Big Excursion

"Big Excursion"
Part of the Revival Process
Location	Bulgaria
Date	May – August or December 1989[note 1][1]
Target	Bulgarian Muslims (90%~ of victims were Bulgarian Turks)[1]
Attack type	Persecution, Ethnic cleansing, Forced displacement
Victims	310,000[note 2] -400,000[note 3][1]
Perpetrators	People's Republic of Bulgaria, Bulgarian Communist Party
Motive	Anti-Muslim sentiment, Anti-Turkish sentiment, Bulgarianisation

The "Big Excursion" (Bulgarian: Голямата екскурзия, romanized: Goliamata Ekskurziya) was the 1989 forced migration (Turkish: 1989 Zorunlu Göç) of Bulgarian Muslims by the Communist government of the People's Republic of Bulgaria. In total, around 360,000 Bulgarian Muslims crossed the border into Turkey.^[2] In late December 1989, a month after the resignation of General Secretary Todor Zhivkov, the "Big Excursion" came to a genuine end, with the new government promising to restore the rights of Bulgarian Muslims.^[3] By the end of 1990, around 150,000 Bulgarian Muslims had returned from abroad.^[4]

The "Big Excursion" has been recognized as an ethnic cleansing, including by the democratic government of now-EU-member Bulgaria in 2012.^[5] Though the Excursion is not as widely remembered in the West as the Bosnian genocide and expulsion (and subsequent return) of Kosovar Albanians in neighboring Yugoslavia,^[6] as of 1989 it was the largest instance of ethnic cleansing^[7] in Europe by number of victims since the expulsion of Germans living east of the Oder–Neisse line between 1944 and 1950.

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