Oldal 60 [60]
OCR
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 immigrants 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 +
