Zeynep Zafer
Zeynep Zafer is a lecturer and literary historian at Ankara University. She is the co-author of When They Took My Name, an anthology of poems, stories and memories of people who suffered during the forced assimilation of the 1970s and 1980s. Born in the Pirin village of Kornitsa, she experienced the repression of her parents and fellow villagers as a child. Then she herself experienced arrests, resistance to repression, trials, imprisonment, displacement within Bulgaria and finally expulsion to Turkey in 1989.
She has published a number of articles in Turkish, English and Bulgarian on forced assimilation, the deportation of Turks from Bulgaria and the resistance of Turks and Pomaks (individuals or groups) to repression during the forced name change.
