“Never Come Back, You Hear Me!”

An interesting cultural paradox exists in Bulgaria: while most countries value staying in their homeland, in Bulgaria one is a “good Bulgarian” if they leave Bulgaria. This chapter investigates this paradox by examining the symbolic interplay of identity and belonging within discourses on emigration. Studying the ways participants in Bulgaria attempt to communicatively make sense of their national identity and their homeland offers a unique illustration of social life in post-socialist locales and draws attention to the underlying cultural premises for being and dwelling that are discursively employed in current discussions of migration. The geopolitical and historical context of the country and the resulting local cultural notions of self and the land play a large role in how the choice of leaving is culturally constructed as a moral imperative.