The Turkish Minority in Bulgaria 1878 - 1908

During the 1988-89 academic year I took the course "Nationalism in European History", taught by Prof. L. Vos in the European Studies Programme at K. U. Leuven. This course turned out to be very interesting and I decided to write my M. A. thesis on "Greek Nationalism" under the supervision of Prof. L. Vos. Later, I decided to continue working with him on nationalism, and we started to look for an interesting Ph. D. subject on this topic. In April 1989, we asked Prof. U. Vermeulen``s opinion. The latter gave me a list of Turkish newspaper published in Bulgaria, and suggested that I should work on the Turkish Minority in Bulgaria during the Principality period, throught the study of Turkish newspapers. This was the beginning of the story.