Bulgaria is a crossroads where East and West converge. A smattering of elements from Greece, Byzantium, Turkey, Russia, and the West have been absorbed into Bulgaria’s language, culture, cuisine, music, and mentality. Bulgarians leap in a circle dance called the horà. Female choirs chant oriental melodies with the accompaniment of bagpipes and flutes. Adding distinct Mid-Eastern flair, the once one-million-strong Turkish community spices up village life and open-air markets where Bulgarians, Turks, and Gypsies mingle.Numbering less than eight million today, the Bulgarian people descend from Central Asian ancestors, who, in AD 680, arrived to the Balkans from the regions north of the Caucasus that neighbor Georgia and Armenia. While one branch of Bulgars pushed westward to modern-day northern Italy, a second clan of two- to three-hundred thousand nomads settled Bulgaria’s present homeland.
By the ninth century, the newcomers had already been slavicized, having mixed in with the pre-existing Slavic tribes that had ebbed into the region toward the end of the fifth century. The original inhabitants, who had long garrisoned the land, were the Thracians—a barbaric, warring people who, being wracked with disunity among their tribes, were assimilated by the Slavic and Bulgar influx.
In an all-out effort to conquer Byzantium, or Eastern Rome, the desire of which is conveyed in the royal title assumed by Slavic monarchs—”tsar” from the Latin “Caesar”—the Bulgarians were, in turn, conquered. As a result, in AD 865 the Bulgarian tsar extended a warm welcome to Eastern Orthodoxy, which was imposed on his subjects as the State religion. Until 864 AD, the Bulgarians had worshipped their supreme god, who was depicted by a horse. Interestingly, it has been conjectured that the name “Bulgar” connotes ‘one who tans hides’.
Bulgaria lays claim to two of the greatest eastern missionaries originating from Byzantium, who translated the Scriptures into the old Slavic language and converted many Slavic nations to the Orthodox Faith. They have gone down in history under the title of Methodius and Cyril, the latter giving name to the Cyrillic alphabet, which the two men conceived purely out of missionary motives. This alphabet has been employed in sixty nations. In the tenth and twelfth centuries, the Bulgars laid groundwork to powerful empires and, as the cradle of Slavic literacy and culture, circulated apocryphal writings across the land. In AD 988, Bulgaria’s missionaries blazed as far north as to the ancient Rus where the old Bulgarian tongue and Orthodox Faith were imported and have since poured the foundation for the Russian language and religion.
In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the Bulgarian language and folk styles of music also penetrated the Balkans. Bulgaria’s glory faded overnight, when the Turks invaded in 1396 and harnessed their Bulgarian foes with the yolk of a five-hundred-year servitude.
Photo by Klearchos Kapoutsis of the Great Basilica at the Outer Town of Pliska, the first Bulgarian capital, Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license at Wikipedia. Photo traditional costumes in the Rhodope Mountains by Silar, Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License at Wikipedia.
