NAZIM HIKMET’S 1951 VISIT TO BULGARIA: AGITPROP PERFORMANCE, COMMUNIST FALLACY, LITERARY LEGACY
Études balkaniques (Sofia) 2026, N 1, pp. 5-49
DOI: https://doi.org/10.62761/645.EB.LXII1.01
Ahmed NURI 
Independent Scholar, Stockholm, Sweden
Abstract: This article examines the motives, content, and multifaceted impact of Nazım Hikmet’s 1951 visit to Bulgaria through extensive archival sources. Drawing on Bulgarian state and party archives, Blaga Dimitrova’s 1952 travelogue “Nazım Hikmet v Bulgariia” (Nazım Hikmet in Bulgaria), the leading Turkish newspaper “Yeni Işık” (New Light) published in Bulgaria, and eyewitness accounts it reconstructs a nuanced historical and literary context for the visit. Organized in three phases – before, during, and after the visit – it discusses Nazım Hikmet’s actions as an agitprop performance, his rhetoric as an ideological commitment, and
his reception as a literary legacy within the broader Cold War dynamics linking Turkey, Bulgaria, and the Soviet Union. The article argues that the visit served the Bulgarian Communist Party’s policy toward the Turkish minority during the 1950 – 1951 migration, while also contributing to the formation of a socialist Turkish literary culture that emerged in Bulgaria from the 1950s onward.
Keywords: Nazım Hikmet, Bulgarian communism, Cold War, Turkish literature in Bulgaria, Turkish communists