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CHRIS KOSTOV
alienated from Bulgarian culture. A concerned immigrant, for instance,
burned the English books of his brother to keep him safe from Anglo-Saxon
influence.”
From the 1920s on, the Bulgarians started to shift their primary loyalty from
their home village to a larger Bulgarian common identity and community.
People from different villages started to cluster on the same streets and the
community as a whole began to move north of Queen Street and east of the
Don River, as they wanted to avoid prejudice against them and residential
mixing with other ethnic groups." Bulgarian immigrants did not want to
be viewed as clannish and anti-Canadian, especially because Bulgaria had
fought on the side of the Triple Alliance in WWI. The anti-Greek riots in
Toronto of August 1918 also indicated that there was some hostility against
Balkan immigrants. In the aftermath of the Great Depression, few Bulgarian
immigrants could enter Canada after 1929. However, the settlers who were
already in Toronto managed to organize a number of charity organizations,
churches, political organizations, newspapers, Saturday schools and cultural
events, which facilitated the development of an active community life."
During the period 1900-1940, most Slavic immigrants from Macedonia
had a Bulgarian ethnic identity, but there were also some ethnic Bulgarians
from Aegean Macedonia, who also came to Toronto and joined the Greek
community in the city. Itis not quite clear how many of these immigrants were
ethnic Greeks and how many were ethnic Bulgarians from Aegean Macedonia,
who identified themselves as Greeks (grkomani). Kostadin Gurdev estimated
that at least a few hundred grkomani were active in the Greek community and
participated in the founding of the first Greek Orthodox parish in Toronto —
St. George in 1909.”°
As the statistics in Figure 1 indicate, Bulgarian immigration, even at its
height, never approached the magnitude of immigration by other comparable
Southern or Eastern European nationalities, and it occurred later — only after
1900 — than it did in the case of other nations in the region and by 1941, there
were only 3,260 Bulgarian Canadians. As a comparison, in 1914, there were
already 8,301 Romanians in Canada and by 1931, they were 29,000. In the period
1891-1914, 150,000 Ukrainians settled in Canada and approximately 150,000
Italian immigrants entered Canada in 1901-1940." Thus, Bulgarian immi¬
grants were practically invisible to the Canadian public and government, except
during the periods of the two World Wars, when Bulgaria was a German ally.
7 Petroff, Sojourners and Settlers, 69-71.
Gurdev, Bulgarskata emigraciya, 40-55; Dincho Ralley, interviewed by Irene Markoff, 26
May 1977, MHSO Bulgarian collection.
Gurdev, Bulgarskata emigraciya, 58.
Gurdev, Bulgarskata emigraciya, 125.
Bruno Ramirez, The Italians, Ottawa, Canadian Historical Society, 1989, 7.
+ 58 +