Big Excursion
The "Big Excursion" () also known as the 1989 migration () or Big Migration () was the ethnic cleansing of Bulgarian Muslims by the Communist government of the People's Republic of Bulgaria. Between May and August 1989, 360,000 Bulgarian Muslims crossed the border into Turkey. 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. By the end of 1990, around 150,000 Bulgarian Muslims had returned from abroad. While the "Big Excursion" is sometimes alleged to have been a case of voluntary mass-migration, it has been widely recognized as ethnic cleansing, including by the democratic government of now-EU-member Bulgaria in 2012. Though the Excursion is not as widely remembered in the West as the subsequent Bosnian genocide and expulsion (and subsequent return) of Kosovar Albanians in neighboring Yugoslavia, as of 1989 it was the largest case of ethnic cleansing in Europe since the expulsion of Germans living east of the Oder-Neisse line between 1944 and 1950. Terminology Though use of the term "ethnic cleansing" dates back to the early 19th century, the term is usually understood