UKRAINIANS’ VIEW OF THE BULGARIANS: PERCEPTION OF THE MIGRANTS’ COMMUNITY ON THE BASE OF UKRAINIAN SCIENTIFIC PUBLICATIONS

Abstract

The article provides an analysis of a verbal image of the Bulgarian migrants in the Crimea, Pryazovia, and the region of Kropyvnytskyi. It is a case study of the scientific publications of V. Lobachevskyi (19th c.), O. Muzychenko (20th c.), and field research carried out by N. Krasko and S. Proskurova (21st c.) The village of Vilshanka (Olshanka in Bulgarian) has been the first Bulgarian colony within the territory of the current Ukraine, that had been formed due to the migration of Bulgarians from Alphathar (a settlement close by Silistra) and as a result of settling the left bank of the Syniukha river in the last half of the 18th c. Then the Bulgarians from several regions of their mother country migrated actively to Bessarabia (the region of Odessa is a part of it), Pryazovia and the Crimean peninsula. It is expected that the Ukrainian scholars have been interested in traditions, daily life and national mentality of the Bulgarians. The home-born intellectuals shared gladly their impressions of intercommunion with the compatriots, which had been representing another ethnic culture and bearing another view of the world. In particular, Volodymyr Lobachevsky, the priest of Vilshanka, whose curacy had been including the Bulgarian community in the last half of the 19th c., seriously focused on the Bulgarian lifestyle in his local studies. He emphasized some typical personality traits of his church members, the most attractive for their religious advisor. Oleksandr Muzychenko, the ethnographer, not only described closely rituals and everyday life of the Crimean Bulgarians in his regional study, but also outlined some peculiarities of their interactions – inside and outside the ethnic community. Scholars in the 21st c. in their studies of the Bulgarian language island don’t propose their own exclusive view, they rather take care of asking effective questions in the interview, so that the members of the Bulgarian ethnolingual community can characterize themselves and their people in the answers. For example, Natalia Krasko focuses on the death issues; she places an emphasis on the attitude of the senior and junior generation of the Bulgarians to the relative’s transit from this life to the next. Svitlana Proskurova has been accenting specifically the questions related to preserving the Bulgarian ethnos, language, and traditions in the foreign-language (Ukrainian and Russian) surrounding in the present days.