NOT your typical expat residing in Sofia, Tolga Esmer has been visiting Bulgaria regularly since 2000. He originally came to learn the language, being a student of Ottoman and Bulgarian Studies. "I enrolled in an intensive language-learning course on a FLAS summer grant. I met with an excellent individual tutor four hours everyday and worked really hard." His momentum in Bulgaria slowed down as he began his PhD programme at the University of Chicago, "because I then had to focus on my classwork and studying Ottoman Turkish, the official, hybrid language of the Ottoman state." The language, although now "dead," is a hybrid of Turkish, Arabic, and Persian written in the Arabic script.  With a strong desire to learn the languages and the history of the Balkan region, Tolga spends quite a bit of time buried in the National Library in Sofia archives and finding time to interact with people.

Tolga's initial curiosity in Ottoman and Turkish history arose from what he describes as "my own identity crises and curiosity in my family's heritage." Tolga's parents came from Turkey in the 1960s to pursue graduate degrees, but his parents stayed in America and never returned to Turkey as initially planned. Tolga therefore took the opportunity to study his roots. By taking classes in Ottoman, Middle Eastern, and Byzantine history, Tolga says, "I began to think of Ottoman history and the history of its successor states in Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Central Asia, and the Middle East more seriously and critically."  While attending college, Tolga began to sincerely contemplate learning Turkish and other languages in order to become a scholar in Ottoman history.

By 1998 Tolga was enrolled in a Masters programme in Middle Eastern Languages and Civilizations at the University of Washington in Seattle. He spent a year living in Istanbul, studying the language and the people. "I began to make sense of my own past, and made the decision to pursue a career in academia. Of course, while my interests in Ottoman history were beginning to shape into a career path, the world was shocked by all of the instability and ethnic violence taking place in the Balkan nation-states after the fall of communism. All of these phenomena were intertwined with the problematic national historiographies and national memories of the Balkan states, and I knew that there was plenty of work to be done in the field. Another thing I found extremely disturbing as these events unfolded in the Balkans was how the rest of the world merely watched as thousands and thousands of people were being persecuted and cleansed. However, the fact is that this ethnic, religious, and national violence in the region is very new -something that began with the emergence of the Balkan nation-states only at the end of the 19th century and beginning of the 20th century."

 Tolga says, "I decided that it was important for me to educate American students - future leaders and citizens - about the former lands of the Ottoman Empire and the current cultures and peoples of the Balkans, Middle East, and Central Asia so that when instability and violence resurfaces in the Balkans, the region will not seem so remote and foreign to them, justifying indifference. I think that this is all the more important in a time when Islam and the Christendom are artificially pitted against each other.  It is my job to deconstruct national myths and national memory, and also debunk the idea that Islam and Christianity are inherently incompatible."

As a Fulbright scholar, Tolga feels that the Fulbright grant has made his dream of writing a dissertation and soon a book on the Ottoman Empire and the Balkans a reality. "The beginning of my research period is the end of the 18th century, so it is not exactly clear who are `Bulgarians' and who are `Turks'.  This period was before the beginning of the national movements, which came later in the 19th century.  At that time, identities were much more fluid; people didn't think of themselves as `Bulgarians' or `Turks'." He is studying the period known as the Kurdzhaliisko Vreme in Ottoman-Bulgarian history, "a tumultuous period of widespread revolt throughout the Ottoman Balkans."  He is most interested in "the anachronistic use of the past.  This is a perennial problem in the Balkan nation-state; governments misappropriate aspects of the Ottoman past in order to persecute minorities or other political actors." The different viewpoints of historians working on either side disagree on how to classify the different roles of the performers on the historical stage, and as a relatively impartial historian, Tolga hopes to find a middle ground, a point where both sides can take equal credit and notoriety for their role in history. As a man of Turkish descent, Tolga finds more issues with people residing in Sofia than those in the villages, something he finds disturbing in a city that claims to be cosmopolitan. Tolga will continue to carry out dissertation research both in Bulgaria and Turkey with the intent of completing his dissertation and then pursuing a career in academia as a professor in Ottoman, Balkan, and Middle Eastern studies.