Home Issues Vol. This article employs Greek-Bulgarian interethnic marriage as a category of analysis to contextualize the intersection of language, class, gender, and nationalism. Such marriages reveal pragmatic practices of auto-hellenization as expressions of eclectic urban lifestyles that flourished in the Ottoman era up to the s, a process interrupted by the emergence of nation-states and the Tanzimat that led to intra-millet conflicts in which the groups caught in-between became scapegoats. Thus, a natural demographic process was ideologized, entered national discourses, and eroded the Ottoman cosmopolitan life in which mixed marriages often united local versions of high and low cultures. I wish our quickest split with the phanariot Greeks and Greek women!!!