Coping with Strangeness: Adaptive Strategies of “Returnees”
Coping with Strangeness: Adaptive Strategies of “Returnees”

Summary/Abstract: The political and economic transformations, as well as the “national revival” in the republics of the former USSR, has resulted in sweeping “ethnic migrations” during the early 1990s. Many hundred thousand people decided to “return” to their “historical homelands”. They were confronted with a multitude of problems in their new places. One problem is the “strangeness”1 ascribed to them by the local population. The present study focusses on the Crimean Bulgarians, some of whom moved from Kazakhstan into Bulgaria. It aims at presenting some of the strategies that resettlers are developing through their interactions with the local population in order to cope with the strangeness in the new situation2 . The study is based on observations and unstructured interviews with both migrants and the local host population at the end of 1996, as well as on articles on the issue published in Bulgarian newspapers during the 1990-1997 period…

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