Baku instead of Ankara – Turkish Students from Bulgaria in Azerbaijan during 1950s
The paper presents the nonresearched question about the Turks from Bulgaria who studded in Baku in the 1950s. In this period in Bulgaria the Soviet policy for acknowledging of the rights of the national minorities was applied and the communist regime aimed at directing Bulgarian Turks to the Turkic republics of Soviet Union and especially to Azerbaijan. This policy changed at the end of the 1950s. From 1952 to 1960 more than 50 students graduated from Azerbaijan Peda-gogical Institute and Azerbaijan State University. They were prepared to teach in the Turkish schools in Bulgaria (around 1100 at the beginning of 1950s) but when they returned there were not anymore Turkish schools in Bulgaria. The processes in the sphere of the national languages and educational policies in USSR for this period have been researched. The alumni from the universities in Baku have to experience the contradictions between the Soviet policies to national republics and dynamic of the policy of the communist regime in Bulgaria concerning the Turkish population. The research is based on documents from the State Archive of Azerbaijan, documents from the Central State Archive in Sofia and oral testimonies.