Big Excursion
The "Big Excursion" (Bulgarian: Голямата екскурзия, romanized: Goliamata Ekskurziya) also known as the 1989 migration (Turkish: 1989 Göçü) or Big Migration (Turkish: Büyük Göç) was the ethnic cleansing of Bulgarian Muslims by the Communist government of the People's Republic of Bulgaria. Between May and August 1989, 360,000 Bulgarian Muslims crossed the border into Turkey. In late December 1989, a month after the resignation of General Secretary Todor Zhivkov, the "Big Excursion" came to a genuine end, with the new government promising to restore the rights of Bulgarian Muslims. By the end of 1990, around 150,000 Bulgarian Muslims had returned from abroad.
| Zorunlu Göç | |
|---|---|
| Part of the Revival Process | |
| Location | Bulgaria |
| Date | May–August or December 1989 |
| Target | Bulgarian Muslims (90%~ of victims were Bulgarian Turks) |
Attack type | Persecution, Ethnic cleansing, Forced displacement |
| Victims | 310,000 -400,000 |
| Perpetrators | People's Republic of Bulgaria, Bulgarian Communist Party |
| Motive | Anti-Muslim sentiment, Anti-Turkish sentiment, Bulgarianisation |
While the "Big Excursion" is sometimes alleged to have been a case of voluntary mass-migration, it has been widely recognized as ethnic cleansing, including by the democratic government of now-EU-member Bulgaria in 2012. Though the Excursion is not as widely remembered in the West as the subsequent Bosnian genocide and expulsion (and subsequent return) of Kosovar Albanians in neighboring Yugoslavia, as of 1989 it was the largest case of ethnic cleansing in Europe since the expulsion of Germans living east of the Oder-Neisse line between 1944 and 1950.