The first major civilization to emerge in the lands of modern Bulgaria was Thrace. Mastering metalworking, horsemanship, coinage, music, and poetry in the same period as their more renowned neighbors to the south and west—the ancient Greek city-states and Macedon—the Thracians had a strong society by the first millennia BCE. Thrace traded with the Greek sea towns along the Black Sea coast and assisted Athens in the Peloponnesian War against Sparta (431-404 BCE). Philip II of neighboring Macedon overran Thrace in 342 BCE and many Thracians marched with Philip’s son Alexander (the Great) to the edge of India. By the 1st Century CE, the Romans had conquered Thrace, and the province’s position at the center of the Balkans placed it along the road between old Rome and new Rome (Constantinople) after the split into the Western and Eastern Roman Empires in the 3rd Century. Important towns along the Rome-Constantinople road included Serdica (now Sofia) and Philippopolis (now Plovdiv). As Constantinople’s power grew from the 4th to 6th Centuries, the lands that make up Bulgaria were completely under Byzantine rule.

The Bulgarian nation traces its roots to the arrival of Slav and Turkic Bulgar settlers from the Eurasian steppes in the late 7th Century. While the Slavs settled throughout the Balkans and lived under Byzantine rule at first, the Bulgars, under their leader Khan Asparuh, crossed the Danube (Byzantium’s northern frontier) and soundly defeated a Byzantine army helmed by Emperor Constantine IV himself. Byzantium accepted a treaty acknowledging the creation of a Bulgar kingdom in 681, the first independent state on former Byzantine territory. The new Bulgar state included northern Thrace as well as Wallachia, on the north shore of the Danube (now part of Romania). The majority of the Bulgar kingdom’s population was Slav, but rather than segregating Slavs from Bulgars, Asparuh let the two groups intermingle. While Slav tribal leadership was incorporated into the ruling class, Bulgar elites retained the throne, which would sow ethnic discord in the Bulgar state over the next few centuries.

During the 9th Century, the Bulgar state faced sustained harassment of its southern borders by Byzantium, and focused its efforts on north- and westward expansion. The Bulgar state became an immense power, growing from its 681 borders to include Transylvania, much of Macedonia, and the area around Belgrade by 850. In 864, Khan Boris I converted the kingdom to Orthodox Christianity, already the religion of the formerly Byzantine Slavs throughout the extended Bulgar kingdom. Christianity gave Bulgars and Slavs a new cohesiveness, and history marks that shift by beginning to refer to the people as Bulgarians, and the kingdom as the First Bulgarian Empire. One political drawback of Christianity emerged: because Byzantium retained the Orthodox Patriarch, conversion gave the Greek-speaking Byzantine church and emperors new leverage within the Bulgarian state. At the same time, Cyril and Methodius, two Salonika-born monks, developed the Cyrillic alphabet, which gave written expression to Slavic languages. The Bulgarians seized on the Cyrillic alphabet’s promise of autonomy from the Byzantine Greek language. Over time, Bulgaria’s adoption of the Cyrillic alphabet fostered considerable cultural differentiation from Byzantium in literature, law and religion.

The First Bulgarian Empire reached its apex under Tsar Simeon I in the early 10th Century, ruling all of modern Romania and the bulk of the Balkans save Croatia and regions around Constantinople and Salonika (modern Thessaloniki, Greece). Bulgaria had shores on the Black, Aegean, and Adriatic Seas. Constantinople also submitted to the Bulgarians establishing their own Patriarch at Ohrid, in Macedonia. After Simeon’s death, however, invasions by Magyars and Kievan Russians in the north, Serbs in the west, and Byzantium in the south weakened the Bulgarian Empire. By the dawn of the 11th Century, Bulgaria had been swallowed by Byzantium altogether and its patriarchate was demoted to an archbishopric.

In the late 12th and early 13th Century, strict Byzantine tax regimes aggravated the Bulgarians of the plains north of the Stara Planina Mountains. The population rose and declared a new Bulgarian kingdom. Though not as large as the First Bulgarian Empire, this Second Bulgarian Kingdom regained many of Bulgaria’s former territories. It also had to contend with the marauding Crusaders from western Europe, who crossed the Balkans en route to sacking Constantinople in 1204. When the Crusaders installed Baldwin of Flanders as the Emperor of Catholic, re-Romanized Latin Empire based at Constantinople, the Bulgarians took up the mantle of restoring Orthodox rule to the region. They defeated the Crusader army at Adrianople (modern Edirne, Turkey) in 1205 and captured Baldwin, imprisoning him in the Bulgarian capital of Turnovo until his death. Bulgaria’s continued harassment of the Latin Empire helped lead to its collapse after less than 60 years. In the mid 13th Century, a truncated Byzantium returned from exile in Anatolia and re-established itself, while the Mongolian Golden Horde pushed Bulgaria’s northern frontiers back below the Danube. Meanwhile, as the power of medieval Serbia grew, Bulgaria’s shrank, culminating in the Serbs’ rout of the weakened Bulgaria in 1330.

As the Christian kingdoms of the Balkans squabbled for territory, a larger power arrived at their doorsteps in the mid 14th Century: the Ottoman Turks. Seizing the Gallipoli peninsula, the Ottomans established a European base for imperial expansion. After the Ottomans defeated Serbia’s main army at Kosovo Polje in 1389, Bulgaria soon fell as well. Byzantium was reduced to scraps of land around Constantinople until it too fell, in 1453. Ruling from the former Byzantine capital they renamed Istanbul, the Ottoman sultans built a massive empire that encompassed virtually all of the Balkans and most of the Middle East. Bulgaria’s proximity to the imperial core left it particularly subjugated by the Ottomans.

The Ottoman Empire was a multi-ethnic, multi-religious entity. To maintain order in this unruly amalgam, the Ottomans devised the millet system in which top reverence was reserved for Islam and its laws, while Christianity and Judaism were accepted and used as “national” groupings. Thus, all of the Empire’s Orthodox Christians were governed, taxed, and represented by the Greek Orthodox Patriarch in Istanbul, which had considerable autonomy but was still subordinate to Islam and the sultans. This came as an affront to Bulgarians and other Slavs no longer accustomed to deference to the Greek-speaking Patriarch, let alone the Ottoman Sultans. Though its cruelty has often been exaggerated for political purposes, the Ottoman Empire—and particularly its elite Janissary Corps plucked from the Christian population—were frequently harsh in their treatment of the subjugated peasants of Bulgaria and other occupied nations. As a simple example of the mark Ottoman rule left on the Bulgarian consciousness, despite the fact that modern Bulgarian historiography has replaced many references to the "Ottoman yoke" with the neutral "Ottoman period," Bulgarians continue to use the latter, more emotive phrase in everyday parlance.

In the 18th and early 19th Centuries, as decline set in, the once-mighty Ottoman Empire became the so-called “Sick Man of Europe.” At the same time, sporadic Bulgarian resistance to Ottoman rule began to occur with more frequency. Bulgarian haiduks came out of their mountain hideouts to stage scattered assaults on imperial targets, but these had little effect on Ottoman authority and disastrous consequences for the local peasants, who were routinely slaughtered in response. Perhaps more inspiring was the National Revival, an explosion of literature, arts, education, and architecture that gripped the Bulgarians from the 1830s onward. Initially emanating from the relative safe haven of their churches and drawing heavily on folkloric tradition, the cultural products of this renaissance became significant unifying factors for the Bulgarian nationalist movement.

Abroad, exiled Bulgarian nationalists lobbied for their cause in the capitals of Europe’s Great Powers. Theirs was a difficult position to argue, for they had to preserve space for their future autonomy while simultaneously opposing Ottoman rule and differentiating themselves from the Greek-centric Orthodox Patriarch, which was expected to assert a new Byzantium in the post-Ottoman period. This distinction was lost on most western European leaders, who accepted the basic “national” distinctions of the Ottoman millet system. The Russians, however, understood the Balkan Slavs’ fear of a subsuming Hellenism, largely as a result of their own historic struggle to establish an Orthodox Patriarch independent of the Greek one in Constantinople. In 1870, the Bulgarian nationalists received a major boon when the Ottomans recognized a separate Bulgarian Orthodox Exarchate. Revolutionary planning intensified, but several small uprisings failed to break the Ottoman grasp on Bulgaria. That changed in 1876 when news of the savage repression after a rising at Koprivshtitsa reached all of Europe. Russia declared war on the Ottomans in 1877, and by 1878 the Russians had helped liberate Bulgaria. In the San Stefano treaty ending the war, a vast Bulgaria was created, including most of Macedonia. The other Great Powers, fearful of a Russian-aligned super-state in the Balkans, convened the Congress of Berlin later that year, in which Bulgaria was reduced to 37% of the San Stefano size, and its southeastern half was left under Ottoman suzerainty.

By 1885, popular pressure forced the unification of Bulgaria’s two halves, but Ottoman-run Macedonia remained subject to the claims of Bulgaria, Greece, and Serbia, who all funded insurgents in attempts to include the province within their borders. The Macedonian Question would plague Balkan politics for years to come (see Macedonia and IMRO). In 1908 Bulgaria declared full independence from the dying Ottoman Empire. In 1912, Bulgaria allied with Greece and Serbia to beat the Ottomans out of the Balkans in the First Balkan War. Shortly after their victory, however, the allies went to war amongst themselves over the prize of Macedonia. Bulgaria was defeated in the Second Balkan War and lost northern Macedonia to Serbia and southern Macedonia, including Thessaloniki, to Greece.

Irredentism drove Bulgaria’s decision to join the Central Powers in World War I, though once again the war resulted in further loss of land for the country. The interwar years saw Bulgaria’s monarchy stamp out opposition parties in favor of royalist dictatorship, and when World War II commenced, King Boris III sided half-heartedly with the Axis (Bulgaria never declared war on the Soviet Union, and refused to deport its Jewish population). In September 1944, the Soviet Army rolled unopposed into Bulgaria and swept the Bulgarian Communist Party into power. Communist Bulgaria was the Soviet Union’s most loyal satellite state throughout the Cold War, and benefited from industrialization and other socio-economic improvements while suffering from suppression of political freedoms. Bulgaria under Premier Todor Zhivkov (from 1954 to 1989) was neither as liberalized as Tito’s Yugoslavia nor as repressive as Ceaucescu’s Romania, and the regime could not survive once the Soviet Union went into a tailspin. As his rule stagnated, Zhivkov played the nationalist card and unleashed a forced "Bulgarianization" campaign on Bulgaria's ethnic Turk community, which numbered 10% of the population; many ethnic Turks fled Bulgaria until international condemnation led the government to rescind its mass name-changing policy. Reformist Socialists ran the country after Zhivkov was deposed, but by 1991 the Communist era was over.

Post-Communist Bulgaria saw the rise of the center-right Union of Democratic Forces, which undertook neoliberal reforms and re-orientated relations toward the West. The sputtering economy drove as many as 700,000 (of about 8 million) Bulgarians to leave the country in the 1990s, and there has been a sharp rise in mafia activity. In a peculiar development, Bulgaria elected its former king, Simeon II, as prime minister in 2001. Bulgaria is on track to join NATO in 2004, and the European Union in 2007.

Sofia and Environs_ 2__3__4__5

The Northwest_6__7

The Southwest_8__9

Central Bulgaria_10__11__12

The Black Sea Coast_13__14__15

Maimunka enjoys the delicious Bulgarian cuisine in his local mehana (tavern) in Sofia. The shopska salata mixes tomatoes, cucumbers, onions, and white (feta) cheese. To wash it down, the Monkey has a glass of rakia, Bulgaria's national drink (a strong brandy made from plums, grapes, or apricots). And for good measure, the Monkey is sporting his martenitsa—a red and white good luck charm exchanged by Bulgarians each year on March 1.

Sofia, the capital

Vidin, in the Northwest

Rila Monastery, in the Southwest

Melnik, in the Southwest

Plovdiv, in Central Bulgaria

Hisariya, in Central Bulgaria

Varna, on the Northern Black Sea Coast

The Southern Black Sea Coast

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