love songs

The article comments on the denial of the Ottoman heritage in the Bulgarian culture and the marginalization of the love poetry during the Bulgarian National Revival. Subject to the observations are song books from the past three decades before 1878, containing Turkish songs printed in Cyrillic alphabet. On The grounds of factology we can summarize, that under the pressure of national ideology the reception of love songs is depreciated and the role of the Turkish literature and vocabulary is denied radically in the cultural transfer in the Balkans in the 19th century. The reprinted "most used" Turkish folk songs are a testament to the multi-faced and multi-voiced Bulgarian Revival period; they emphasize the conceptual significance of the regional and marginal in the genre preferences during the specific political and socio-cultural context.

The paper examines songs with love and erotic content, dating back from the so-called National Revival Period. They used to be visible part of the popular culture of Bulgaria and the Southeastern Europe region in initial decades of the Modern Bulgarian statehood. These songs were originally written in Bulgarian and in Turkish, but with Cyrillic alphabet. Turkish ones are introduced for the first time in Bulgarian Literary History Studies. They were taken from books by Manol Lazarov, Petko Slaveykov, and by an unidentified author with initials K.S.M. This popular literature genre had a complex biography, following to some extent the ideological planning of the Bulgarian society and the social trajectory of the ideas of the nation, particular for that period. Initially, they were well accepted, so they gained vast popularity. Such a positive reception was particular for the period, when they were not experienced as non-matching to the emerging national ideology. Coincidingly with the rising of Bulgarian nationalism, their popularity decreased and they accumulated certain criticism, so in the beginning of the XX c. they were marginalized. In the last decades of XIX s., according to the changes of the ideological climate in Bulgaria, some of them were reinterpreted in a patriotic key.