Between resistance and state violence: The co- belonging and non- exclusivity of the pomak heritage

Bulgaria's Rhodope Mountains are home to the nation's large Turkish minority and the Pomak population. The latter is a diverse, complex, and stratified Slavic- speaking rural and mountainous community, whose cultural heritage has been historically contested by competing regional nationalisms. In this chapter, I discuss the Rhodopous ethno religious pluralism and Bulgaria's project of nation- building, to associate the history of Muslim Pomaks with that of indigenous communities that worldwide negotiate and promote their right to cultural heritage as human rights. Based on previous qualitative research and fieldwork conducted in South- western Bulgaria, two particularly important perspectives are considered. First, the genealogy of the "Pomak question" in Bulgaria and, second, the gendered local history of Pomak Muslim women's resistance to state techniques and practices of assimilation during communism. Focusing on these locally- nuanced perspectives is to contend that Pomak heritage as a whole co- belongs to different spatial- temporal junctures and disruptions, across which the manifestation of multiple context- sensitive Pomak identities cannot but recognise a non- exclusivity of their heritage with regard to the nationalist and ethnocentric politics of heritage.