Meglena Zlatkova
Pages 109-130
DOI: 10.5840/cultura201411217
ABSTRACT
This paper discusses inheritance after migration on both sides of the Bulgarian-Turkish border. A specific approach to the (re-)settled people and moving objects, inheritance and patrimonialisation of the movement, instrumentalized by the (state) border, is applied in a comparative way to two specific groups: the Bulgarians from Aegean Thrace, or the so called “Thracian Bulgarians” resettled after the Balkan wars, and the Turks who were born in Bulgaria and resettled in Turkey during the several migration waves in the twentieth century in two localities – Tsarevo, Bulgaria and Edirne, Turkey. In this study, heritage is thought of as inheritance from an activist position, as ritualised and everyday life practices, as reactualisation of meanings, network of heirs and circulating objects – values, symbols, knowledge and memory. The paper analyses practices of crossing the border of heirs as: as tourists, as explorers of their origins, as neighbours inhabiting border territories. Nowadays, on an institutional level, they are engaged in developing projects that aim at transborder collaboration and in exhibiting cultural heritage with a focus on the levels of cultural diversity in the places close to the border.