Appearing on TVP WORLD’s show How We Got Here, Dr Bruno Surdel – senior fellow of the Centre for International Relations – traced the origins and consequences of the 1989 “Big Excursion,” when Todor Zhivkov’s Communist regime compelled Bulgaria’s Turkish minority to “vacation” across the Turkish border—effectively Europe’s largest act of ethnic cleansing at the Cold War’s end.
Dr Surdel outlined centuries of Bulgarian-Turkish coexistence and conflict, the rise of Zhivkov’s nationalist communism, and the muted international response that allowed the operation to proceed without mass killings but with lasting trauma. He stressed that property losses, cultural suppression and demographic shock remain under-researched in Western historiography.
