In the 3rd century, when the Thracians were already declared citizens of Rome, came waves of barbaric invasions, marking the advance of the Great Migration of People. Although the Roan authorities made serious efforts to stop the pressure from the barbarians, at the beginning of the 7th century AD the ancient culture of Thrace and Moesia was destroyed and the life in still existing settlements became barbarian like.
In these territories, inhabited by numerous tribes speaking different languages, the Bulgarians formed their state.
The homeland of the Bulgarian tribes was in the highland regions of Altai in Siberia (a Russian restaurant in Dublin has Altai vodka!) and they belong to the same ethnolingual group as the Huns, the Avars, the Pechenegs and the Cumans. Their language is related to the Turko-Altai group.
These tribes were numerous enough to stand advancing towards Europe between the 2nd and the 6th centuries AD. In the Old Continent they suffered serious losses during the barbaric raids against the Roman possessions. Finally they succeeded in founding two powerful states – one near the Volga and the other near the Danube, but they inhabited whole areas in other states as well.
As early as the 2nd century AD the tribes settled in the plains between the Caspian and the Black Seas, which border in the south – the Caucasian Ridge. Between 351 and 389 AD they migrated to Armenia headed by their chieftain Vund. In the beginning of the 7th century, swept by the Hunnish wave, many Bulgarian tribes moved to the lower valleys of the Donets and the Don rivers and the Azov. Some of these tribes stayed for centuries in their new settlements but others moved on, together with the Huns, towards central Europe and made their homes in Pannonia and in the plains around the Carpathian mountains.
The Hunnish-Bulgarian association existed throughout the period between 377-453 AD, spreading like a dark cloud over Europe. But the defeat of the Huns led to the dissolution of this alliance. In 480AD Byzantium signed its first agreement with the individual Bulgarians to use them against the Ostrogothic invaders. But, when in 488AD, the Goths moved away from the Balkan Peninsula, the Bulgarians being Byzantine allies, were allowed to walk across Moesia, Thrace and Macedonia and liked these lands.
Only five years after the Goths were driven out, the Bulgarian troops invaded Thrace, defeated the Byzantine army and killed their leader, Julian. After this the Bulgarians living in the plains between the Caucasus, the Black Sea and the Caspian Seas preserved intact and increased their human, economic and military potential.
In 567-568AD khagan Sildjibu, a ruler of the Turkish khanate, forced the Bulgarians, the Khazars and the Belenzers to join his Turkish empire. But the tribal chieftains were not killed or driven away; they continued to govern their tribes and this was the first time ever that these tribes were united. When in 581AD the khanate collapsed into two separate khanates – the eastern and the western – the Bulgarians, who were in the western part, became the greater part of the population and their leaders started fighting for the supreme power.
Kubrat, leader of one of the tribes, united them, broke loose from the khanate and then founded a state in the year 632. He spent his childhood in Constantinople, in the palace of the emperor. There he was baptised as a Christian. In this capital city of the European civilisation, home of rich libraries, antique heritage and culture and aesthetic values of Christianity, Kubrat gained a high standard of education. He became one of the most learned men in Europe at that time.
When he declared himself as an independent ruler,all the Bulgarian tribes living in the region of the Black Sea, the Sea of Azov and the Caspian Sea, immediately united under him. This was not a military-tribal alliance but it was a state with its strictly outlined territory, its own administration, uniform laws and its own foreign policy. The Byzantines called the state Great Bulgaria. Its boundaries were the lower course of the Danube in the west, the Black Sea and the Azov seas in the south, the Kuban river in the east and the Donits river in the north. The capital of the Old Great Bulgaria was the town of Phanagoria on the coast of the Azov Sea.
This big territory was ruled by a khan who made decisions after discussing them with the council of the Great Boyls. In the administrative hierarchy the khan was the first man, the second was the khavkhan and the third man was the Schirpuboyl. The last two were in charge of the army in times of war.
In 635 AD, khan Kubrat was honoured with the title of Patrician and signed an inter-state agreement for the recognition of the new state. He was a good friend of the Byzantine emperor and after his death, in 641 AD, there was a risk of worsening the relations with the empire because he supported his widow Martina and their children in their battle for the throne. Kubrat, being baptised as a Christian, helped his troops in the conflict he had with some barbarian tribes and he succeeded in beating off the Khazars until his death.
There is a medieval legend which gives an example of political wisdom, which came from the opinions of the Bulgarian people after this long lasting war with the Khazars. It goes that at his death bed khan Kubrat called his sons and made them break a bundle of vine twigs with only their hands. None of them succeeded. Then Kubrat, himself, took the vine shoots and broke them one by one with his own frail hands. The moral was that as long as the Bulgarians and their political leaders were united, it would be hard to break the state apart. If they allowed a split in their community and their actions they would be destroyed one by one, letting Bulgaria be swept away.
After khan Kubrat’s death, in 651AD, Bulgaria suffered many Khazar raids. They occupied the Bulgarian territories and some Bulgarians accepted their dependence on the Khazars, but others moved to the north, to the valleys of the rivers Koma and Vilga. In that place they founded a big Bulgarian state called Volgo-Koma Bulgaria. This state existed until the 13th century when the Tatars took it over. And still people of Bulgaria origin exist in the autonomous region of Chuvashia in Russia.
Khan Asparukh was khan Kubrat’s successor, already ruling over the territories between the Dnepr, the Donets and the Danube. He managed to drive the Khazars back across the Dnepr and stop their offensive on the west. In the next few years, the Bulgarian politicians decided to undertake the lands of ancient Moesia. This place was perfect for them because they could use the protection of the Danube in the north, the Balkan Mountains in the south and the Black Sea in the east. But populous Slav tribes inhabited these territories.
In 680AD khan Asparukh transferred a big part of his army and population to the south of the Danube delta and took up the lands of present-day Dobruja (the name of the region where I am from, in the north east of Bulagria). This led to a war between Bulgaria and Byzantine, when Constantine IV Pogonatus commanded Byzantia. In the autumn of 681AD Byzantium was forced to conclude a peace treaty with the Bulgarians.
During the 8th century, the Bulgarian statesmen showed surprising political tact in steering the state boat to a salutary coast. But dramatic incidents happened at the beginning of 8th century, when the Arab invasion extended to Europe passing through Gibraltar and the Bosphorus. In the west, the warriors of Mohammed conquered the Iberian Peninsula in the battle at Poitiers in 732 AD. It was going to take a few hundred years to move them out of Spain.
The whole of Byzantium was taken over by Arab cavalry hooves and its capital was forced to surrender. In main time, the Bulgarians put their oar in the conflict. In that same year, 716 AD, the Bulgarian heavy cavalry under the command of khan Tervel came in Constantinople and after the two- year-long fighting the Bulgarians and the Byzantines defeated the Arabs. This success put an end to the Arabs attempting to penetrate into the Old Continent through the Balkan Peninsula.
In 756 AD Byzantium concentrated all its forces to destroy the Bulgarian state. And after fierce battles in the plains of Thrace and in the Balkan Range passes in the end of the 8th century, the Bulgarians succeeded in withstanding the Byzantine aggression.
All this made the Bulgarian state rulers think about the need of a new state and political conception, which will help for the independence of Bulgaria. During the rule of khan Krum (803- 814) this was strictly observed and continued for over half a century by most of the Bulgarian political minds during the rule of khan Omurtag (814-831), khan Malamir (831-837) and khan Presian (837-852). This helped Bulgaria to become a state equal in territory, population, economy and military strength to the European political giants.
At the beginning of the 9th century Bulgaria joined forces with the Frankish empire of Charles the Great in destroying the Avar khanate in Central Europe and annexing its lands inhabited by Bulgarians and Slavs in Transylvania. In 807 AD, after a battle with Byzantium which lasted almost seven years the Bulgarians had Thrace and Northern Macedonia detached to them from the empire of the Romans. During the reign of khan Omurtag (814-831) the Bulgarians took the offensive against the empire of the Franks. Pannonia (present-day Hungary) was conquered in 829, khan Malamir (831-837) and khan Presian (837-852) helped extend Bulgaria’s borders to its present-day mountains to the south: Rhodopes, Rila and Pirin, as well as the northern coast of the Aegean and Macedonia. So, by 852 Bulgaria had the territories of Panonnia (present-day Hungary), Transylvania, Wallachia (in present-day Romania, also the kingdom of Vlad the Impaler, who inspired the character Dracula), Moldavia, Moesia, Thrace and Macedonia with their numerous inhabitants, and was already a European super-power.
Under Krum (803-814) and Omurtag (814-831) the independence of the Slav principalities was eliminated. The huge territory of the country was divided into eleven administrative areas - one of them was the capital and was called internal area and the other ten were external. Their leaders were officials appointed by the central power. That is how from a federation of voluntarily associated tribes, Bulgaria became an early feudal centralised monarchy. This united Bulgarian nation was situated on the most contended land on the European continent.
There were many religions and heretic diversions on this enormous territory. The Turkic Bulgarians believed in Tangra, the God-Heaven, but anyway part of them were Christians. The Slavs were polytheists, and they believed in Perun, Lada and Volos who were also patrons of large territories in Moesia, Pannonia, part of Macedonia, Wallachia and Moldavia. The areas in Thrace and Macedonia which had been detached from Byzantium were inhabited by Christianised Slavs and Thracians some of whom were Christian heretics.
A problem confronted the Bulgarian political minds, who had to find resolution. The problem was not so much in the ethnic or language differences as in the impossibility to have the population of the state observe only one consistent law.
In 852 AD khan Boris sat on the Bulgarian throne. He took part in the high European politics over a period of ten years. With the king of France Charles the Bald, he participated in the war against a coalition formed by the West Germanic kingdom and Croatia. In 862, this time in alliance only with the West Germanic kingdom, Bulgaria waged war on Great Moravia and Byzantium. These contacts with the European Christian countries convinced the Bulgarian politicians that despite its military might Bulgaria held an inequitable position on the international stage. So, khan Boris decided to adopt the Christian faith as the one and only official religion of the Bulgarians and the state, using his contacts with the German king Ludowig I. He took the obligation to send over his preachers while the Bulgarians had to submit to the Roman Catholic Church in religious and administrative respect. Byzantium did not like this appearance of a powerful Catholic power near the Greek-Orthodox Constantinople, and declared immediately war on Bulgaria.
At this time Boris’ population was exhausted and at the border, the Byzantine troops were met by Bulgarian envoys who announced the decision of the Bulgarians to assume the Christian faith from Constantinople, which signified an observance of the Eastern Greek Orthodox rite.
In 863 Christianity was proclaimed as the official state religion and the conversion of all none-Christians was started. All churches, from the huge basilicas in the capital down to the modest parish churches in the villages, conducted their service in Greek. This was a danger of national decomposition. And the brothers Constantine Cyril the Philosopher and Methodius were sent to spread the Christianity around. They invented the earliest Bulgarian alphabet and translated the principal books of the Christian doctrine into the Christian ideological and theoretical heritage.
In 889 AD, Boris, the Baptist of the Bulgarian people, gave the throne to his son Vladimir-Rassate (889-893) and retired to a monastery near the capital. The new Bulgarian ruler made some attempts in favour of paganism, and Boris, following his policy-supporting Bulgarian aristocracy, deposed his son and blinded him. Finally he put his younger son, Simeon (893-927) on the Bulgarian throne.
The Bulgarian state conception was that each people on the earth had the right to independent political, economic and cultural development. This ideology, which served as the basis of the modern European civilization, had been accepted only by the Bulgarian state during this time. Byzantium knew, that the Christianisation of Bulgaria was a chance to take over the barbarian state formation and decompose the Bulgarian state. The plan was to annex the Bulgarian territory to the empire at a time convenient, and ultimately, to do away with its independence.
Tsar Boris's political foresight, incredible for that time, helped him destroy one after the other the levers of the Byzantine mechanism employed to destroy Bulgaria from within. The Greek language was abandoned and the Byzantine clergy expelled from the Bulgarian church and state. Once again, Bulgaria was a dangerous example of national survival and the only way for universalism of the European politics, was to resort to the well-tried expedient of military confrontation.
Instead of retaliating the shift of the trade depot, the fearless Bulgarian ruler preferred to prepare the battlefield. At that time Byzantium was unprepared for military confrontation.
Byzantium wanted to drive off the Bulgarian troops from the avenues of approach to Constantinople, so they sent for the militant Magyars, then dwelling in the lands of the present-day steppes of the Russian Black Sea. Their invincible cavalry raids were known to have passed like a dark cloud all over Europe from the Don to the Atlantic.
Simeon was forced by the Magyars to abandon Thrace and to hurry the better part of his army northwards. It did not succeed in winning the field and Simeon even had to encamp his troops behind the walls of the big Bulgarian forts along the bank of the Danube. The Magyars advanced on Preslav, the new Bulgarian capital, and besieged it.
The Bulgarian elite troopers confined to the castles by the Danube, and Preslav was guarded by volunteer forces consisting of adolescents, old men and women. To the south, Byzantium was preparing an offensive by an enormous army that could hardly be stopped by the meagre Bulgarian troops left back in Thrace.
Boris I cast off his monastic cassock to head the troops. The Magyar army was destroyed to the last man. The siege of the Bulgarian capital was raised. Boris was still putting back on his monastic cassock when the Bulgarian crack regiments left the Danube fortifications and took the offensive. Having driven the remains of the Magyar troops out of Bulgaria, Simeon made his way into the territories occupied by the Magyars. The enraged Bulgarians destroyed everything that crossed their path. The Magyars were forced to abandon for good the Black Sea littoral steppes and to settle in the heart of Europe, where they founded their own state, in present-day Hungary.
Then tsar Simeon was off against Byzantium again. He directed his armies to the western part of the Balkan Peninsula. The Bulgarians occupied the territories of present-day Albania and Northern Greece. The peace treaty, signed in 904 AD, endorsed all territorial gains of Bulgaria. But Byzantium decided to cede to Bulgaria its role of a dominant power in the European East. So this peace enabled the Bulgarian people to direct its energies to impressive building and cultural activities. Tsar Simeon was aware that as long as Byzantium existed, there would exist the universal state and the political idea denying the right to existence of the state he was ruling. Thus, his future foreign policy scheme included a plan to have the two states merge into one united Slavo-Byzantine empire with the Bulgarian ruler on the emperor's throne. His attempt to fulfil this plan by peaceful means, i.e., through a diplomatic matrimony in 912-914 AD, failed. Bulgaria and Byzantium found themselves involved in a vigorous conflict once again. The Bulgarians invaded on a large front and conquered most of the Byzantine domains in Europe.
The Byzantines retaliated and in August 917AD, all Byzantine troops were made into an army which set out towards Bulgaria. The Bulgarian and Byzantine armies met at the river Acheloi, near the present-day Bulgarian sea-side resort of Sunny Beach. The Bulgarian ruler, Simeon, a known authority on ancient literature, employed Roman tactics used against Hannibal and surrounded the Byzantine army, defeating it to the last man. The battle was exceptionally fierce, but Simeon was only slightly wounded.
The anti-Bulgarian coalition disintegrated at the news of the decisive defeat of Byzantium. The Hungarians and the Pechenegs refused to invade the Bulgarian possessions. Serbia was crushed by the Bulgarian troops and its territory annexed to Bulgaria.
After the battle at Acheloi, tsar Simeon proclaimed the Bulgarian church a patriarchate and himself an emperor and autocrat of the Romans. He effectively possessed the power over the European Southeast with the exception of Constantinople, still remaining unconquered. All attempts of the Bulgarian ruler to take the capital of the Romans were in vain. On 27 May 927 AD, tsar Simeon the Great died of heart failure. His successor, tsar Peter signed a peace treaty with Byzantium, which was in a fragile state. Byzantium had to recognise not only Bulgaria's territorial acquisitions but also the king's title of the Bulgarian ruler (equal to that of the emperor) and the independence of the Bulgarian patriarchate.
Tsar Peter’s rule of 42 years was the longest of any Bulgarian ruler in the history of the state and marked a peaceful period, with no conflicts among neighbouring states. The lasting peace helped make stronger the united Bulgarian nation, strengthening the position of Christianity, spreading once and for all, the Old Bulgarian alphabet and literature and establishing firmly Christian state and religious structures. Nevertheless at the end of Peter’s rule, some negative signs were emerging. Society was becoming more polarised, with the corrupt rich getting richer and the poor becoming poorer, as often happens.
The clash between the ruling class and the oppressed part of the societyshowed itself in the middle of the 10th century, through the teaching of a lower clergyman, Bogomil the Priest, began to spread like an avalanche all over Bulgaria. It was called Bogomilism after the name of its originator.
Bogomilism had its ideological roots in the system of views of two earlier heretic philosophies which had penetrated Bulgaria via Byzantium - those of the Paulicians and the Manichaeans. The Bogomils preached faith in the existence and operation of two forces - the Good (embodied in God) and the Evil (embodied in the Devil). The whole visible or material world and man were a creation of Satan, while the human soul was a creation of God. It was quite clear that such a philosophy would rate the state and the official church, together with their institutions and servants, as well as all structures of the society - the legislature and the like, as the work of Satan. Furthermore, since the Bogomils held that there was war between Good and Evil and that this war would inevitably end with the victory of the Good, they called for an all-out struggle against the state. The aggressiveness of this heresy could not but frighten both the state and the official church authorities. Anti-Bogomil struggle was waged to which the heretics responded by concealing their organisations.
Bogomilism crossed the Bulgarian borders and in the next few centuries enjoyed large-scale diffusion in the Balkan countries, Russia and Western Europe. In Italy the Bogomil offshoots were known as Cathars and in France, as Bougreans or Albigensians. The Bogomil organisations (communities or lodges) throughout Europe kept in close contact with each other. They exchanged people and literature and, in all spiritual affairs, recognised the supremacy of the main fraternity back in Bulgaria.
The echoes of this heretical outpouring spread to western Europe, which had relatively limited contact with Bulgaria. A rather poor view of Bulgarian culture was formed, a view which ignored the high cultural achievements current then. The perception of western Europeans was that the Bulgarians were a heretical nation where very unsavoury practices were common, giving coinage to words derived from the word, ‘Bulgar’ e.g. vulgar. This is most unfortunate. The geographic distance of Bulgaria to the West of Europe has always been a barrier to a true appreciation of its culture and history.
In 965 AD agreements of alliance with the Hungarians and the German emperor Otho I were concluded. These put an end to the country's foreign political immobilism and self-isolation from active international life. Crisis in the Bulgarian state was gaining momentum and this, by some tragic coincidence, concurred with a continued period of stabilisation for the Byzantine empire.
Byzantium paid huge sums of money to convince the Prince of Kiev to raid noth-eastern Bulgaria. He did this and narrowly succeeded in forming his own little state there. Scared by the loss of the northern territories, the Bulgarian palace aristocracy overthrew incapacitated tsar Peter, sent him to a monastery and gave the throne to his son Boris II. Possessing none of his great grandfather's skill the new Bulgarian tsar failed to organise the Bulgarian people in the struggle against the Russian aggression, and entered into an alliance with Bulgaria's sworn enemy, Byzantium, instead. They, of course, did not send him any reinforcements during the subsequent Russian aggression in 969 AD. The Russians again, conquered and besieged the capital city of Great Preslav. Instead of continuing the war with the Russians (three quarters of the Bulgarian territory were still free with all military potential intact), Boris II concluded an anti-Byzantine treaty with Svyatoslav and made him a commander-in-chief of the joint Russo-Bulgarian troops. The power of Boris II was formal - the uneducated Russian prince had the whole of the country in his full disposition.
The result was disastrous for Bulgaria – Svyatoslav led a huge army of Russians, Bulgarians, Pechenegs and Hungarians invaded Byzantium. It was his dream to found upon the ruins of Bulgaria and Byzantium an enormous barbarian state, stretching from Kiev to Constantinople. His military skills were not up the task, and his army was defeated, he being killed by his allies on his retreat. The Byzantines took the offensive and took over most of Bulgaria, stripping Boris of his power. The Byzantine army was exhausted and failed to solidify their conquest, however, which encouraged the western Bulgarian governors to launch, from Sofia (the modern day capital), a successful struggle to reclaim Bulgaria.
In 978 AD tsar Boris II somehow managed to escape from captivity. With his brother Romanus he made his way to the Bulgarian border but was accidentally shot dead by a Bulgarian sentry. Romanus could not ascend to the throne as he had been castrated by the Byzantines and thus, doomed to leave no issue. This and other accidents left Samuel unravelled contender for the throne and he became tsar of the new Bulgarian empire (978-1014). Samuel went on to thoroughly defeat the Byzantines and consolidate the Bulgarian State. Byzantium's allies, the Serbian principalities, were swept away and so were the Hungarians. Tsar Simeon the Great's once advanced main policy of no compromise against Byzantium seemed to have come to life again.
The pendulum of Bulgarian fortunes swung dramatically again when, in 1019, Byzantium re-gained control of Bulgaria following the death of Samuel.
The subjection of Bulgaria to direct Byzantine rule had, undoubtedly, grave consequences for the Bulgarian people. The Bulgarian patriarchal was downgraded to an archbishopric. Strangers were appointed incumbents of the Ohrida archbishopric. The Bulgarian literacy, liturgy and traditions were subjected to ruthless persecution. The greed and selfishness of the Byzantine officials, commissioned to work in the Bulgarian lands, gradually ruined the local economy. To most of them the years of service there meant no more than a golden opportunity to make a fortune. The Bulgarian aristocracy had slowly but consistently been removed from its lands. Many of them were sent on 'assignments' in other realms of the empire remote enough from the Balkans, while others were bribed to pass over to the Byzantines.
A few insurrections occurred, some briefly successful but all were ultimately put down. Bulgaria remained under Byzantine rule. At the end of the 11th century the Byzantine domains in the Balkans which, for nearly a century, had comprised chiefly Bulgarian lands, became the arena of fierce hostilities: the Normans invading from the south and the knights of the First (1096-1097) and then the Second (1146-1147) crusade advancing along the trans- European route with swords drawn and fire blazing. Most frightful of all, however, were the renewed raids of the barbarians from the steppes, raids unseen in those lands since the 7th century. In times gone the Bulgarian state had reliably safeguarded not only Byzantium but also the whole of Europe against the raids of bellicose Nomads. The now weaker Byzantine empire was no longer in the position to effectively defend the territory of the empire, so the burden of safeguarding the metropolitan mainstays fell on Bulgarian shoulders. During the 11th century all attempts at organising a liberation movement had stopped. The Bulgarians were busy organising their life-and-death struggle to keep body and soul together. At the cost of numerous lives lost they managed to restrict, within certain limits, the advance of the crusaders along their mapped-out routes and to crush or beat off the raids of the Uzes, the Pechenegs and the Cumans. A paradoxical situation arose at the end of the 12th century. Formally Byzantium was the sovereign of the Bulgarian lands, but whole areas (Moesia, Dobrudja and Macedonia) the Byzantine power was nominal. There ruled representatives of the Bulgarian aristocracy - harsh warriors who had been through dozens of battles. The population, inured to the privations of war and inspired by spurious accounts, supported them.
The crusades weakened the Byzantine empire to the point where, in 1204, it collapsed. Bulgaria reclaimed some of its independence, in Moesia, Wallachia, Thrace and the southern territories including Macedonia. The crusaders hoped to establish an eastern empire and they seized much land but their hopes were dashed in 1205 when the Bulgarians won a decisive battle at Adrianopole. The crusaders no longer posed a serious threat to the Balkans.
The threat from the crusaders was soon replaced by that of hordes of asian Tatars. The Bulgarian army crushed many waves of Tatars who had been invincible until that time. It is worth reminding that the Tatars, obsessed with the Asian mania for world hegemony, had already engulfed all state formations west of the Urals including Russia, had defeated and unmanned Hungary and were then heading towards Bulgaria in order to cover their flank - a prerequisite needed for their planned invasion of Western Europe. But in 1241 the Bulgarians routed the Tatars, which took the edge off their intended aggression against Western Europe once and for all. They remained a major political power for long centuries ahead but their ambitions did, never again, stretch beyond the borders of Eastern Europe - the lands reached until then.
The span between 1185 and 1241 marked the notable rise of the Bulgarian state. At the end of this period it seemed the only formation in Eastern Europe capable of uniting its population both against the expansion of the Asian barbarians and the advance of the Catholic West. However, the rise days were over and a period of decline of no smaller proportion set in. The inept foreign policy of the tzars led to many territories being lost all over. A notable Bulgarian tsar of the time, Constantine Tikh (1256-1277), did not manage to reverse the fortunes of the state. In 1263 his army was defeated by the army of the Byzantine empire which was back on its feet since 1261 and Bulgaria lost the southern Black Sea possessions. Now weaker, Bulgaria became easy prey to the Tatars who immediately resumed their vigorous raids against its surviving territories. Constantine Tikh was mentally broken by the defeats. He retired into himself behind the walls of Turnovo, leaving the country to the mercy of fate. The Bulgarians protected themselves in their fortresses, which the Tatars found difficult to capture and lost many men in the process.
After some initial success in fighting back the Tatars, to the point where they were driven out of Bulgaria, in the 1280s the tzar of Bulgaria, George Teter, was forced to submit to becoming a vassal of the Tatar khan. The Tatars nevertheless dared not enter the Bulgarian territories after their experiences there. After 20 years, Bulgaria managed to shake off its shameful status and become independent once again in 1300.
The Bulgarian state at this time had a fundamental flaw in its make-up which provided an opportunity for a new threatening force, that of the Ottoman empire. The Bulgarian state became less centralised with strong regional rulers whose relationship to the central power was largely nominal. The land began to fragment into feudal statelets, especially in Macedonia, Thrace, Moesia and Dobrudja. Foreign policy fragmented and these regional powers fought amongst themselves and with surrounding states in Byzantium, Wallachia, Serbia and Hungary.
In 1352 a detachment of Ottoman Turks sailed through the Dardanelles - the strait separating Europe from Asia, and took Tsimpe, a small Byzantine fort. That is considered to have marked the beginning of the fresh offensive of Asiatic Islamism against the Christian civilization of Europe. The first two assaults at the beginning of the 8th century and at the turn of the 13th century were beaten off by the Christian political powers of the East - Bulgaria, Byzantium and Russia. The third storm, however, led to centuries long confrontation causing, at different times, utmost bracing of all European energies directed at checking the Muslim invasion. It was eventually stopped and fought back for ever no nearer than Vienna. This happened in 1683 and was drowned in seas of European blood. Bulgaria and all the other medieval Christian states in the Balkans were ruined in the twists of this dramatic clash between the European and the Asian civilizations during the l4th-l5th centuries.
The success of the Ottoman invasions was due mostly to the fact that the Christian states could not organise a coherent reaction to them. The states were too fragmented and could not unite successfully to combat the threat. Also, the Western Christian powers did not realise the great danger posed and so did not come to the assistance of the eastern powers until it was too late. Indeed, the western states could only think about how they would divide up the Balkan states afterwards.
The combat potentialities of the Bulgarian people alone, a people which at that time took up three quarters of the territory of the Balkan Peninsula, would have been sufficient to throw the Muslim invaders back to Asia. The Bulgarians failed to offer efficient resistance, because of their being split into several state formations and their being frequently involved in intricate political chicanery both between themselves and with close and not so close Christian neighbors. It would be true to say the same about the rest of the Balkan countries - Serbia and Byzantium, which had been divided into several independent feudal possessions towards the middle of the 14th century.
A young and vigorous centralized Islamic monarchy, drawing on the resources of Asia's boundless womb and elated by the Islamic martial ideology - an ideology aspiring to fix the banner of Mohammed on all lands of the 'unfaithful' and to establish a world- embracing Islamic empire, was already confronting the disunited ranks of Bulgaria and the other Balkan feudal states.
The agony of the medieval Bulgarian state began only 12 years after the Turks' coming to Europe. In 1364 they invaded Bulgaria and took Central Thrace with the important towns of Borouy or Berrhoea (today's Stara Zagora) and Plovdiv. The attempted counter-offensive organized by two Bulgarian feudals from the region of Macedonia in 1371, resulted in the tragic battle at Chernomen (near Edirne). There the united Christian army of Serbs and Bulgarians, coming from various feudal possessions in the Balkans, was defeated. The Turks occupied new territories on the Balkans. In 1372 they invaded Bulgaria once more and, after sanguinary fighting, they eventually took a number of fortresses in the Rhodopes, Thrace and at the foothills of the Balkan Range. The new Bulgarian tsar Ivan Shishman (1371-1393) was forced to become a vassal to the Turkish sultan.
It was only after the Turks took control of Bulgaria that the West opened its eyes to the reality. Islam was completely intolerant to anything not conforming to its ideology and it did not accept at all the European values. This compelled the European political minds to organize a massive crusade against the Turks. In 1396 over 60,000 West European crussaders, led by king Sigismund invaded the Bulgarian lands. The troops of tsar Ivan Sratsimir (1356-1396), ruler of the last Bulgarian state, joined the West European army. The united forces of the Eastern and the Western Christians, having obviously disregarded their imbecile religious arguments in the face of the Islam, reached as far as Nicopolis. There, beneath the walls of the ancient Bulgarian fortress, the crusaders, lacking in coordinated and orderly command, let themselves be defeated by the Turks once again. All of Bulgarian was put under the Turkish yoke. This put an end to the medieval Bulgarian statehood. The Byzantine empire and the kingdom of Serbia were both destroyed a few decades after. The European Southeast found itself in the hands of a hostile Asiatic power.
The fall of the medieval Bulgarian states under the Ottoman rule interrupted the Bulgarian people's natural development in the framework of the European civilization. This experience was shared by other European states in their history, but the Bulgarian experience was different in that the imposed regime was completely different to European values. In the course of centuries the Bulgarians were forced to live under a state and political system that was substantially different from and distinctly alien to the European civilization which had evolved on the basis of Christianity and the Christian economic, social and cultural patterns. The intrusive nature of Islamism and its intolerance to anything that was not part of it, resulted in the continued confrontation between the Ottoman empire and Christian Europe in the l5th-l8th centuries. That fact drew an iron curtain between the Bulgarian people on the one side, and Europe and the free Slav countries on the other. In other words, Bulgaria was separated from the progressive trends of the Renaissance and the Enlightenment as well as from the nascent modern bourgeois world. The Bulgarians were pushed into a direction of development, which had nothing in common with their seven-century history until then, history deeply connected with the natural course of the European political, economic and cultural development.
The Turkish conquerors ruthlessly destroyed all Bulgarian state and religious structures. The natural political leaders of the people in the Middle Ages, i.e. the boyars and the higher clergy, vanished from sight. That deprived the Bulgarians of both the possibility for self-organization and any chance of having foreign political allies for centuries on end.
The place allotted to the Bulgarian people in the Ottoman feudal political system entitled it to no legal, religious, national, even biological rights as Bulgarian Christians. They had all been reduced to the category of the so called rayah (meaning 'a flock', attributed to the non-Muslim subjects of the empire). The peasants who represented the better half of the Bulgarian population were dispossessed of their land. According to the Ottoman feudal system which remained effective until 1834, all of it belonged to the central power in the person of the Turkish sultan. The Bulgarians were allowed to cultivate only some plots. Groups of rural Christian families, varying in number, were put under an obligation to give part of their income to representatives of the Muslim military, administrative and religious upper crust, as well as to fulfil various state duties. The number of the families liable to that payment was determined according to their position in the Ottoman state, military and religious hierarchy. The establishment of that kind of intercourse in agriculture - the fundamental pillar of the economy at that time, clearly led to the total loss of motivation for any real farming or and production improvements both among the peasants and the fief-holders. The complex and incredibly burdensome tax system forced the farmers to produce as much as needed for their families' subsistence, while the feudals preferred to earn a lot more from looting and from the incessantly successful wars waged by the Ottoman empire in all directions until the end of the 17th century.
Bulgarians had no chance of entering even the lowest levels of the Ottoman bureaucracy.
The Bulgarian people were subjected to national and religious discrimination unheard of in all of European history. During court proceedings, for example, a single Muslim's testimony was more than enough to confute the evidence of dozens of Christian witnesses. The Bulgarians were not entitled to building churches, setting up their offices or even to wearing bright colours. Of the numerous taxes (about 80 in number) the 'fresh blood tax' (a levy of Christian youths) was particularly heavy and humiliating. At regular intervals, the authorities had the healthiest male- children taken away from their parents, sent to the capital, converted into Islam and then trained in combat skills. Raised and trained in the spirit of Islamic fanaticism, the young men were conscripted in the so called janissary corps, the imperial army of utmost belligerence known to have caused so much trouble and suffering to both the Bulgarians and Christian Europe.
The Turkish authorities exerted great pressure on parts of the Bulgarian people to make them convert their faith and become Muslims. That policy was meant to limit the basis of Bulgarian culture and to increase the Turkish population numbers. In medieval times, it was considered that a people’s religion largely determined its values and allegiance. To help make this happen, the Turkish authorities took the Christian names of those who had converted into Islam and gave them Arab names instead.
A variety of ways and means was used to make the Bulgarians more like the Turks. Some of the methods were the 'blood tax’, and the regular kidnapping of children, pretty women, girls and young men to Turkish families. Quite frequently, whole areas were encircled by troops and their inhabitants forced to adopt Islam and new Arab names, while the objectors were 'edifyingly' slain. In those cases, however, the 'new Muslims' were allowed to go on living in the compact Bulgarian environment, i.e. as a community which retained both its language and its Bulgarian national consciousness. The present-day Bulgarian Muslims representing about five percent of modern Bulgaria's population, are descendants of those Mohammedanised Bulgarians, whom the Bulgarian Christians used to call pomaks (from the Bulgarian root-words macha or maka, meaning harassed or caused to suffer). And yet the thousands of Bulgarians whom Bulgaria lost once and for all were those who had been subjected to individual conversion to Islam. For, it is only natural that having fallen into a community of strangers, speaking a different language and practicing different customs and faith, they had easily and quickly been assimilated. The genocide carried out by the Ottoman Turks during hostilities in the Bulgarian lands, at the time of uprising or riot suppression, during the frequent spells of feudal anarchy, or even of Ottoman troops move-ups from garrison stations to the battle-field, had struck heavy blows on the Bulgarian nation. The Bulgarian Christian population was treated as infidel and hostile and it was outlawed even at the time of peace. Individual and mass emigration of Bulgarians to foreign lands was another cause for no lesser losses to the Bulgarian nation. There were times when whole regions became depopulated. Thus, in 1688-1689 the whole of the north- eastern Bulgarian population emigrated and in 1829-1830 the same thing happened with the population of southeastern Bulgaria, Thrace, etc. Unprotected by Bulgarian state, religious and cultural institutions the immigrants, with only few exceptions, amalgamated into the people whose country had received them. That was the way in which thousands of Bulgarian immigrants had vanished in Romania, Hungary and Serbia.
During the l5th-l7th centuries the Bulgarian nation had suffered a gradual but grave biological collapse which predetermined, to a large extent, its place in the European civilization. According to some Bulgarian historians' estimations, the beginning of the Turkish oppression in the 15th century found Bulgaria with a population of about 1.3 million. Those were the then demographic parameters of any of the large European nations, for example, the population in the present-day territories of England, France or Germany. One hundred years later, the Bulgarians were already down to 260 000 people and remained as many in the course of two more centuries. The demographic growth was suppressed through genocide, Mohammedanisation and emigration. The biological collapse of the l5th-l7th centuries had repercussions which are still being keenly felt. The Bulgarian nation, nowadays, amounts to some ten million people while its European equals in number, back in the 15th century, are now sixty to eighty million-strong.
The Bulgarians under these circumstances could not organise any real resistance, although there were persistent guerrilla movements orchestrated from the woods, where brave rebels would disrupt Turkish operations. This helped reduce intolerable tax regimes and make the Turks more conscious of reaction to their more extreme actions.
The Bulgarian people were living through one of the most difficult periods in its centuries long existence. It had been deprived of its state, its church, its intelligently and its legitimate rights. Furthermore, its survival as an ethnos had also been put at stake. Under the heel of that powerful, ruthless and uncivilized Asiatic despotism, it lasted out but remained without any substantial material and spiritual resources needed for its further development. Thus, the Bulgarians, along with all the other European peoples which had been engulfed by the Ottoman empire, were to lag some centuries behind the attainments of present-day Europe.
The Ottoman expire eventually declined, being so corrupt and incapable of change. It could not keep up with the technological and military advances of the West. The beginning of the end came at Vienna in 1683, then the Turks lost a huge army in the siege of that city. The Europeans, with Russians, Autrians, Poles and Viennese, had huge losses too, but it saw the beginning of the illness that led to the Ottoman empire becoming the ‘Sick Man of Europe’.
In Bulgaria, the number of Turks stayed relatively small compared to the indigenous Bulgarians. The Turks believed that the best cure for any illness was that given by the hands of Allah, so they became easy prey to epidemics and plaques. The Bulgarians, on the other hand, had the knowledge, will and means to combat most diseases. This tradition continues to this day. Most Bulgarians, and eastern Europeans, are much more adept at preventing illnesses and promoting a healthy lifestyle than their western counterparts. After all, it was Bulgaria which discovered the secret of producing yogurt, a gift it gave to the rest of the world.
The Bulgarians, afterwards, saw some room for improving their lot. A new bourgeoisie emerged based on the craft industry. It was this new class which harboured thoughts of rebellion, especially as it would benefit them to have an independent Bulgaria. They slowly built up a small capital base. It was to take a few centuries before they could finally organise themselves to form a coherent resistance.
The earliest national uprisings in modern times provoked extreme atrocities from the Turks.
Vassil Levski, whom the present-day Bulgarians consider their greatest national hero of all times and epochs, was born in Karlovo, a prosperous center of craftindustry in 1837. At the age of twenty four he took the vows of a deacon. The lot in store for the young Bulgarian was obviously not the one of a monk living in resignation to the world. In 1862 he fled to Serbia and enlisted as a volunteer in the Bulgarian legion raised by another prominent rebel, Rakovski. The legion took part in the Serbo-Turkish hostilities. Between 1862-1868 Levski participated in almost all Bulgarian armed assaults against the Ottoman empire.
The revolutionary theory which took form in Vassil Levski's mind towards the end of the 1860s, turned out to be a leap forward for the Bulgarian liberation movement. Levski viewed the national liberation revolution as a concomitant armed upheaval of the whole Bulgarian population in the Ottoman empire. It followed that this uprising had to be well-prepared in advance, with all adequate military training and proper coordination on the part of an internal revolutionary organization branching out into committees in each living area. That organisation was supposed to operate independent from the plans or the political combinations of any foreign powers which, as known by previous experience, had brought only trouble and failure to the national revolutionary cause.
Levski also determined the future form of government in liberated Bulgaria - a democratic republic, standing on the principles of the Human and Citizen Rights Charter of the Great French Revolution. That was the only document hitherto known to guarantee the individual freedom of expression, speech and association. In their essence Levski's ideas tallied with the most radical ideas of the European bourgeois-democratic revolution.
In more practical terms, in 1869 Levski addressed himself to the task of setting up local committees. By the middle of 1872 he had scoured the Bulgarian lands with the dedication of an apostle, and succeeded in establishing a strong network of committees in hundreds of Bulgarian towns and villages which were in constant contact with and subordination to the clandestine government in the town of Lovech. They provided weapons, organized combat detachments, and got traitors and Turkish officials punished.
In May 1872, the Bulgarian Revolutionary Central Committee and the Internal Revolutionary Organization, convinced that a coordination of the efforts would be for the general good, merged into one organization. Revolutionary uplift overwhelmed the whole country.
This enthusiasm was short-lived as only a few months on, in the autumn of that year, during a robbery of a Turkish post-office meant to procure money for weapons, the Turkish police picked up the trail of some committees in northeast Bulgaria including the organization headquarters in Lovech. Numerous arrests of revolutionaries followed, threatening the organization to fall through. karavelov demanded that Levski should immediately rise the Bulgarians in revolt. Levski, who was in Bulgaria at that time and was well-aware that the population was yet unprepared, refused to fulfil the order and tried to take into his charge all documentation belonging to the organization - a safety precaution against its getting into Turkish hand, which could destroy the movement completely. Unfortunately, he himself fell in the hands of the Turkish authorities who put him on trial and sentenced him to death by hanging. Levski was sent to the gallows in Sofia in February 1837. The death of Vassil Levski - a generally recognized leader of the national revolutionary movement, caused temporary crisis. The Bulgarian Revolutionary Central Committee was groping for new ways and means. A number of revolutionaries undertook actions without coordinating them with the underground headquarters, while others sank into apathy.
By 1875 a group of young revolutionaries - Hristo Botev, Stefan Stambolov, Nikola Obretenov and others, was ready to play an important role in the Bulgarian Revolutionary Central Committee. They attempted at and partly succeeded in restoring the internal revolutionary committee network. Taking advantage of the deep crisis of the Ottoman empire (in 1875 Turkey was adjudged bankrupt, while Bosnia and Herzegovina were shaken up by uprisings), the young revolutionaries speeded up the preparation for an armed uprising. It broke out in the spring of 1876 and was recorded in the annals of Bulgarian history as the April uprising.
However, that uprising did not spread all over the Bulgarian lands. Only the towns and villages, nestling among the mountain hills surrounding Plovdiv - the capital city of Thrace, rose on a mass scale. In the other regions only guerilla detachments had been set up. After several days of heroic fighting, it was crushed with cruelty unheard of in the human history. The Turkish atrocities were unprecedented. The troops made a massacre of the population both in rebellious and non-rebellious settlements. In some places the inhabitants were killed to the last man without distinction of age or sex.
The Turkish atrocities that accompanied the April uprising illustrated to the whole world the true face of the Ottoman state and its barbarity. World public opinion raised its voice in defence of the Bulgarian people. British, American, Italian, French, German and Russian journalists and consuls made known to their governments and their peoples the truth about these monstrous crimes. Prominent statesmen, political and public figures, intellectuals and scholars to whom the Bulgarians would always be indebted, joined in a campaign for the Bulgarians' right to lead free life. Some of the names that stand out among the champions of the Bulgarian people's cause are those of William Gladstone - leader of the Liberal party of Britain, Charles Darwin, Dublin-born Oscar Wilde (his plays are popular in Bulgaria even now!), Victor Hugo and Giuseppe Garibaldi. The first Chancellor of the German Reich, Bismarck made a speech in the Reictistag to the effect that the abominable bloodshed in Bulgaria had rendered Turkey no longer eligible to a place in the community of the European states.
The events in Bulgaria raised a tide of compassion, solidarity and willingness for support among the Russian public. The Russian people, sharing with the Bulgarians related languages, cultures and religions, insisted that its emperor and government declare war on Turkey.
The Russian army came to Bulgaria in 1877. A year of battles ensued, with Russian and Bulgarian volunteer troops fighting many bloody campaigns against Turkish armies of superior numbers. The Bulgarian troops more then proved that they deserved liberation. At one significant juncture, the Bulgarians resorted to hurling rocks and the bodies of their dead comrades on Turkish troops who were besieging their city, leading to the decimation of the enemy.
Eventually, the Ottoman empire was forced to conclude a peace treaty in 1878. The Berlin treaty dismembered the Bulgarian people into three parts. The northern Bulgarian lands (Moesia) were made into the principality of Bulgaria - an independent state under Turkish suzerainty. The lands of Thrace, called Eastern Rumelia, were made an autonomous province under the rule of the Turkish sultan. Macedonia and part of Thrace were unconditionally returned to the Turkish administration.
A constitution was drawn up and, In April 1879, the First Grand National Assembly (the Bulgarian Parliament) elected the German prince Alexander of Battenberg as prince of Bulgaria. As a Russian army officer he had participated in the Liberation War, which earned him fairly good reputation in Bulgaria.
The regions organised themselves and in time, all of Bulgaria was unified.
The great powers all had their eye on the fledgling state, hoping to make it a principality of their own. Political intigues ensued between Austria, Britain, Russia and Turkey. The Serbians attacked an unprotected western Bulgaria, at the behest of Austria. The Bulgarians launched a fierce and decisive resistance which proved to the other powers that it had the organisation, will and means to determine its own destiny independently of the great powers. At the beginning of 1886 Bulgaria signed a peace treaty with Serbia and later, an agreement with Turkey which regularised its position as a single unified state.
Bulgaria saw itself on the losing side of the first World War, resulting in a great decrease in its army, a disastrous economy and large reparations to pay. The country and its people seemed to lose its direction and hobble along and then came the Second World War.
The government was very conscious of the disastrous consequences of taking sides in this new conflict and tried, initially, to retain a neutral position. However, with Germany at its gates, it chose to side with the Axis powers. On 1 March 1941, Bulgaria joined the fascist bloc. The public opposition to this decision was rather weak and this reaction was determined by one main psychological factor: the Soviet Union, which most Bulgarians used to identify with Russia - the country they had traditional liking for, had signed a friendship and non-aggression pact with nazi Germany. Things seemed well to begin with (no war with Germany, good relations with the USSR even after Germany invaded it). In 1944, the USSR invaded Bulgaria and no resistance was offered; the Bulgarians found themselves with no option but to side against the Axis powers. It declared war on Germany in September 1944.
It has to be mentioned that the Bulgarian government was the only member of the Nazi Axis to resist the deportation of jews during the war. Almost all the 50,000 Bulgarians jews survived the war despite pressure by Germany to have them processed. Bulgaria has always been a very tolerant and peace-loving country.
The Bulgarian troops had good success in reclaiming their land from the Germans in Macedonia and went on as far as Austria. When, in April 1945, the soldiers of First Bulgarian Army and the British Eighth Army established contact at the Austrian 'Elbe', the encounter was marked by a friendly football match between the two army teams which drew one all.
The participation of the Bulgarian armies in the final stage of World War II and the excellent performance of their extremely efficient live force against the Germans and their Hungarian, Croatian and Albanian allies, improved considerably the international image of the country. This enabled Bulgaria to live at greater ease to see the peace conference at which it would no longer be looked upon as an ordinary satellite to the fascist bloc. Sure enough the Paris treaty of peace which was signed in 1946, made provision for the territorial integrity of Bulgaria within its borders of 1939 and acknowledged the annexation of Dobrudja of 1940.
In September 1944, a year after the Bulgarian Tzar Boris III died (one theory claims he was poisoned in an airplane on his way back from Germany), the Socialist Revolution took place. It was inspired by the Soviet Union, long-prepared and quickly realized.
Thus Bulgaria fell under 45 years of Bolshevik domination, which ended on November 10, 1989, when Todor Zhivkov - Bulgaria's dictator for the last 30 years was ousted from power. This change marked a new phase in the development of the country - the democratisation of the public life and the start of Bulgaria's integration in the Western world.
Customs and Traditions
In Bulgaria we have many interesting traditions and most of them are unique even for the different parts of the country. We celebrate Christmas Eve, Christmas, New Year's Day, Saint George's Day, Easter the birthdays and the name days. All of these holidays have their own rituals.
New Year
On the first of January Bulgarian men, Sourvakari, go from house to house wishing people a Happy New Year. Late after midnight, they set out on their round of the homes, tapping everybody on the back with decorated cornel twigs, with wishes for health, long life and success. The cornel twig is called “sourvachka”. It is the sourvakari’s indispensable attribute, and is differently decorated in the different regions. This is the original tradition, but in nowadays the people help their children in making their “sourvachki”, so they have to tap the members of the family. After the tapping people give them some money for the New Year.
“Triffon Zarezan”
This is the wine-grower’s day and is celebrated in the fourteenth of February. It originally comes from the ancient Thracians and is connected to the god of celebrations and wine- Dionysus. On this day the vines are pruned and sprinkled with wine throughout the country. People sing ritual songs and dances with wishes for a plentiful harvest. In some parts of Bulgaria a "Vine King" is chosen, who is crowned with a wreath of wine twigs. Everybody believes that the fertility will depend on the King's happiness. On “Trifon Zarezan” the National Mummers participate in festivals organised for this holiday.
The First of March
On 1 March all the people give each other strips or small woollen dolls, called "Pizho” and “Penda" or "martenitsi". The name is connected with March, in Bulgarian language called "mart".
The story behind the tradition is that an angry old lady, named “Grandma Marta” (in Bulgarian “Baba Marta”) changes her mood very rapidly from bad to good and vice versa.
At the very beginning of our country people were fighting a lot, usually in March, and most of the warriors had to leave their families and home. The women were very unhappy about it and they decided to give their husbands red and white tassels, or small wooll- en figures of a white girl and a red boy. The red represented the blood of the warriors, which their wives didn't want spilt, and the white - the pale faces of their wives while they were waiting for their husbands.
The exchange of those tassels had two reasons. The first is to remind the men about their families, and second to please Baba Marta so she does not change her mood so frequently, and the warriors do not have problems with the weather and do not die because of frost.
In nowadays the Bulgarians believe that they will be healthy during the whole year if they wear the “martenitsa” in March. From long time our grannies were saying that "if you don't wear your martenitsa, Baba Marta will bring bad things to you."
As soon as we see a stork or a swallow, we have to take away the "martenitsi" because these birds show the arrival of the spring. In different parts of our country the process of taking away the tassels is different. Some people tie them on a fruit tree. So we give the trees the health we had, while we were wearing the tassels. Other people put the "martenitsa" under a stone so they will be as strong as stone. They have to check on it, and if a worm bites the "martenitsa", it will be a very healthy year and we will have success. If it is an ant, it's the same but we will have to work a lot in order to achieve something. If spider crawls over the "martenitsa" this means that we are in trouble and we might not have all that luck.
The Third of March
On that day Bulgarians celebrate the liberation of Bulgaria from Ottoman yoke. On this national holiday the Bulgarian people pay homage to the heroes, who fought in the Russian-Turkish war 1877-1878, that put an end to the five centuries of the Turkish rule.
Mummer’s Celebrations
Every spring in Bulgaria, usually on the eight of March, “koukeri” (mummers or masquers) come out on the streets to drive the evil away, and to mark the beginning of the spring.
The people make their own personal masks and costumes to prove their skill and aesthetic feeling. That is why no two ritual masks resemble each other. They are coloured, covered with beads, ribbons and woollen tassels, made from animal skins and have big heavy bells around the waist. The “koukeri” carry sticks and perform ritual dances through the town. The main mummer has a heavy swaying that is meant to represent wheat heavy with grain and the bells tied around the waist are intended to drive away the evil and sickness.
Day of Humour
On the first of April we celebrate the Day of Humour. At this date Gabrovo, a town in Northern Bulgaria, becomes the venue of humour from within the country and from abroad. There are many performances, exhibitions of cartoons and satire plastic arts, movie festivals organised for this holiday. This is the day when everybody in my country is allowed to lie and make jokes with everyone. Sometimes it is big confusing of lie and truth.
“Lazarovden”
Lazarovden is the Saint Lazar’s Day. It is celebrated on the Saturday before Palm Day. It is of Slav origin.
Young girls play ritual games and sing songs during the long Lent. They are dressed in beautiful costumes with superb heavy jewellery. The girls are coming out fit to be married. Getting married and setting up a home has always been a part of the feelings and hopes of the Bulgarian.
“Tsvetnitsa”
Tsvetnitsa-Vrabnitsa (Palm Sunday) is one of the biggest Bulgarian holidays. It is a holiday of flowers and trees. The celebration is rich in a variety of customs, songs and melodies. It is held annually on the last Sunday before Easter.
Early in the morning on Tsvetnitsa the young girls who have been ‘lazarki’ on the previous day go to the nearest river. They have to find a place where the water is calm. They put pieces of traditional bread on willow barks and throw them into the water. Then they wait to see which bark outsails and the girl that own it has to invite everybody to her house. There they all sit down to a table with traditional bread, hominy and mashed nettle. Groups of young girls, wearing the traditional national costumes, carry hand baskets to collect eggs as gifts and sing the Lazar Day songs.
Also on Tsvetnitsa, the people who have names of flowers celebrate their name days (in Bulgarian “tsvete” means flower).
“Velikden”
In Bulgaria on Easter we need to have coloured eggs and “kozunak” on the table. The bright red colored egg is the symbol of Easter (or Pascha) for the Orthodox Christians all over the world. The eggs are colored on Holy Thursday after the Divine Liturgy. The Easter breads are a worldwide Orthodox tradition as well. They are big and small and decorated. The bread is called "kolache" or "kozunak". One of these Easter breads is specially decorated with one or more (but an odd number) of red eggs are incrustate into it. This bread is taken to church on Saturday evening when a special sequence of services takes place: Midnight Office, Rush Procession, Matins & Divine Liturgy. These are actually the services of Great and Holy Pascha (Velikden). After the service the clergy blesses the breads and eggs brought by the people and they take them home.
The eggs are cracked after the midnight service and during the next days. One egg is cracked on the wall of the church (and this is the first egg eaten after the long Great Fast). The ritual of cracking the eggs takes place before the Easter lunch. Each person selects his egg. Then people take turns tapping their egg against the eggs of others, and the person who ends up with the last unbroken egg is believed to have a year of good luck.
The traditional Orthodox Paschal greeting is: "Christ is Risen!" (Hristos Voskrese) The answer is: "Indeed He is Risen" (Voistinu Voskrese). This is the greeting during 40 days after Pascha.
In my country the Easter traditions are a variant of the Orthodox traditions, but are added some unique Bulgarian beliefs.
“Gergyovden”
It is on the sixth of May, and it is another typical Bulgarian holiday is Gergiovden (Saint George's Day). The day before Gergiovden we have to take a twig of oak or beech and we put it at the outer door of the house. In the Gergiovden’s evening we eat lamb. The first peace is given to the godfather. In the afternoon we play music in the public square and the people dance a Bulgarian dance called "horo".
There are traditions in Bulgaria of drinking wine and Georgian table. There is the "Tamada"- main face at the Georgian table. He is the table's leader and is chosen by the people, which are at the tabTe. He must be clever and jolly. He drinks tradition toasts one after another with various glasses.
The Mravalzhamieri is Georgian folk song for the Georgian table. The drink for the table is wine. On the Georgian table ("Supra") wine's use culture and leader's institute were created by our ancestors and today if someone has tradition like ours, he has taken it from us.
Wine is divine liquid for Georgian man and when he is drinking that divine liquid, he has a right to give someone's bless. That is why on Georgian table it is necessary to present wine.
One of the best traditions is that is last minutes leader of table says a divine words. This words are:
”Everywhere sacred virgin
Was coming barefooted
Everyone is blessed from god
Guest and hostess.”
The Day of the Slavic Alphabet
We also celebrate May 24, the Day of the Slavic Alphabet. We decorate the schools with flowers and wreaths and we sing songs about the brothers Saint Cyril and Saint Metodius who invented the Slavic alphabet.
The Day of Botev
At twelve o’clock on the second of June, all Bulgarians stand in silence for one minute, in memory of Khristo Botev and those that sacrificed their lives for the freedom of Bulgaria.
The Rose Celebration
When in late May and early June every year, the oil bearing roses from the Rose Valley are ready to be picked up. Rose-picking starts at dawn, before sunrise and before the rose fragrance has had a chance to disappear. This is the time of the Festival of Roses, celebrated with carnivals, processions, folk songs and dances in Karlovo and Kazanluk on the Sunday in June.
The Bulgarian oleaginous rose yields are 70 percent of the world’s attar of roses, and are used by every well known perfume company as an essential component of its products.
Christmas
On Christmas Eve a low table is arranged with a lot of vegetarian meals like walnuts, corn, etc. The food is blessed with incense which is put on the plough share. This is done to secure abundant crops during the next year. The most important thing we eat on Christmas Eve is a kind of cake on bun in which we put pieces of paper where we write good things that we want to happen during the New Year. When we serve it for dinner everybody eats from it and looks at his "luck".
Red Wine in Bulgarian Culture
Alcohol takes an essential part in the life in my country. Bulgaria is the country, where one can find whatever he wants - from vodka to whiskey, from tequila to beer, or from the so-called "rakiya" to wine.
Wine is very popular in Bulgaria. We have many different kinds of red and white wine. No matter red or white - it is really good. The Bulgarian wine has a special taste - it is strong, just a little bitter, tart, and dark-coloured and smells refreshing. In the winter, the red wine is the most popular drink.
People in Bulgaria usually make their own home wine. There is whole tradition for making wine. Every year the Bulgarians buy or usually cultivate their own grapes- red and white. There is a special way to make wine. The grapes, about few hundred kilos, should be cleaned and squeezed. There are barrels, which must be very clean before we put the squeezed grapes into them. It takes a couple of months before the period of fermenting ends and we can drink really good wine. Well, this depends of the year. Sometimes there is not enough rain and it is very hot, or too much rain and bugs that destroy the grapes.
This is a long tradition and nobody knows when and how everything started. It is not only a part of the Bulgarian traditions, but also a family tradition. In the Orthodox religion red wine symbolizes the blood of Jesus Christ and it is a basic element of the Sacrament. There are a lot of songs in Bulgaria about love and wine. The wine is a main part of our culture.
“Rakiya” Making
Rakiya is one of the most popular drinks in Bulgaria. Every second person drinks rakiya at parties, discos or somewhere else. In taste it is close to the Russian “Vodka”.
Just like with the wine, the making of rakiya is whole tradition. Most of the people prefer to make their own drink, than to buy it from the supermarket. And there is nothing like the homemade rakiya.
The plums are usually picked up three months before the boiling of the drink. The plums must stay several months in the canister. There are two ways of preparing the plums for making rakiya. The first way, which is faster, is to add some sugar to the pulp in the canisters. The other one is without sugar; it is slower but rakiya tastes better.
First the fire should be lighted. It has to be neither very fierce nor too low. Then the cauldron with the plums should be put on the fire. The cauldron has a top with a small hole in the middle. From this hole a pipe goes out into another container with a serpentine turning. Another pipe projects from the container, trough which the ready rakiya flows into another cauldron.
The "rakiya making" process is: The plums are boiling and make steam, which is going through the pipe into the serpentine turning. There it condenses and turns into a fluid. The fluid flows into the second cauldron. This liquid is the ready rakiya. In the beginning it is stronger and in the end it becomes milder.
It stays for two or three days and then we can drink it.
Culture and the Arts
Literature
In the 19th century the first printing house in Bulgaria was established. At this time the most well-known author, Hristo Botev (1848-76), wrote in support of Bulgarian independence. His poems reflect the complicated rhythms of Bulgarian folk music.
There are many well-known post-liberation writers like the poet and revolutionist Khristo Botev (1847-1876), the novelist and playwright Ivan Vazov (1850-1921), philosopher Stoyan Mikhaylovski (1856-1927), satirist Aleko Konstantinov (1890-1970), and short story writers Elin Pelin (1878-1949) and Yordan Yovkov (1880-1937). They helped very much in shaping the Bulgarian language. During the communist period, the state suppressed freedom of speech.
Kristo Botev is considered the greatest poet in modern Bulgarian literature. He was also a gifted writer of journalistic prose. He wrote some twenty superb poems. The rare combination of a powerful poetic talent, an extraordinary life and an heroic death made him a national hero and a role model for future generations of Bulgarian poets. Many of the best Bulgarian poets have devoted special poems to him, and his works have been translated into twenty- five languages.
For more than fifty years Ivan Vazov was the most prominent figure in Bulgarian literature after the liberation. He wrote abut Bulgaria's national reawakening and to articulate the ideas of the past, lest they be forgotten by postliberation society. In these days his works remain an invaluable treasure of Bulgarian cultural history. Vazov is considered the patriarch of Bulgarian literature because he provided the highest standards for future generations of writers, who would seek in his verse a solution to their doubts and a confirmation of their ideas. He loves his homeland, its freedom and its nature, and he is able to incorporate into his works Bulgaria's traditions, history, morality, and national spirit, so now Vazov is regarded as Bulgaria's national poet.
Aleko Konstantinov was a humorist and social commentator during a period of political turmoil in newly liberated Bulgaria. His chief literary creation, Bay Ganyo, is one of the best known literary figures in Bulgaria because of his distillation of all that is most unattractive in the Bulgarian character. The book “Bay Ganyo” is very funny.
The modern writers in Bulgaria include the novelist Viktor Paskov (Ballad for George Henig) and poet and novelist Blaga Dimitrova (Because the Sea is Black). Dimitrova served as vice-president of Bulgaria from 1992 to 1994.
National Costumes
There are costumes for men and costumes for women and for the different regions, occasions and weather. The traditional costumes are exclusively home made product, born out of the women's taste and creativity. The materials for clothing textiles are flax, hemp, wool, silk and cotton. The typical Bulgarian footwear tsurvouli (a kind of sandals) is made from leather, and furs were used for kalpatsi (men's fur caps). Both women and men wear full, white shirts. Women wear embroidered bodices over richly ornamented skirts. The colours, the textiles and the details in the costume signify age, marital status and regional origin. If there is unmarried girl, her hair can be shown, but if it is married woman, her hair is concealed.
All traditional Bulgarian costumes are decorated with exquisite embroidery. They are made with big details and because they are handmade in nowadays the costumes are very expensive.
Crafts
The Bulgarian crafts are woven rugs and cloth, handmade lace, woodcarvings, and ceramics.
The designs and the colours for cloths and rugs are unique for every region of the country. Fibres are usually natural and include hand-spun wool, goat hair, and cotton, and they are often dyed with colours from herbs, berries, and flowers. Kilim (a type of hand-loomed rug) from the village of Chiprovtsi are well known in the world and their quality and artistic richness can be compared to rugs from Kashmir and Persia.
The small textile products are made from traditional materials. They are very well decorated. The most popular among larger textiles is the rug. Goat-hair rugs and coves, woven of goat-hair wool, are used for bedspreads, especially in the mountain regions. They are in one colour or in multicoloured stripes. The tradition of embroidery most connected with the decoration of clothes.
Anonymous shepherds, who were amateur woodcarvers, have created the works of shepherds' woodcarving. They used a knife to engrave or carve the wood. Parallel with their woodcarving is the art of church woodcarving. The increasing number of churches, monasteries and chapels that were built during the Revival led to the evolvement of several Bulgarian woodcarving schools. People have developed church decoration on the basis of unified Bulgarian tradition. Masters of woodcarving made church iconostases, bishop's thrones, pulpits.
Many wine bowls, water vessels, broad plates are handmade works of metal in Bulgaria. They are decorated with combinations of geometrical forms, streaks and dots, and the construction shows the varying nuances of the reflected light. The engraving by means of awl, as well as the use of acids for changing the metal surface in definite patterns, is typical Bulgarian method of decoration of the arts of metal.
Architecture
Many towns and villages in Bulgaria have preserved unique 18th and 19th century Bulgarian architecture. Kolyo Fitcheto is Bulgaria's best-known architect; his churches, bridges and other monumental works are seen throughout Northern Bulgaria.
Houses feature graceful curved bay windows and ornate wooden ceilings, the walls are hand painted. All this shows the influence from the East and from Central Europe.
Some Rhodopi and North Stara Planina villages have narrow cobbled streets and stone homes with slate roofs. In these areas are found old stone Roman and Turkish bridges and merchant roads.
Music
Bulgarian folk art has centuries-old history. The Bulgarian folk songs are an expression of the Bulgarian way of life trough the ages, and they are also fairy tales, riddles, proverbs and sayings. They are product of joint creative work of the Bulgarians in the old ages. Bulgarian folk songs are ritual songs, labour songs, customs songs, historical, heroic and songs about the Haidouti.
The traditional female vocal music has rich and stirring sound. In some regions the vocalists sing a polyphonic harmony, full of dissonance and the sounds are elaborated with whoops, vibrato, and slides.
The Bulgarian folk music is different for the different areas in Bulgaria. People can distinguish the songs by this what region in the country are they from. These are the folk music regions - Thrace, Pirin, Shopluk, Rhodopies, Northern Bulgaria and Dobrudja. There is one popular Rhodope folksong, named “Izel e Delyu Haidutin”, sung by the Famous Valya Balkanska, that was recorded on a gold disk and sent in the space as a message on the American spacecraft “Voyager” in 1977.
In my country, like in every other, we have unique national musical instruments. The most common are the gaida (bagpipe), kaval (end-blown flute), duduk, dvoyanka, gadulka (bowed stringed instrument), tambura (a strummed stringed instrument), taranduka and the tapan (a large drum).
Dance
Just like the folk music, the Bulgarian dances are also different by region. The dance regions are the same as the music regions.
The Bulgarian dace is called “horo”. The horo can be danced in a closed or open circle formation, or in a line. There is a leader or leaders of the horo (Horovodec) who are located at the ends of the line. They wave a handkerchief held in their free hand. The people hold their hands or their belts of the costumes while playing. The movements in the dances are mainly bouncing, and the legs play an important role, and the head and the body participate fully.
Some horo dances resemble very much of the Irish dances. There are many steps combinations that are very similar.
Conclusion
This was my first year in Ireland, and this was my first project ever. In Bulgaria we never write this kind of projects. Usually we have long essays, big homework and too much theory to study. Now, in transition year I could do something different than writing formulas and boring facts. With this project I have learned how to use the thing I know, and with the help of different sources to write something on my own.
I am glad I had the chance to tell something about my country and the people that live in it. Of course, I could not write everything, and I had to exclude of the project many other interesting facts and places. Well, I can not put a whole country in fifty pages. But probably later on I will have other opportunity to tell more.
With this project I have discovered things I did not knew about, I reminded me things I have forgotten, and I enlarged my knowledge.
In the school library, there are books for many, many countries, but not for Bulgaria. I hope my project will be one good addition to the school, if I can say so, “country information” collection. And I am sure this will be the first peace of information about Bulgaria, written by Bulgarian in “Saint Andrew’s College”.
