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Comment by pvg | Hacker News Reader

The Balkan mentality, greatly twisted in the half millennium of Ottoman rule, does not help much either.

I don't think this sort of ethnic essentialism is at all necessary to explain Bulgaria's current problems. It seems especially misplaced given Bulgarian Turks and muslims were subjected to ethnic cleansing quite recently, in the decade before the horrors in neighbouring Yugoslavia.

Petko Slaveykov's famous line 'не сме народ, а мърша' was written in 1875. The fact that it's becoming more literally true than he meant it is hardly the fault of the Ottoman Empire.

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For those who don't speak Bulgarian (like me), google translate of "не сме народ, а мърша" is "we are not a people, but a carcass". Though I'm sure a native speaker would probably have a better translation.

It's good enough for government work! I didn't translate it because it can come off as far too inflammatory - it happens to be a line from a well-known poem by one of the founders of modern Bulgarian written literature.

That attitude is quite common in Eastern and central Europe. When I, as a Brit, lived in Hungary I often heard Hungarians apologising for the “Hungarian mentality” or “hungarian thinking” when something went wrong or appeared ill-conceived.

Absolutely. Here's a Bulgarian example

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bay_Ganyo

But despite getting the works 500 years ago, it's more than a little silly to blame it on the Turks.

> it's more than a little silly to blame it on the Turks.

Not somebody who would be ready to unconditionally defend Bulgarians, but here I don't agree at all.

The "Turks" weren't there "500 years ago" they were there for more than 500 years and were there even 200 years ago, and during these centuries all the "non-Turks" lived in the constant very strong discrimination, across the huge empire that included a big part of Mediterranean:

https://cdn.britannica.com/89/4789-050-B6176F52/Expansion-Ot...

It's not an excuse but a fact. I know it's today fashionable to ignore centuries lasting discrimination of huge swaths of population, but it's wrong.

they were there for more than 500 years

I think that qualifies you for not a 'they'. That's an 'us'.

Yeah not sure of of it's historically unique but 100 years ago, the Ottoman, Austro Hungarian empires fell apart. If it weren't for the communists the Russian Empire would have. And yet it didn't last yet another 70 years. And the British Empire broke up over the mid twenties century.

That said the Ottoman Empire seems like a badly run affair for a long time.

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