site.btaTurkish Photographers to Present Images of 1989 Expulsion of Over 360,000 Muslims from Bulgaria

An exhibition by Turkish photographers Behic Gunalan and Suleyman Akman will be presented as part of the Fotofabrika 2025 festival, the organizers said on Tuesday. The exhibition, titled Banishment, will open on June 3 at the National Reconciliation Exposition (garrison shooting range) in Sofia's South Park.

Banishment will be shown in Bulgaria for the first time and features images from two different waves of displacement. Some of the photographs document the 1989 forced migration of Bulgarian Muslims by the Communist government of the People's Republic of Bulgaria. In total, around 360,000 Bulgarian Muslims crossed the border into Turkiye. In 2012, the Bulgarian Parliament officially declared this event “a form of ethnic cleansing carried out by the totalitarian regime,” the organizers noted.

The exhibition also presents a rarely seen historical perspective, photographs from 1969 depicting a previous wave of emigration that has largely remained absent from public memory.  

This dialogue between the two Turkish photographers - Behic Gunalan, who captured the 1989 expulsion of ethnic Turks from Bulgaria, and Suleyman Akman, with his photographs from 1969 - is described by the organizers as both a major challenge and a powerful invitation for public reflection.

A brief discussion will follow at the Toplocentrala Centre for Contemporary Art. According to the organizers, “this exhibition does not negotiate with the past - it brings it out of silence.”

The photographs are part of the Visual Archive of Assimilation, an open project founded by Zeynep Zafer and Diana Ivanova with the mission to collect images documenting the assimilation and repression of ethnic Turks in Bulgaria. The archive aims to build a visual memory where there has long been only silence.