightforward. The Bulgarian national project, as it takes shape from Paisius onward, does not seek a positive self-description; it seeks distance. For two centuries, Bulgarian identity has been constructed through negation – we are not Turks, not Orientals, not Balkan, not “like them.” This is understandable given the historical conditions, but it inevitably turns our entire modern history into a struggle against a past that cannot be erased. The inhabitants of this country begin to treat large portions of their own past as a defect that must be removed in order for the “real,” “European” Bulgaria to emerge.

This internal frustration carries heavy consequences. Nations built on negation tend toward insecurity, hysterical gestures, and chronic suspicion of the “other.” Bulgaria is no exception. Ethnic relations, instead of resting on the idea of equal citizenship, become a permanent zone of tension, because the national framework itself is defined in a way that casts suspicion on anything that recalls the “Oriental” past.

When this mindset migrates into politics, the outcome is predictable: a series of historical catastrophes. Bulgaria – a country with limited resources and a fragile international position – repeatedly attempts to realize its identity through expansion, through “restoring justice,” through forceful solutions that inevitably bring it into conflict with its neighbors. Thus come the failures of the Balkan Wars, the tragic ambitions of the First World War, the misjudgments of the Second. Even the so-called “Revival Process” represents the final, painful spasm of the same national impulse: a desperate attempt to eliminate that “Oriental residue” which certain ideologues have long claimed stood in the way of Bulgaria becoming a “true” European state.

If we set mythology aside, however, it becomes clear that the Ottoman legacy is not a black hole but part of Bulgaria’s very substance. The Empire, especially in its stronger centuries, was not the monster late-nineteenth-century collective memory invented. It possessed a legal system that granted specific rights to non-Muslim communities; a land-tenure regime that allowed peasants more mobility and choice than in many Western European regions; and forms of religious tolerance that, in certain periods, would have seemed unthinkable in the West. These are verifiable facts, grounded in archives and scholarship rather than national textbooks.

Acknowledging these facts does not mean forgetting repression, taxation, violence, or war. It means accepting that history is not a moral fairy tale but a complex and often contradictory reality. Bulgaria cannot become a modern state while attempting to erase half of its own past. That half – long described as “slavery” – was in fact a prolonged, dramatic, yet not unambiguous period that shaped culture, everyday life, language, habits, and even the temperament of the people. To deny it is to deny ourselves.

The paradox is that Bulgarian society has already shown that it can overcome its ethnic demons. Twice in its recent history – during the rescue of part of the Jewish community in the 1940s and in the avoidance of civil war after 1989 – it acted with a maturity that exceeded its Balkan reflexes. These moments were not accidental. They indicate that beneath layers of historical nervousness lies a capacity for civic self-awareness capable of moving beyond ethnic automatism.

If Bulgaria has a future, it will not be a replay of the nineteenth century. The national project in its old form is exhausted; it can generate nothing beyond revanchism and recurring tension, because it rests on negation. What is needed is a new project – civic rather than ethnic; grounded in the rule of law and equal rights rather than blood-based mythologies; a project in which the past is no longer a factory of eternal enemies but a field for mature understanding.

The path toward such a shift requires an internal effort: allowing ourselves to view the Ottoman legacy soberly. Not with enthusiasm, but not with hatred either. To examine it as part of our own history – a legacy more complex and less demonic than we are inclined to admit. Bulgaria needs this not for the sake of the Empire, but for its own. As long as half of our historical layers are treated as shameful, our identity will remain partially amputated. And a people with an amputated past inevitably inherits an amputated future.

The real challenge is not to “embrace” the Ottoman legacy, but to stop waging war against it. To acknowledge that it is part of us – not as a stain to be erased, but as a layer to be understood. Only then can Bulgaria move from an identity built on flight to one grounded in understanding. And only then can we imagine a future in which the “other” ceases to be a threat and becomes a fellow citizen.