History of Bulgaria

A Captivating Guide to the Bulgarian Nation from Its Origins to Modern Times

© Copyright 2025 - All rights reserved.

The content contained within this book may not be reproduced, duplicated, or transmitted without direct written permission from the author or the publisher.

Under no circumstances will any blame or legal responsibility be held against the publisher, or author, for any damages, reparation, or monetary loss due to the information contained within this book, either directly or indirectly.

Legal Notice:

This book is copyright protected. It is only for personal use. You cannot amend, distribute, sell, use, quote, or paraphrase any part, or the content within this book, without the consent of the author or publisher.

Disclaimer Notice:

Please note the information contained within this document is for educational and entertainment purposes only. All effort has been executed to present accurate, up-to-date, reliable, and complete information. No warranties of any kind are declared or implied. Readers acknowledge that the author is not engaging in the rendering of legal, financial, medical, or professional advice. The content within this book has been derived from various sources. Please consult a licensed professional before attempting any techniques outlined in this book.

By reading this document, the reader agrees that under no circumstances is the author responsible for any losses, direct or indirect, that are incurred as a result of the use of the information contained within this document, including, but not limited to, errors, omissions, or inaccuracies.​

Introduction: Who Were the Early Bulgars?

Bulgaria is part of a southeastern European conglomeration of land commonly lumped—shall we say balkanized? —together as the Balkans. In close proximity to the Balkan Mountains, from which the region gets its name, the portion of the land that constitutes Bulgaria has a long-reaching history. In fact, the first human settlements in this region date back to some 100,000 years ago.​[1]

This culture left artifacts throughout prehistory and seems to have reached its height around 4000 BCE. Around this time, we find a steady series of deposits left behind by them in the geological record. Then, around 3000 BCE, this group of people began to work with metal, leaving behind sophisticated tools, as well as works of art.

Around this time, one of the first clearly identified groups of people—the Thracians—emerged onto the scene. The Thracians were an Indo-European tribe. They had mastered metalwork and were especially skilled in the working of gold and silver. Their penchant for hammering out great works of silver and gold has been uncovered by way of several large deposits of the precious metals that have been excavated in Bulgaria.

A Thracian treasure hoard.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Valchitran-treasure.jpg

Along with being great metalworkers, these early Bulgarians were also known to be quite skilled on horseback. It was likely their steel blades, which they wielded from their mighty steeds, sent shivers of fear into their enemies. They were indeed a formidable group of people. Their main problem, however, was the state of disunity that often existed among them.

None other than the ancient Greek historian Herodotus noted that the Thracians could have risen to greatness if only they could unite under one banner. It was their natural disposition to be divided and war among each other. It was only when threats from outside of Bulgaria arose that the Thracians grudgingly put aside their own differences to forge a united front.

One of the first outside groups to put this sort of pressure on the Thracians was Herodotus’s own people—the Greeks. At this time, Greek colonies were expanding out from Greece into neighboring regions, up and down the coastlines of the Black Sea. Interestingly, even though the Thracians were roughly the equals of the Greeks in many ways, the Greek colonists tended to look down on the Thracians, viewing them as a bunch of hot-headed inferiors.

But putting up with the Greeks’ trespasses was one thing. The encroachment of the Persians was another. By the 5th century BCE, the Persian incursions had become a serious threat. The Persian Empire was steadily expanding and eventually would come to threaten the Greeks as well. The Greek answer to the Persian threat was Alexander the Great. Alexander was a Macedonian by birth, but he was Greek-educated and well versed in Greek philosophy, culture, and thought. Alexander the Great would end up being the one to significantly change Thracian Bulgaria.

​

Chapter 1 – Alexander the Great and His Roman Successors

“We are born with tears and with tears we die.”

-Old Bulgarian proverb​[2]

Thracian Bulgaria had a mighty neighbor in the form of Macedonia. As Thrace remained in a fractured state, the Macedonian kingdom unified and grew in strength. One day, a world conqueror—Alexander the Great—rose up.

Initially, though, it was Alexander’s father, King Philip of Macedon, who made major waves in the region. He solidified his grip on the kingdom and subjected many neighboring realms into vassal states. In 336 BCE, King Philip was assassinated, and his young son Alexander was made king in his place. Alexander quickly sought to subdue the independent Thracians on Macedonia’s northern flanks. Ignoring the advice of his own court, which suggested that it was perhaps better to use diplomacy to bring the rebellious Thracians in line, Alexander opted for a show of force to set things straight.

Southern Thrace right before the rise of Alexander the Great.

Map_Macedonia_336_BC-es.svg: Marsyas (French original); Kordas (Spanish translation)derivative work: MinisterForBadTimes, CC BY-SA 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Map_Macedonia_336_BC-en.svg

He gathered a large force, and in 335 BCE, he sent them to deal with the Thracians. Alexander’s troops clashed with the Thracian forces holed up at Mount Haemus. The Thracians were excellent strategists, and they were determined to hold the higher ground. As Alexander’s troops attempted to make their way up the heights, they were bombarded with debris from the Thracians positioned above.

To offset this challenge, Alexander ordered his troops to ascend the mountain in loose formations. This allowed them to be able to quickly pull back, split apart, and allow openings through which all of the missiles that the Thracians were hurling at them could pass. When necessary, they would also fall flat on their faces, with their shields over their backs, in order to prevent themselves from being injured.

At any rate, it was a tough slog up the mountain, but eventually, Alexander’s army managed to meet the Thracians where they were. Unable to whittle down their numbers during that fateful climb, the Thracians were not very effective against Alexander’s massive and largely intact force, so they were quickly overwhelmed.

Alexander’s army then marched on the Thracian stronghold of the Triballi tribe and defeated a Thracian contingent there as well. It took some time, but Alexander eventually subdued the fiery Thracians and even convinced them to fight on his side. This set the stage for Thracian bowmen and cavalry to march in lockstep with Alexander’s armies as they subdued vast tracts of land, pushing as far as the Indus in India in the east and Greece and Egypt in the west.​[3]

However, as great as Alexander’s empire might have been, it was not destined to last long. Alexander died at a young age without an immediate heir to take over the running of his massive dominions. As such, his hard-fought empire quickly fractured into different sections controlled by his generals and other would-be successors.

In the meantime, over in the city of Rome on the Italian Peninsula, the Roman Republic was rising to prominence. The Romans first came into contact with the Thracian Bulgarians during the 3rd century BCE. The Roman Republic was attempting to police the region out of fear of pirates’ nests, which had popped up and were threatening shipping. Arguably, the most famous Roman of them all—Julius Caesar—had at one time fallen prey to pirates, being kidnapped by them in his youth.

The Romans had come to realize that without getting a solid grip on what was happening in far-flung places like Thrace, there would always be dangers on the high seas. As such, they began to take an interest in controlling what was happening in the region. In 168 BCE, the Roman Republic stretched its hand across the waters to seize the regions of Illyricum in the western reaches of the Balkans and the old kingdom of Macedonia. Greece itself was then occupied by the Romans in 146 BCE.​[4] By the time the Roman Republic had transformed into the Roman Empire, the Romans had extended their influence over most of the Balkan Peninsula.​[5]

Initially, the Romans turned Thrace into a client of theirs, but soon, they clamped down on it so much that the Thracians lost even the barest hint of autonomy until their independence ceased altogether. The Romans now had full control of the Balkan Peninsula and the land we would one day refer to as Bulgaria. The Balkans were united now—albeit under Roman rule—in a way that they had never been united previously. There was no longer tribal infighting among warlords; there was only strict obedience to Roman enforced law.​[6]

Despite the strictness of Roman rule, there were some benefits. The general peace and stability of the land allowed the proto-Bulgarian peoples to prosper financially like never before. Roman roads allowed for greater mobility, enabling the people of the Balkans to travel freely from one side of the Balkan Peninsula to the other. This allowed for greater collaboration, economic exchange, and cross-cultural pollination.

A Roman theater in Plovdiv, Bulgaria.

Dennis G. Jarvis, CC BY-SA 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bulgaria_Bulgaria-0785_-_Roman_Theatre_of_Philippopolis_(7432772486).jpg

The Romans’ grip would slip by the 4th century, and the Balkans felt this decline much more keenly than perhaps any other part of the Roman Empire. Hordes of invading tribal groups from farther east rampaged through the Balkans in order to assault the faltering Roman Empire. Atilla the Hun is the most infamous leader of these warring tribes. His warriors—known as the Huns—stormed through the region and destroyed the Roman outposts they found there.

The Romans had already established another great and powerful capital city in the east called Constantinople. This city, named after the Roman Emperor Constantine, was situated on the Bosporus in Asia Minor (modern-day Turkey) and presented a great prize to the rampaging tribes of the east. Constantinople had formidable defenses, though. After Atilla failed to make any headway against this mighty fortress of a city, he headed west to take on the Romans at Rome itself.

Attila perished in 453 CE, ending his attempts to take Rome, but the whole western half of the Roman Empire had become destabilized at this point. The western half of the Roman Empire finally collapsed in 467 CE, leading the way for factions of tribal warlords to rise up and claim various sections of what had previously been the western half of the Roman world.

Over in the east, the eastern half of the Roman Empire (henceforth referred to as the Byzantine Empire in this book), based out of Constantinople, remained strong and would exist until the year 1453. In that year, mighty Constantinople finally fell to the Ottoman Turks and was transformed into Istanbul, Turkey. However, until then, Constantinople and the Byzantines would come to dominate the Balkans in general and Bulgaria in particular over the next several centuries.

​

Chapter 2 – Of Bulgars and Byzantines

“The Emperor himself standing before the small gate sorted out the boys on one side and the females on the other, and the men along the ditch on one side and the women on the other side. All those among the men who were the most important and distinguished he ordered decapitated.”

-Konstantin Mihailovic​[7]

Although the Western Roman Empire toppled after a series of invasions and incursions in the late 5th century, the eastern half based out of Constantinople would live on for several more centuries. With the fortified citadel of Constantinople in their backyard, the early stages of what would come to be known as Bulgaria truly began to form.

During this period, the Thracian tribes began to intermingle with a group of newcomers known as Slavs. The liberal mixing of Thracians, Slavs, and others led to a new people group. This people group was called the Bulgars. The term is a Turkish one, which literally means “to mix.” In 681 CE, the First Bulgarian Empire was officially established under the Bulgar leadership of Khan Asparuh following a peace treaty with the Byzantine Empire.

Of course, that treaty was not simply handed over—it was earned on the battlefield. In the years leading up to the agreement, Asparuh had led his people across the Danube in search of more secure territory, fleeing pressures from the rising Khazar Empire to the east. The Bulgars found fertile land in the region of Moesia, but their presence quickly drew the ire of the Byzantines.

Seeing the newcomers as a threat, Emperor Constantine IV launched a military campaign to dislodge them. In the summer of 680, the Byzantine forces suffered a humiliating defeat at the hands of the Bulgars near the Danube Delta in what came to be known as the Battle of Ongal. The Byzantines retreated, and Asparuh seized the moment to consolidate his control over the area.

The following year, in 681, Constantinople opted for diplomacy. A treaty was signed recognizing the Bulgars’ control of the territory they occupied. More than that, it also stated the Byzantine Empire would pay an annual tribute.

During this point in early Bulgarian history, the nascent Bulgar nation had a couple of dilemmas to face. First, they had to figure out just where the borders of their realm ended and where they began. They also had to better establish harmony so that a common national identity could be forged. The First Bulgarian Empire was at least in a solid state strategically, with a capital called Pliska in its north, which was situated right on top of important trade routes through the Balkan Mountains.

The First Bulgarian Empire in the early 900s.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:RizMap09.jpg

But, of course, this great crossroads often led to conflict with others who were passing through claimed Bulgarian terrain. This was child’s play compared with how to deal with the mighty Byzantines just to their south. The Bulgars would forge a pact with the Byzantines in 716 CE, which created a general understanding that the Bulgars would control most of Thrace and the surrounding regions and that the two would exist in a state of mutual cooperation. This pact would be put to the test with the rise of Islam.

Soon, Islamic armies would be knocking on the doors of both the Byzantine Empire and the Balkans.​[8] The Bulgars assisted the Byzantines against some of these first incursions. Back then, Bulgaria was a much larger piece of real estate, as it included Romania and a good chunk of Ukraine. Even so, it was the Byzantines to the south who were the real power brokers at the time. As writer and historian R. J. Crampton put it, the whole region of the Black Sea was practically a “Byzantine lake.”​[9]

At the height of Byzantine power, it was more or less at their express permission that others were tolerated in the region. It is largely due to the Bulgars’ subordinate status to the Byzantines, who controlled the surrounding waters, that they never really became much of a sea power themselves. Another factor that kept the Bulgars firmly landlocked was their lower degree of technical know-how.

The Bulgarian economy was also subservient to the Byzantine one. The Bulgars did not create their own coins and instead used the currency of their Byzantine benefactors. The Byzantines were indeed powerful friends to have, but at the same time, they had a decidedly stunting effect on their junior partner, which the Byzantines made sure was always dependent on them for everything that truly mattered. Yes, dealing with the Byzantines was truly a double-edged sword.

Since the Bulgars lacked their own navy, they were not able to expand any farther across the shores of the Black Sea. The steppes to the east were far too chaotic for expansion in that direction. The only real avenue for expansion was to the north. Fortuitously enough, around this time, a notable regional power located on the Bulgars’ northern flanks, known as the Avar Kingdom, collapsed. The Bulgars gladly stepped into this power vacuum to expand their own power base. This enabled them to expand their domain up the banks of the Tisza River. Soon, they were able to make even Transylvania a part of their realm.

The northern frontier was easier for the taking than their southern frontier was. This fact was clearly demonstrated when the Bulgars met strong resistance when they made attempts to push farther south. The Bulgars had already taken some portions of old Macedonia, but they had also lost part of Thrace in the process. The Bulgar leader, Khan Krum, sought to rectify this situation.

Khan Krum marched as far south as Byzantium in 811 CE. After taking on the Byzantines themselves, he managed to take over the fortified city of Sredets (the future site of Sofia). It was as if they had forgotten all about their past alliances. The warfare between the Bulgars and the Byzantines during this period was quite brutal, so much so, in fact, that even the emperor of the Byzantine Empire—Nicephorus I—was affected by it.

In one particularly bloody battle, the Byzantine emperor was cut down, just like a common soldier. Khan Krum was quite pleased with this and even ordered the slain emperor’s body to be decapitated and the flesh of his head cleanly removed. The bloodthirsty Khan Krum apparently did this so that he could use the man’s skull as his own personal drinking goblet.​[10]

Even so, Khan Krum’s successor to the Bulgarian throne, Khan Omurtag, who reigned from 814 to 831 CE, was able to somehow mend fences with the Byzantines and enter into a new peace treaty with them. This treaty proved to be a great boon for the Bulgars and even added land to the Bulgarian Empire. The Bulgars were gifted with the lush Tundzha Valley, of which Belgrade itself would eventually be incorporated.​[11]

In the 9th century, the Bulgarians were able to benefit from internal disruption in Byzantium, especially over the discord known as the iconoclast controversy.​[12] This controversy erupted over the contentious matter of religious icons. The Byzantines were widely known (and rightfully praised) for their beautiful and ornate illustrations of saints, angels, and scenes from the Bible. Stunning frescoes decorated their places of worship and were a part of their everyday lives.

Initially, no one seemed to have a problem with such things or thought too much of it. It was only after the Byzantines were beset with devastating losses on the battlefield that some within Byzantium began to look for a reason for their failure. The most often asked question in the minds of these religious people was whether or not God was somehow displeased with them. “Is God angry with us? Is that why we are having a hard time?” That was the line of thinking that had people searching for anything that might be amiss in their lives that could be pointed at as the cause of God’s supposed displeasure.

The Byzantines began to take a long, hard look at their traditional use of religious icons. People began to think that perhaps these icons were wrong or that perhaps they were even akin to the idol worship that was forbidden in the Bible. The Bible clearly states that believers should not make use of any graven images.

The recent exposure to Islamic religious practices did not help things either. The Byzantines saw that the Muslims did not allow any graven images to gain a foothold in their lives. Idols of any kind were forbidden. If one were to go to a mosque, they might find ornate calligraphy and even geometric designs, but they would find no imagery or icons of any kind.

The Byzantines saw how the Muslims won victory after victory on the battlefield while they were losing ground. They could only wonder if it was because of their icons. Many began to think that perhaps this just might be the case. However, there were those who loved and enjoyed the beautiful religious imagery and refused to part with them.

While the Byzantines were preoccupied with both the iconoclast controversy and incursions from Islamic forces on their southern flanks in Asia Minor, the Bulgarians were able to steadily expand their reach into Macedonia. At this time, Macedonia was dominated by Slavic tribes, which were actually quite receptive to the Bulgarians, seeming to prefer them to the Byzantines who had previously held dominion over them.​[13]

The Bulgarians continued their advance through the Balkans and soon made eastern Albania part of their realm as well. By this point, the Byzantines were relegated to their holdings in Asia Minor, Greece, Thrace, and western Albania.

The Bulgarian ruler, Khan Omurtag, demonstrated that he had a grasp not just on warfare but also on civil society. He instituted many notable legal codes into the Bulgarian Empire and built up the overall civil structure. Many buildings and monuments bear his name, demonstrating the importance of his reign for the formation of medieval Bulgaria.

But the greatest transformation was yet to come. The Bulgarians had long been influenced by Christian Byzantium and finally decided to convert to Christianity. This milestone occurred under the stewardship of Bulgar King Boris I, who reigned from 852 to 889 CE. Boris was skilled in the arts of war, as were his predecessors, but he also had his ear to the ground and was well aware of what had been developing in the surrounding region. He clearly understood the ideological struggle that was taking place between Christianity and Islam, and he likely realized that he would have to choose one or the other very soon.

After much soul-searching, King Boris decided that Christianity would best suit the needs of himself and his people. This decision was made by countless people in the Balkans and even in Ukraine, where the prince of Kiev (now known as Kyiv) supposedly decided that he preferred Christianity simply because he had a penchant for pork and realized that the Muslims forbade the eating of it!

The baptism of Saint Boris (King Boris I).

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:57-manasses-chronicle.jpg

There were, of course, many matters to consider in this fateful decision to Christianize the Bulgarian Empire. For instance, choosing Christianity over Islam clearly made them an ally of the mighty Byzantine Empire. The decision to become Christian opened them up to the military aid of the Byzantines. It also opened the door to the high culture that the Byzantines enjoyed. By becoming Christians, the Bulgars could be viewed more or less as peers and benefit accordingly. There was also the unifying factor of Christianity. It was realized that much of the disunity within Bulgaria itself as it pertained to so-called “Proto-Bulgarians” and the newcomer Slavic tribes could be eased with the tonic of Christianity.​[14]

Yes, they might have different languages, customs, and cultures, but they were all one in Christ. Or at least, that was the unifying sentiment they hoped would catch on. This soothing balm of religious unity was very important to the Bulgarians at this time since they realized that if some of them were pagan and some were Christian or of another religious mindset, they could be much more easily divided. They needed the sense of unity that being under the banner of Christianity could provide in order to shore up their solidarity and prevent any potential enemies from exploiting their own internal divisions.

The notion of unity and solidarity was likely reinforced as an important value in light of all of the internal division that the Byzantines themselves had faced during the iconoclast controversy. The expansion of the Bulgarians into contested territories also had them seeking unification. Since the Bulgarians had expanded their reach into Macedonia and Albania, they had taken on even more Slavic populations with differing views from them. To have potential division and internal discord among a populace at their vulnerable southern flanks was considered unsound.

Interestingly, another great influence on the Bulgars as it pertained to their shifting stance on Christianity was captured prisoners of war. These prisoners of war—many of them Greek Byzantines—were devout Christians, even under harsh and dreadful conditions. The example they set must have struck a chord with the Bulgar authorities.

This, of course, is the absolute brilliance of Christianity at work. Since the start of the faith, when Christian missionaries were being arrested and tortured by Roman authorities, their example often swayed their antagonists. Prior to Christianity’s acceptance in the Roman Empire, Christians were often seen preaching and attempting to “save” their own captors. Jesus stressed the importance of loving one’s enemies and seeking to save them, not destroy them.

In 864 CE, the Bulgars made Christianity the official religion of the realm. Boris saw the potential for Christianity to help better facilitate a centralized autocratic nation-state than the traditional decentralized arrangements of pagan tribalism.​[15]

However, once the people had converted and especially once they linked up with the Byzantine Orthodox Christian apparatus, there was still much left to be desired. Although Bulgaria was officially part of the Orthodox Christian fold, it was not allowed to have its own patriarch. Instead, all matters had to be deferred to the patriarch in Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire. This meant that they were unable to appoint their own bishops; all such appointments could only be made with the express permission of the patriarch of Constantinople.

This was disturbing in many ways to the ruling class of Bulgaria. To them, it seemed that rather than gaining a major ally, they had somehow agreed to become a subservient protectorate of Byzantium. The Bulgarian Empire was seen as a junior partner and forced to do the bidding of a Byzantine religious apparatus that was essentially just another arm of the Byzantine government. It was feared that this arrangement with the Byzantine Church meant the Byzantine Empire would be able to freely interfere and meddle with the politics of Bulgaria.

King Boris, however, still had one more card left to play. He was well aware of the split that was occurring between the Roman Catholic Church (known as the Latin Church) and the Greek Orthodoxy of the Byzantine Empire. (Just to clarify, this was this was prior to the Great Schism.) He knew that Rome, although weakened after the fall of the Western Roman Empire, was still a vital political and religious competitor of the Byzantines. As such, he knew that if the Byzantines gave him a raw deal, he could take his business elsewhere, such as to Rome, and at the very least frighten the Byzantines enough to change course and their actions.

With this idea of healthy competition in mind, Boris sent an official delegation to Rome to see if he could get a better offer than what the Byzantines were selling him. This outreach would begin the start of a long pull between the Latin West and the Greek East in the Balkans. While most of the Balkans retain a semblance of Greek Orthodox Christianity, some sections would become Latinized, such as Slovenia and Croatia.

The group of Bulgarian emissaries dispatched across the Mediterranean Sea to Rome asked their Roman counterparts if the pope would be all right with Bulgarians appointing their own bishops. The Bulgarians also asked if they could have their own patriarch. Ultimately, the Roman Catholics balked on both fronts. Just like the Byzantines, they were not too eager to allow the Bulgarians, who had just been newly baptized into the faith, to appoint their own bishop. They also did not like the idea of them having their own patriarch. The pope was already growing increasingly disenchanted with the patriarch of Constantinople as it was; he certainly did not want to deal with a Bulgarian version.

The only consolation that the Romans were willing to provide was for the Bulgarians to have their own archbishop, who would be entirely subservient to the Roman Catholic Church. However, even this consolation was not really much of a consolation since this archbishop would have to be appointed by the pope.

As such, the delegation left Rome feeling that the terms offered by the Roman Catholics were no better (if not worse) than what the Byzantines were offering them. The Bulgarians ultimately decided that they were better off just sticking with the Greek Orthodox Christianity of the Byzantine Empire.​[16] Deciding to go all in with the Byzantines, in 870 CE, the Bulgarians formed an official council to hammer out the exact structure of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, which would be subservient to the patriarch of Constantinople.

Having been officially bound at the hip to the Byzantines, the most important thing to do next was to educate the Bulgarian masses on the official church doctrine that they would be expected to follow. The Bulgarians, novices as they were, needed help in this task, so Greek Byzantines were sent to serve as instructors.

This created problems since the Greeks were viewed by many with some degree of suspicion. Sure, those aforementioned Greek prisoners of war might have had their admirable moments, but the Bulgarians had spent many years waging war with Greek Byzantines and were used to viewing them as the enemy. Even after decades of peace, such attitudes were hard for them to shake.

Old cultural traditions were equally hard to shake. The Bulgarians, while open to Christianity, wanted to hold on to at least some of the roots of their pagan past. This often led to a superficial overlay of Orthodox Christianity over pagan traditions. It also led to what the Byzantines would consider profound errors and even heresies among Bulgarian Christians. Even so, it must be said that the positives far outweighed the negatives for both parties. Bulgaria’s conversion to Christianity indeed proved transformative both for Bulgaria and its relations with the rest of the world.

First of all, it healed the wounds of division between the proto-Bulgarians and the Slavic peoples. Rather than viewing the Slavs on their frontiers as potential spies, turncoats, and aggressors, they were viewed as Christian brothers and sisters. They were members of the same church and the same Bulgarian governmental apparatus.

Healing the rift with the Slavs would prove to be consequential since the Slavic people had developed their own alphabet (the Cyrillic alphabet) and written language, which would help to enrich the Bulgarian state, which previously did not have a written script of its own. The script was first developed by Greek monks named Cyril and Methodius, who were ministering to the Slavs. They sought to create a script that would better facilitate their teachings to the people of the Balkans.

The script they created was able to capture the sounds of the dialects spoken in the region and was a great tool for conversion. It also proved to be a boon for the entire Balkans and would reach into Ukraine and Russia as well. The objective was to win souls to Christ, but the subsequent outreach also managed to create a Christian buffer zone between the Byzantines and other forces that were encroaching into the region.

At any rate, this was the kind of backdrop and the kind of world in which the Bulgars first cut their teeth on Christianity. The Cyrillic script proved to be a real game changer as it pertains to the development of religious doctrine and legal codes in the region. All of this culminated in an assembly of notables in 893 CE.​[17] During this assembly, it was decided that the Bulgarian language (written in Cyrillic script) would be the language of the state. A kind of palace coup also took place, which made Bulgar notable Simeon the king of Bulgaria.​[18] Reigning from 893 to 927, Simeon would go on to become one of the most formidable rulers in the history of Bulgaria.

Simeon is an interesting figure. He initially pursued the life of a religious scholar, spending many of his formative years in what was then the seat of Eastern Christianity, the Byzantine capital of Constantinople. His scholarly ways would later be reflected in the way he revitalized interest in scholarship and learning. There was a burst of manuscript production written in the Cyrillic script that focused on a wide variety of academic pursuits. Around two thousand of these manuscripts are still in existence today. However, Simeon demonstrated that he was skilled in more than just scholarly efforts and liturgy. He soon became a prominent player in the power politics of the Balkans.

King Simeon I.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Car_Simeon_Bulharsky_-_Alfons_Mucha.jpg

Even though he came of age in the heart of Byzantium, during his early reign, he spent much of his time fending off the Byzantines. Yes, the Bulgarians had ostensibly become Christian Orthodox brothers of Byzantium, but even so, squabbles still emerged. On two separate occasions, disagreements between Bulgaria and Byzantium resulted in Bulgarian armies boldly marching right outside of the walls of Constantinople. It likely both infuriated and frightened the authorities of Constantinople to know that a man who had lived inside their city and who likely understood the workings of their capital in and out was marching armies right up to its gates.

Simeon’s saber-rattling got results, and in 896 CE, he managed to convince the Byzantines to accept the Bulgarian Church as an independent body, a feat that his predecessors had dreamed about yet failed to achieve.

Simeon was also eventually given the official recognition of basileus or king by the Byzantines. In a world where status and the recognition of status meant everything, the fact that the Bulgarian leader was recognized as basileus by the Byzantines was quite consequential.

Squabbles emerged with other, albeit smaller, neighboring powers. The Bulgarians were able to handily put down these disruptions, greatly expanding their own dominion as a result. Simeon deserves a lot of credit for the Bulgarian Empire’s expansion toward the west and the shores of the Adriatic. He also pushed the Bulgarian boundaries farther south toward the Aegean Sea as well. To the north, he made inroads in what we now call Serbia and Montenegro.

During the reign of Simeon, the decision was made to move the Bulgarian capital from Pliska to Preslav. It was here that the culture of the First Bulgarian Empire truly flourished.​[19] Trade was also booming, as the region became a crossroads and commercial hub between the Greek Byzantine East and the Latin West. However, as prosperous as these times were, they would not last forever.

​

Chapter 3 – The High Point of Medieval Bulgaria

“Now I am truly home—a world it is. Which I adore and seek. Here I breathe freely. And lighter feel; a deep tranquility now fills my breast and waves of new life, sweeping into my soul, thrill me with new sensations. New Strength, might—and poetic revelations.”

-Ivan Vazov​[20]

The great Bulgarian leader Simeon passed away in the year 927 CE. Just prior to his passing, he named his son Peter as his heir. Peter automatically came to the throne after his father’s demise, and much was expected of him. His reign was a long one, lasting all the way until 970 CE, but Bulgaria began to deteriorate during this period. While his father reigned over the expansion of Bulgaria, Peter reigned over its disintegration.

Rather than going on the offensive, this period was marked by a spate of defensive warfare. Threats faced the Bulgarian Empire on all sides. One of the most daunting of them was the Magyar tribe on Bulgaria’s northern frontier. This, coupled with continued wars with the Byzantine Empire, ensured that the Bulgarian Empire would go into a long decline. Along with external threats, there was also internal division that rocked the Bulgarian courts.

The church was not immune from problems either, as this period saw internal corruption in the church. The only upside during this period was that as the top-heavy authority of the central government began to weaken, its grip loosened considerably on the lower classes of Bulgarians, allowing them to have greater economic and social freedom to do as they pleased.

Many who had not been entirely convinced of the doctrine of the Greek Orthodox Church began to slide back to their old ways and customs. They might not have slid all the way back to paganism, but villages often espoused a hybridized version of Christianity that left much more room for ancestral folklore and tradition.

Rather than sticking to Eastern Orthodoxy, villagers adopted beliefs similar to other later converted peoples, such as the Irish and Germans, in which rich pre-Christian traditions were kept alive with a superficial coating of Christianity over the surface. The Germanic peoples, for example, had fairy tales, which were later collected by the Brothers Grimm, that spoke of ogres, witches, wizards, and other pagan-styled entities but also had references to Christianity mixed in with them. The Bulgarian tradition emerged as an ideological and cultural hybrid in much the same way. If the Bulgarian Empire had been in lockstep with Byzantium or if the Bulgarian king had greater central authority, such things might have been forbidden.

However, hybridized customs were one thing; developing a brand-new Christian doctrine was another, and that was a much greater threat to the Greek Orthodox Church. Yet, that was what eventually happened when a Christian sect called Bogomilism began to become popular.

The Bogomils, seemingly taking a page from the Christian Gnostics and perhaps even Buddhism, argued that the physical world was evil and full of suffering. They insisted that only the spiritual world was good. They preached that it was the end goal of humanity to escape their physical forms and, thus, the evil physical universe in order to return to the spiritual heaven from whence they had come.

The spread of Bogomilism.

Razvoj_bogumilstva.jpg. Derivative work: Hoodinski, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bogomilist_expansion.svg

Some mainstream Christians today who like the idea of being ethereal spirits floating on clouds in the heavens may feel motivated to agree with such sentiments. However, such views were and still are very much contrary to the actual teachings of Jesus Christ and the original doctrine of Christianity. After all, Jesus himself was physically resurrected and ascended to heaven in a physical body. The early Christians did not expect the end goal of Christianity to become a spirit. They fully expected to be physically resurrected just like Christ, who is said to one day return after a new heaven and Earth were established.

For the Bogomils, the notion of a physical resurrection was complete anathema. They believed that our purpose was to die, shed our physical form, and become a spirit. This, of course, put them at direct odds with official church teachings on the subject.

The Bogomils were a tough bunch, though, and even had an army of aesthetic monks willing to live and work in the roughest and most rugged conditions. Since much of Bulgaria was out of reach for Orthodox enforcers, for a time, Bogomilism was allowed to thrive in the remote reaches of the Balkans.

Bogomilism’s teaching also took clear advantage of the political chaos in the region by declaring that men should be allowed to establish their own way of life and live in their own social groups and not have to answer to an outside central authority. In a time of great confusion, the words of the Bogomils found eager ears among the Bulgarians. Many felt as if the church had already abandoned them, so it was only natural to gravitate toward these strange new teachings. The idea that the world was an evil place and that all physical life was an evil thing was also appealing to the suffering that many were going through on a daily basis. Times were hard, and many were looking for an escape.

Interestingly, as much as the Bogomils were later condemned as troublemakers, they were not actively calling for the overthrow of traditional institutions. They were not seeking to revolt or reform anything in the physical world since they considered such things evil and unreformable. They were not really calling on their adherents to do much of anything either. If it were the 1960s, the Bogomils would have said something along the lines of, “Tune in and drop out.”

However, it was their rejection of worldly institutions—marriage, military service, and state loyalties—in favor of ascetic withdrawal that alarmed both the church and state. If Bogomil ideals spread, there could be societal collapse because their dualistic worldview held the material world to be evil, rendering everyday work and public duties spiritually meaningless. As their criticism of both the state and the church gained traction, those in power began to worry. The Bogomils weren’t just turning their backs on society—they were encouraging others to do the same. If too many people followed their lead, the whole system could unravel. So, efforts were made to stop them before their message spread any further.

This ongoing internal struggle was taking place in Bulgaria while ongoing external threats continued to emerge. Most pressingly on the northern flank was the rise of Kievan Rus’ at the end of the 10th century. This was the predecessor state to both Ukraine and Russia. The Kievan prince, Sviatoslav, for example, launched an invasion of Bulgaria in 967 CE that would lead to a stinging defeat of the Bulgarian forces at the Battle of Silistra.

Along with duking it out with Kievan Rus’ in the north, incursions were increasing with Constantinople. In 971 CE, the Byzantines rallied against the Bulgars and seized the Bulgar capital of Preslav, along with a big chunk of Bulgaria’s eastern flank. This had a destabilizing effect on the rump state that Bulgaria had been reduced to, and the capital shifted to several polities in western Bulgaria until the Bulgars made arrangements for a permanent national center based out of the city of Ohrid.​[21]

One high point during this tumultuous period happened under the leadership of Tsar Samuil (Samuel), who reigned from 997 to 1014 CE. A brief national revival took place during his reign, which saw the Bulgars retake much of their previously lost ground.

Their success was not due to an improvement of the Bulgars’ martial might; rather, it was due to the fact that the Byzantines had suddenly become distracted by an external threat of their own. Islamic armies began to overrun Byzantine territory in Asia Minor. It was not until 1001 CE that the Byzantines managed to put down this threat well enough that Emperor Basil II (later dubbed the Bulgar Slayer) was able to exert the full force of Byzantium on the Bulgars. This led to a final showdown between the forces of Bulgarian Tsar Samuil and Byzantium’s Bulgar Slayer, Emperor Basil II, in 1014 CE.

The two forces came to blows in the old Bulgar stomping grounds of Macedonia. The Byzantines delivered a stunning defeat to the Bulgars, which resulted in an astonishingly huge number of Bulgar prisoners of war. It is said that some fifteen thousand Bulgar fighters were taken captive by the Byzantines. Incredibly enough, it was reported that every ninety-nine of one hundred of these prisoners of war had their eyes gouged out.​[22]

It might be hard for us to believe such things today, but this anecdote has been widely repeated over the centuries. If this battle truly did end as described, one can only imagine the terror an average Bulgar villager must have witnessed after seeing this vast multitude of blind men being led back to their village.

It is striking that two nations who were ostensibly Christians and shared the same Christian religion would come to blows like this. Some credit must be given to the pope of the Roman Catholic Church for largely keeping the peace between Christian nations of western Europe. The pope famously channeled the aggression of western Europe by creating the Crusades, which saw knights and royals go to the Middle East and other non-Christian domains to spread the faith and gain back what had once been Christian territory. Then again, due to the perceived heresy afoot in Bulgaria thanks to the Bogomil sect, perhaps the Byzantine emperor did not really consider the Bulgars very Christian at this point.

Tsar Samuil perished shortly after this crushing defeat, leaving his entire kingdom in chaos. Just a few years later, the Byzantines successfully absorbed much of the Bulgarian Empire into their own empire. The high point of medieval Bulgaria had come to an end.

​

Chapter 4 – Bulgaria under Byzantine Rule

“Weysit [Bayezid] took flight, and went with at least 1,000 horsemen to a mountain. Temerlin [Tamerlane] surrounded the mountain so that he could not move and took him. Then he remained eight months in the country, conquered more territory and occupied it.”

-Johann Schiltberger​[23]

Bulgaria under Byzantium’s thumb was an interesting part of the region’s development. It definitely had both pros and cons. One benefit was that while the Bulgars enjoyed the relative stability of the governmental authority of Byzantium, they were still allowed to have their own separate church. They were even allowed to have their own patriarch based out of Ohrid. This was certainly a step forward from their previous arrangements with the Byzantines that had expressly forbade that very practice.

However, at the dawn of the 11th century, things changed. The Bulgarian part of the Byzantine Empire consisted of all of Bulgaria proper, as well as Albania, Macedonia, and what today would constitute modern Serbia. But as relaxed as Basil II was with such things, his successors would have a decidedly different approach. Soon, the Ohrid patriarch was being bossed around by the Byzantine patriarch in Constantinople, and Bulgarians were denied the right to pick who their patriarch would be.

Along with the draconian measures being taken with matters of religion, the purse strings were being tightened as well. The Bulgarians began to be heavily taxed and basically made to pay for the upkeep of the Byzantine army. Although the Bulgarians supposedly were being protected by the Byzantines, most did not feel that this extra tax burden was worth the supposed protection. Another glaring problem during this period was the fixed prices of goods, which constituted yet another financial burden passed to the Bulgars.

The populace was fed up, and in 1040, a large number of Bulgarians rallied around Peter Delyan, a Bulgar relative of the late Samuil. They created a rebel army and seized control of the town of Skopje, which they used as their headquarters in their rebellion against the Byzantines. Soon, they were able to expand their control to Thrace, Epirus, and even Macedonia itself. It is important to note that this revolt was not entirely a nationalist one; rather, it was instigated by the terrible tax burden that had been placed upon the poorer classes of the Balkans. The angst was enough to resonate not just with Bulgarians but everyday Albanians and Greeks as well.

The revolt did not last, though, and the Byzantine authorities, with the help of Scandinavian mercenaries known as the Varangians, managed to put it down. The Bulgars would continue to be part of the Byzantine sphere of influence until around 1200 CE. As the 13th century neared, the Byzantines once again began to lose their grip, not just on the Balkans but also on other far-reaching domains.

The ever-pressing need to rally the troops for increasing threats abroad had the Byzantines pulling the purse strings of the Bulgarians even tighter. The Bulgarians simply could not take any more of a tax burden than they had already been dealt and were soon rebelling. This time around, another Peter took charge of a Bulgarian army based out of Tarnovo. This would become known as the start of the Second Bulgarian Empire, which had Tarnovo as its capital.

A map of the Second Bulgarian Empire from 1185 to 1196.

Kandi, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Second_Bulgarian_Empire_(1185-1196).png

Tsar Kaloyan reigned from 1197 to 1207 CE. He was a successful ruler, even though his reign was brief. Kaloyan finally put the Magyar threat in the north to rest and then turned around and successfully signed a peace treaty with the Byzantines in 1202.

By this point, there were different undercurrents at play since this was the period in history that coincided with the Crusades. The First Crusade had been called in 1095 CE by Pope Urban II. This was largely a call to protect the Christians of the Byzantine Empire, as they had been repeatedly attacked and threatened by Muslim incursions in Asia Minor. But along with helping the Byzantines, there was a grand side mission that involved recovering the Holy Land itself, which had fallen to Muslim forces in the 7th century. This aspect of this supposed “divine quest” got the attention of eager Christian warriors the most.

The First Crusade was astonishingly successful in its aims. Huge Christian armies from western Europe passed through the backdoor of Byzantium to Asia Minor, where they found Muslim combatants who were entirely unprepared for them. Even the medieval armor that the Westerners wore came as a surprise since these towering metallic knights were seemingly impervious to the arrows of Muslim archers.

However, it did not take long for the Muslim powers to reorganize, reassess the situation, and present a more formidable threat to the occupying Crusaders. Soon, they were able to push back the Christians, and by the end of the 12th century, they had been driven out of that most coveted prize of all—the city of Jerusalem. After they were pushed out of the holy city, the Crusaders only had a toehold along the coast of the Levant.

Even so, more crusades were called in vain attempts to recover what had been lost, and these crusades developed into other crusades. The first few crusades had western Europeans marching right through the Balkans and Bulgaria. Some Bulgarian rulers became quite familiar with these Crusaders. Around the time of the Third Crusade (1189–1192), Bulgaria began to collude directly with the German Teutonic Knights of Frederick Barbarossa.

Frederick Barbarossa was the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire. The Holy Roman Empire was founded by Charlemagne the Great centuries prior in an effort to revive the original Roman Empire. However, as famous French satirist Voltaire once put it, the Holy Roman Empire was “not an empire, not Roman, and not holy.” Well, the last part is debatable, but the point is well taken since the Holy Roman Empire did not include Rome for most of its existence and was a very unconventional empire, consisting of several scattered principalities across western and central Europe.

Modern-day Germany was at the heart of the Holy Roman Empire, although it is important to realize that Germany, as we know it today, did not exist until the 19th century. Prior to the German nation-state, there were German-speaking peoples in various principalities of central Europe, and for quite some time, they made up the heart of the Holy Roman Empire.

The crusading knights from this Germanic empire began to intermingle with the Bulgarians during the time of the Third Crusade. The Third Crusade was a hard-fought struggle to recover Jerusalem, but it basically ended in a stalemate. The Crusaders did not recover Jerusalem, but they regained much of the surrounding territory and gained Christian pilgrims the right to visit Jerusalem, even though it would remain under Muslim control.

The German troops passing through the Balkans during the Third Crusade began to lend their support to Bulgarian armies, which were attempting to wrest back lands from the Byzantines. This occurred under Peter and then his brother, Assen, who succeeded him and reigned from 1190 to 1196. In 1197, another brother—the aforementioned Kaloyan—gained the crown.

In 1202, Kaloyan and the ruler of the Byzantine Empire entered into a peace treaty. This was done against the backdrop of what would become the ill-fated Fourth Crusade. This crusade was a mess of complicated intrigue and political machinations that ended up having the Crusaders attack Byzantium rather than defend it. This led to the infamous sacking of Constantinople in 1204.

The Crusaders attempted to set up their own Crusader State within Byzantium. Ruling from Constantinople, the Crusaders then had the gall to try to treat the Bulgarians as their own personal vassals.​[24] A rebellion began to brew among the Byzantines in the meantime, and those eager to push back against the Crusaders began to take action. It was out of this desire to topple the Crusader occupiers that the Byzantines looked to the Bulgarian ruler, Kaloyan, for help.

The Bulgarians began to clash with the Crusaders camped out in their backyard, coming to blows over Thrace. On April 14th, 1205, they fought a battle with the Crusaders at Adrianople. In 1207, they managed to retake much of Macedonia. The Bulgarian forces then pushed into Salonika before the bold Kaloyan was killed.

It must be noted that during all of this drama, the Crusaders had essentially gone rogue. The pope had condemned their actions and in no way condoned what they were doing. This particular batch of Crusaders were opportunists seeking to enrich and empower themselves by taking advantage of Byzantine and Bulgar weaknesses. Interestingly, the pope managed to get a back channel to the Bulgars and agreed to recognize Bulgarian interests in their westernmost frontiers as long as they agreed to acknowledge the authority of the pope as the bishop of Rome.​[25]

In reality, Catholics viewed the pope as much more than the bishop of Rome; he was seen as the ultimate authority of the church. Being recognized as the bishop of Rome sounds more like the Greek Orthodox concept of the patriarch of Constantinople being the “first among equals.” Was the pope trying to relate to this concept by stating that, as bishop of Rome, he was the first among equals? Whatever the case might have been, it seemed to somehow make sense to the Bulgars, and the bargain was struck.

In 1211, the Bulgarians finally got serious about stamping out the perceived heresy of the Bogomils. The belief of the Bogomils was officially condemned at the Council of Tarnovo, which was held at the behest of the new Bulgarian leader, Boril.​[26] The Bulgar ruler Boril was eventually overthrown by Ivan Assen II, who reigned from 1218 to 1241 CE.

Ivan Asen II.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Tsar_Ivan_Asen_II_cropped.png

King Ivan Assen II’s reign was a game changer for Bulgaria. He reasserted Bulgarian power and prestige, and he even took steps to curtail the limited influence the papacy had enjoyed in the region by reestablishing the Bulgarian Orthodox Patriarchate in 1235. He also opened up commercial channels with the West, making sure that the markets of his kingdom prospered. This was a boon not just for Bulgarians but also for markets in places such as Genoa and Venice, which now had another option in the East other than Constantinople to ply their goods. King Ivan Assen II also managed to regain much of the territory that the Bulgars had lost.

However, these hard-won gains would soon be rolled back by the rapid advance of a growing Islamic powerhouse known as the Ottoman Empire.

​

Chapter 5 – Bulgaria Falls to the Turks

“Ghazis and champions striving in the way of truth and the path of Allah, gathering the fruits of ghaza and expending them in the way of Allah, choosing truth, striving for religion, lacking pride for the world, following the way of Sharia, taking revenge on polytheists, friends of strangers, blazing forth the way of Islam from the East to the West.”

-Oruj, a Turkish historian​[27]

The high point of the revived Bulgarian Empire ended with the reign of Ivan Asen II. By the 1250s, Bulgaria was in rather serious decline. There were a multitude of disruptions, both internal and external. There were several repeated incursions by Hungarians, Byzantines, and even Mongols during these years. There was a temporary reprieve by the time of Tsar Theodore Svetoslav, who reigned from 1300 to 1322, but this proved to be a false dawn. After his reign, the Bulgarians faced what would ultimately be their biggest external challenge—the Ottoman Empire.

In order to understand the rise of the Turks during this period, one must understand the rise and fall of the Mongols. These two dynamic peoples had fates that were dramatically interwoven. The Mongols first rose to prominence under the infamous Mongol warlord Genghis Khan and his immediate successors during the 12th and 13th centuries. The Mongols would come to control a huge empire that stretched from China to Russia and from Russia to Iran.

The Mongolian-led Ilkhanate developed in what was Iran, or as it was better known back then, Persia. While Persia was at the khanate’s heart, it also included modern-day Armenia, Turkmenistan, Georgia, and Afghanistan. The Turks originally hailed from these regions in central Asia. The migration of Turkic peoples was a continual process over the centuries, but a major milestone occurred in 1221.

A Turkic group known as the Oghuz clan was alarmed by recent atrocities being perpetrated by the Mongols in what is now modern-day Afghanistan. This particular group of Turks (later known as the Ottoman Turks) migrated in large numbers to Asia Minor, where they were granted land and basic rights and privileges by the Islamic polity of the Seljuks. From these roots, the mighty Ottoman Empire would grow and come to overpower just about everyone else in the whole region.

Although the Ottoman Turks were initially the vassals of the Seljuks, by the year 1291, the situation had drastically changed. The Ilkhanate was in turmoil, and discord was spiraling out into the surrounding regions, all the way to Asia Minor, where several factions were fighting against each other. In the meantime, the Seljuks had shrunk in prestige and power, while their former Ottoman vassals had grown more powerful. The Turks managed to take advantage of the chaos and turbulence of this period and asserted themselves as the predominant powerbroker in Asia Minor.​[28]

Their leader, Osman (from whom the name “Ottoman” was later derived), came to power around the year 1300 when he began leading several daring raids against the Byzantine Empire. In 1301, in fact, Osman led his loyal Turks to the doorstep of the Byzantine city of Nicaea. For many years, Nicaea was like a second capital to the Byzantines; it was second in greatness only to Constantinople itself.

For Osman and his Turks, the city was a great treasure just waiting for them to plunder. The Byzantines attempted to repel the Ottoman advance, but the Turks got the drop on them and decimated their ranks. This led to the local Greek population literally running for their lives, fleeing to the nearby city of Nicomedia. These early victories against the Byzantines allowed Osman and the Ottoman Turks to come to prominence.

The Turkic peoples were nomads, and although they were of the Muslim faith, in many ways, they operated under similar methods as their Mongol cousins from central Asia. Raiding and plunder were great incentives for the Turks. When it was realized how successful the raids of Osman and his troops were against the Byzantines, his ranks swelled with recruits who were eager to take part in the spoils.

Byzantine Emperor Andronicus II was naturally quite alarmed at this massive armed contingent that had risen up on the Byzantine borders in Asia Minor. So, he began actively seeking alliances. The days of the Crusades were already waning at this point, and help from western Europe was not as forthcoming as it had been in the past. Because of this, he turned eastward.

The Byzantine emperor would not let religious differences get in the way of political pragmatism. He forged an alliance with the Mongol ruler of Persia, Ilkhan Oljeitu. Andronicus even sealed the deal by sending his own sister to him as a bride. The alliance apparently paid off because Ilkhan Oljeitu fulfilled his part of the bargain and sent a force of Mongols to try to take on the Ottomans. However, this proved easier said than done.​[29]

The Ottomans rallied and managed to annihilate the Mongol force sent to put them down. This, of course, only served to increase their prestige while further cementing the wily Byzantines, who had arranged the Mongol onslaught, as the clear enemies of the Ottoman Empire.

By 1302, the Ilkhanate was even more unstable and less likely to challenge the rise of the Ottoman Turks. This paved the way for the Ottomans to dominate Asia Minor, even as the Byzantines were retreating farther and farther north. The Byzantines were pushed back toward their only remaining formidable outpost, Constantinople, which was situated right on top of the Bosporus Strait.

The Balkans and Bulgaria, which lay on the other side of the strait, had thus far been shielded from this onslaught, but as the Ottomans lay claim to virtually all of Asia Minor, it was not long before they cast their eyes across the sea toward the Balkans. Osman died in 1326, but he left behind a formidable legacy, giving his successors motivation to continue his expansionist ambition even after he was gone.

His successor, Orkhan, managed to besiege the Byzantine city of Bursa that very year and transformed it into the capital of the Ottoman Empire. By 1337, this former Byzantine city, as well as Nicaea and Nicomedia, were completely within the Ottomans’ grasp. In 1345, the Ottomans annexed the Beylik of Karasi, which put them in a prime position to invade the Balkans.​[30]

The fragmentation of the Bulgarian Empire.

Kandi, CC BY-SA 4.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Feudal_fragmentation_of_Bulgaria_and_fall_under_Ottoman_rule.png

By this point, a plan had been formulated to outflank and surround the shrinking Byzantine Empire. This was done by first taking over all of Asia Minor and then circling up to the Balkans and seizing this territory so that Constantinople would become deadlocked on the Bosporus and surrounded by a huge army of Ottoman Turks on land.

The Byzantines made matters even worse by attempting to befriend their former foes and enter into strategic alliances with them. The Turks were natural mercenaries and were not against doing the bidding of the Byzantines as long as they paid them a hefty fee. The Byzantines even began to invite the Turks into the Balkans to put down incursions from Bulgaria.

The Turks were successful in this aim, but they were a little too successful. The Byzantines became alarmed when the temporary encampment of Turks seemed to take on a more permanent guise. Then, in 1354, something incredible happened. A terrible earthquake hit the region and managed to knock down the city walls of several establishments. The Turks did not want to squander an incredible opportunity, so they rushed from their camps and seized these formerly fortified cities as their own.​[31] This led to the first Ottoman outposts on the isthmus of Gallipoli, which stretched into southeastern Europe and would basically serve as a road into the Balkans.

The Bulgarian Empire was going through some changes of its own in the meantime. King Michael Shishman founded a dynasty that lasted from 1323 to 1393. During that time, the Bulgarians were in constant conflict with Serbia and Byzantium, usually over the status of Macedonia and Thrace.

However, the real challenge was the Ottoman Turks, who were just waiting to break the Byzantine grip on the region in order to wreak havoc in the Balkans. The first real settlement of the Turks dates back to 1352, and it had greatly expanded by 1354.

The first large-scale Ottoman offensive in the Balkans occurred in 1364 when the Ottoman leader, Sultan Murad, drove into Thrace and took control of both Plovdiv and Stara Zagora. This push consisted of three main columns. One of them was directed to travel up the Aegean coast to Macedonia. Another column of troops was sent in a diagonal direction along the Balkan Peninsula right into central Europe. Another contingent was sent to claim territory across the Danube.​[32] This three-pronged attack resulted in the capture of the city of Adrianople in 1369.

The Bulgarian Empire had split into three principalities, which consisted of Vidin, Karvuna, and Tarnovo. Tarnovo had served as the capital of the Bulgarian Empire, but it fell to the Ottoman Turks in 1393. The siege of Tarnovo was led by a Turkish commander named Chelebi and lasted for over three months. The Turks were brutal in their takeover and killed many members of the noble classes in order to impose their rule.​[33]

At this point, it seemed that the Ottomans were rolling right through the Balkans with nothing to stop them. It was only in 1396 that the central powers of Europe finally took notice of the threat emerging from southeastern Europe and decided to take action. The king of Hungary, Sigismund, actually managed to call a Crusade against the encroachment of the Ottomans. In the fall of that fateful year, these would-be Crusaders collided with the forces of the Ottoman Empire in the city of Nikopol. It was a decisive victory for the Ottomans, clearing the way for their domination of the Balkans.

The last holdout of resistance was Vidin, but after three years of struggle, it, too, succumbed to the Ottoman advance. From here on out, Bulgaria would be under Ottoman rule from 1396 until 1878.

​

Chapter 6 – Bulgaria under Ottoman Dominion

“Then each was ordered to kill his own prisoners, and for those who did not wish to do so, the king appointed others in their place. Then they took my companions and cut off their heads, and when it came to my turn, the King’s son saw me and ordered that I should be left alive, and I was taken to the other boys, because none under 20 years of age were killed, and I was scarcely 16 years old.”

-Johann Schiltberger​[34]

More often than not, historians and writers have an ax to grind and either paint Ottoman rule as some sort of multi-cultural utopia in which people of different backgrounds and faiths lived in peace and harmony or the Ottomans as brutal, even genocidal overlords who made the lives of the Bulgarians a living hell. As is often the case, the truth lies somewhere in between.

There is no getting around the fact that the Ottomans treated the conquered Christian people of the Balkans as second-class citizens. Islam was the preferred religion of the realm, and this second-class status was simply baked into the social structure. Nevertheless, the fact that Christians were tolerated at all was actually a step up from how many other religious regimes would have treated religious minorities at the time.

After all, this was the Middle Ages where might made right, and the tolerance of different points of view was typically not too forthcoming. A great case in point would be Christian Spain. After Spain’s victorious Reconquista defeated the Muslim forces that had temporarily been in control, the subsequent Christian rulers proved to be intolerant of anything other than the Christian faith. During the Spanish Inquisition that followed, they literally hunted non-Christians down and set them before a religious tribunal in order to inquire about their beliefs.

The Ottomans did not subject the people of the Balkans to an inquisition; they knew they were Christians and tolerated them as such. But even though the Ottomans tolerated them, they did not treat them as equals. In fact, they purposefully treated them as inferior. They were forced to pay a special tax simply because they refused to convert to Islam. There were also many other petty but insulting slights that Christians had to deal with at the hands of their Muslim overlords on a daily basis.

For example, Christian churches were not allowed to stand higher than any nearby mosques. It sounds ridiculous, but this was a real law of the land. No Christian building could dare to try and outshine a Muslim one. There was also the fact that Christians were forbidden to wear the color green since it was seen as a sacred color in Islam. Perhaps the most humiliating of these discriminatory rules was that Christians were supposed to immediately get off their horse if a Muslim approached them on horseback.​[35]

Yes, Christians were expected to be timid, know their place, and basically grovel at the feet of Muslims. But worst of all was the so-called “blood tax” or devshirme, which forced Christian families to give up one of their own sons to be sent off to join the Janissaries. The Janissaries were non-Muslims who were trained to fight as soldiers in the sultan’s wars.

So, no matter what some historical revisionists might try to have one believe, life under Ottoman rule for non-Muslims was not a utopia. But then again, the fact that the Muslim powers even tolerated differences of opinion and differences of belief at all was a rarity during this brutal, winner-take-all period.

During the first phase of Ottoman rule, Bulgarians held out hope that their situation would soon be reversed and their previous state of affairs would be restored. There was still hope that armies from the West might come to rescue them, and mighty Constantinople was also still standing as a beacon of Orthodox Christianity.

However, aid from the West during this period wasn’t able to turn the tide. Attempts were made. In 1444, Wladyslaw III of Poland led the charge to free the Balkans, but these efforts came to an end at the Battle of Varna. It’s necessary to understand exactly what led up to Varna. In 1439, Murad II seized control of the strategic fortress of Smederevo, which was downriver of the Serbian capital of Belgrade. This led the despot of Serbia to flee to the higher ground of Hungary, where he pled his case to the Hungarian court.

The Battle of Varna.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chelebowski_varna.jpg

This got him the support of the prominent Hungarian noble John Hunyadi, which resulted in the two collaborating together on an offensive against the Turkish force that was now holed up in Smederevo. The Turks were not expecting this, and the Hungarian and Serbian armies were able to get the drop on them. These allied forces also employed tactics that the Turks were not used to. Rather than charging them straight ahead on horseback, the bulk of the army dismounted and fought the Turks on foot while a contingent of knights on horseback encircled the whole group, ensuring that the Turks could not escape the fray. The Turks were demolished in this engagement. The victory did much to fill the previously sagging sails of Christian warriors in the Balkans.

However, the Turks were on the move, and in 1442, they sent their forces into Transylvania. Transylvania is located just south of Hungary. Some may only be familiar with Transylvania because of Dracula. There was an actual person in history called Dracula. He was the son of a Transylvanian king called Dracul, which was in reference to a special order of knights, the Order of the Dragon, or as it was in his tongue, the “Dracul.” His son, Vlad Tepes, was thus called Dracula, which means “son of the Dragon.” He was also known as Vlad the Impaler due to the fact that he had a habit of impaling his enemies on wooden stakes.​[36]

Transylvania was also the original stomping grounds of John Hunyadi. In 1442, the Turks launched an offensive into this region. Hunyadi literally circled the wagons. His forces had developed a technique of warfare in which they would link up horsedrawn wagons as defensive bulwarks and lead the enemy to fight them from what amounted to mobile fortresses. John Hunyadi lured the Turks into just such a trap and was able to decimate their ranks.

Riding high on these victories, John Hunyadi convinced the pope to call for yet another crusade. This one would have the aim of freeing the Balkans and opening up a path to Constantinople. The more ambitious among them even openly spoke of that age-old dream of marching south all the way to Jerusalem in a bid to retake the Holy Land. As ambitious as all of these plans were, they would come to nothing when this coalition of Christian warriors was soundly defeated at the Battle of Varna in 1444.

It was initially hoped that the Byzantines would open up another front, but this was not going to happen. The Byzantines were very weak at this point and dared not invite the wrath of the Turks who surrounded them.

The Hungarians’ Venetian allies also failed to play out their previously agreed-to supportive role. They were supposed to run a blockade that would close off the Bosporus, leaving the Turks stuck traveling by land up through Asia Minor without access to the sea.​[37] The Venetians failed to do so, supposedly due to bad weather. This meant that rather than being cut off, blockaded, diverted, and attacked on multiple fronts, the full force of the Turks was sent slamming right into the midst of these would-be Christian Crusaders. This resulted in a stunning defeat.

By the time Constantinople found itself gravely in need of support in 1453 (when the Turks laid siege to the once-great capital of Eastern Christendom), there was hardly any outside aid to speak of. Save for a small token force of Westerners, the Byzantines were largely left to face the Ottoman juggernaut alone. Mighty Constantinople finally fell that fateful year, making both sides of the Bosporus—Bulgaria included—part of the Ottoman Empire’s domain.

The year after Constantinople (later to be called Istanbul) was snuffed out, the Turks set about establishing their millet system. This was a system that put every religious affiliation that existed in Bulgaria under its own unique category or “millet.” This was both good and bad for the occupied Bulgarians. It was good because it reestablished some local control. The millets were created so that local leaders could be put in place to handle a community’s religious and other daily affairs. But it was also bad because it placed whole communities into distinct categories and into the second-class status associated with them.

The community leaders were completely beholden to Muslim dictates and could be ordered to raise taxes or levy troops from the Bulgarian populace at any time. In other words, although the Bulgarian leaders could lead when it came to mundane, daily affairs, they had no authority whatsoever when it came to crucial matters of statecraft, which could have a lasting impact on the lives of members of the Bulgarian community.

The non-Muslim communities of Bulgaria were also under considerable pressure to convert to Islam. Life would be so much easier for them if they simply converted. The fact that so many were willing to endure this second-class treatment that came with being a Christian is a clear demonstration of just how powerful the original faith of these Bulgarians was.

Nevertheless, there were also those who opted to convert to Islam. For them, the road would be open for an easier life. They would share the same rights and privileges as other Muslims under the Ottoman banner. These Bulgarian-speaking Muslims were called Pomaks.​[38]

For those who remained Christian, there would be a building undercurrent of resentment. This resentment would occasionally break out in the form of popular protest. The Turks handled these uprisings in a variety of ways. If possible, they tried to handle the situation diplomatically, but they also were not against coming down hard on the instigators, making them pay with their lives.

​

Chapter 7 – Bulgarian Revolt against Ottoman Rule

“I could distinguish one slight skeletal form still enclosed in a chemise, the skull wrapped with a colored handkerchief, and the bony ankles encased in the embroidered footless stockings worn by Bulgarian girls. The ground was strewn with bones in every direction, where the dogs had carried them off to gnaw them at their leisure. At the distance of a hundred yards beneath us lay the town. As seen from our standpoint, it reminded one of the ruins of Herculaneum or Pompeii.”

-Januarius MacGahan​[39]

The Bulgarians were a proud and independent people for centuries. Although military defeat necessitated their subjection, they were by no means willing to just accept their fate of being a subservient class under Ottoman rule. From practically the very start of Ottoman dominion, the Bulgarians did what they could to resist their Turkish overlords. Such resistance did not always take place through armed revolt. There were plenty of instances in which the means to resist the Ottomans was through the purse rather than through the sword.

This was often the case, at least as it pertained to the esnafs or guilds. The guilds allowed enterprising Bulgarians to make money while giving Bulgaria as a whole an important chip to play in the Ottoman political system. It was through the guilds that the more successful and enterprising Bulgarians made their wealth. These guilds trained Bulgarians in a trade, with skilled workers rising up through three ranks (apprentice, journeyman, and master of the craft).

At first, this might just seem to be a nice way for one to learn a trade. However, the guilds took on a political life of their own, complete with councils upon which masters sat to decide important protocols that would affect economic commerce in Bulgaria. These measures would ultimately resonate throughout the entire economy of the Ottoman Empire.

The Bulgarians were not the only ones protesting the Ottoman government. There were other Muslim dissidents who occasionally let their voices be heard. In 1416, the Muslim Bedreddin sect—led by Sheikh Bedreddin—rose up to challenge the Ottoman regime. However, for the most part, if anyone was going to protest their treatment at the hands of Ottoman administrators, it was more than likely going to be the Christian population of Bulgaria.

These kinds of protests were considered very dangerous by the Ottomans since they were more than likely connected to deep-seated beliefs. Even more ominous for the Ottomans were the frequent rumors that the nations of western and central Europe might come to the aid of those who dared to rebel against the Ottoman Empire.​[40]

In the late 1500s, for example, there were many rumors afoot that the Habsburgs, who were aligned with Transylvania and Wallachia, were ready to storm through the Balkans to take on the Ottomans. These beliefs were apparently bolstered by visiting traders, who not only traded their wares with the locals but also traded in the latest gossip. The idea that their redemption was nigh had become such a powerful concept that many Bulgarians joined in when a popular revolt erupted in the Balkans in 1598.

The Ottomans were stinging from recent defeats in other theaters of war, so they came down hard on their rebellious subjects in southeastern Europe. Many were massacred and wiped out in a horrific spilling of blood. This incident led to a persistent remnant of underground resistance fighters known as the haiduks. They lived in the wilderness or on the edge of civilization, ready and willing to ambush Ottomans at will. These rebels were similar to the guerilla fighters of South America, with a dose of Robin Hood-styled banditry. These daring souls would become the heroes of the Bulgarian resistance.

Now fast forward a century later, and another great uprising centered around that old Bulgarian seat of power in Tarnovo took place. This time, it was sparked by rumors of an impending Russian offensive against the Ottoman Turks—an offensive that never actually took place. Then, a couple of years later, a major series of revolts erupted in northwestern Bulgaria. Northwestern Bulgaria was the most susceptible to these sorts of revolts since it was on the far fringes of Ottoman control, bordering the free lands of Bulgaria’s European neighbors. Bulgarians eagerly looked at these bastions of freedom for help to throw off the Ottoman yoke.

However, during the early days of the Ottoman occupation of Bulgaria, even this faint hope often came into doubt. The defeat of Constantinople was certainly a crushing blow, as was the toppling of the modern-day Serbian capital of Belgrade. The Ottomans first attempted to take Belgrade in 1456, but even after a lengthy siege, they had failed to make any headway into the city.

It is important to note that back in 1456, Belgrade was actually considered part of Hungary. During the 1456 siege, its defense was directed by none other than John Hunyadi of Varna fame. While the Battle of Varna was one of Hunyadi’s greatest defeats, his defense of Belgrade in 1456 was one of his greatest triumphs. His efforts not only saved Belgrade but also greatly slowed the Ottoman advance. If Belgrade had fallen, the Ottoman war machine likely would have quickly made its way through Hungary and then on into Austria during a time when the defenders of these nations might not have been prepared for such an onslaught.

In 1521, the Turks returned to Belgrade, and this time around, they were playing for keeps. Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent led some 250,000 troops to the gates of Belgrade and overwhelmed the city’s defenses. After their victory, it was made clear that the Turks did not just want to seize the capital; they also wanted to clear the path for further offensives in southeastern Europe. The Ottomans burned down much of the city and deported most of the residents. Many of the residents were actually deported to the outskirts of Constantinople, where they were forced to create new villages in a forested region nearby. To this very day, this part of Constantinople (today’s Istanbul, Turkey) is known as the Belgrad Forest and is a widely visited tourist attraction in Turkey.

Of course, back in 1521, there was nothing touristy about destroying a city, slaughtering thousands, and deporting the rest of the people thousands of miles away. The Ottomans did this to make sure there was not any potential for revolt in Belgrade. It also likely served as a stern warning to anyone in nearby Bulgaria who might have had rebellion on their mind.

The next major defeat of the European Christian powers—upon whom many Bulgarians had placed their hopes for intervention—occurred on the island of Rhodes, located in the Aegean Sea. In many ways, this piece of island real estate was the last toehold from the heyday of the Crusades. After the loss of all that territory on the mainland of the Levant, many Crusader knights fled to this island. It ended up becoming the headquarters of a special order of Christian knights known as the Knights Hospitaller.

By 1522, the Turks were on their trail, and after a prolonged, bloody siege of the island, the grand master of the Knights Hospitaller negotiated a surrender with the Ottoman leader, Suleiman the Magnificent. Surprisingly, the knights were allowed to evacuate and relocated farther afield onto the island of Malta, henceforth becoming the Knights of Malta. The fact that all of their potential allies, the Christian nations, as well as the orders of Christian knights, were being defeated, repelled, and pushed aside had a demoralizing effect on the Bulgarians.​[41]

However, even worse was to come. The disastrous Battle of Mohács, which took place on August 29th, 1526, sent the Christian West reeling. It is believed that in the first couple of hours of engagement, around ten thousand Hungarian troops were killed.​[42] On top of that, the king of Hungary himself—King Louis II—perished during the course of the struggle. It is not clear if he died in the actual fighting or if it was simply a freak accident. Some accounts suggest that his horse actually slipped while trying to cross a stream, causing the king to drown. There had been severe flooding in the region. Whatever happened to him, his corpse was temporarily lost in the floodwaters. It was not until months later that his body was recovered.

At any rate, it was a terrible loss for Hungary. They lost their king, and they lost thousands of men in this ill-fated engagement. Even the thousands who were taken prisoner ultimately would not survive since the sultan decided to behead them the following day. It seems that the magnanimity he had extended to the Knights Hospitaller after their defeat at Rhodes was not going to be extended to these Hungarian soldiers.

Hungary itself would be divided thereafter, with both Ottoman and Austrian powers fighting over the remnants of what was once a proud nation. With this string of victories, any glimmer of hope that outside forces would rally to Bulgaria’s rescue was becoming dimmer by the day.

​

Chapter 8 – The Ottoman Grip Finally Loosens

“They are at present in a most wretched condition, owing to the extortions of Ali Pasha, or of those who have plundered in his name. In the short space of six months, they had paid to his tax gatherers, as they told us, eighty purses, a sum equivalent to forty thousand piastres. Poverty is very apparent in their dwellings. Nor can it otherwise, where the wretched inhabitants are so oppressed by their lords. The whole of the earnings of the peasant is here taken from him; he is scarcely allowed any means of subsistence.”

-E. D. Clarke​[43]

From the 1300s to the 1500s, the Ottoman war machine seemed almost unstoppable. They conquered all of Asia Minor, charged up the Bosporus, and steadily advanced through southern Europe. They controlled the Balkans and even part of Hungary. Their next most obvious target was the closest great capital to their Hungarian possessions—Vienna. The Austrians, from their seat in Vienna, had to look on with great dismay as Hungary was dismantled by the Ottomans.

With the loss of a unified Hungary, they had not only lost an ally but also a useful buffer zone. Now that the Hungarians had been bested, the Austrians found themselves suddenly on the front lines against the mighty Ottoman Empire. The Ottomans reached the very gates of Vienna in 1529. A terrible struggle ensued, but the Austrians were determined to prevail.

The Ottomans were likely surprised at just how fiercely the Austrians resisted them. They were also impressed by the professional nature of their soldiers and the defensive bulwarks of their fortresses. The Austrian defenders were led by the great Austrian champion Archduke Ferdinand of Hapsburg, who oversaw a garrison said to have numbered some sixteen thousand.​[44]

As the cold winds of winter began to be felt, a war council was held by the Ottomans in which a general consensus was made that it was best to call off the siege and try again at some later date. This led to an embarrassing retreat, and the cold winter weather wreaked havoc on the infantry. This whole episode, while not exactly a great defeat of the Ottoman forces, still stood as a small victory for the Austrians for having simply survived the onslaught of an Ottoman siege.

The Ottomans would try their luck again in the year 1683, and they would sustain an even more decisive defeat. It was so decisive, in fact, that the emboldened Austrians began to wage offensives against the Ottomans in the Balkans. This resurgence of aggression against the Turks managed to once again stir up the nationalist spirits of the beleaguered Bulgarians.

Along with Ottoman troops being on the defensive, it was also quite clear that the whole Ottoman system was in a state of decline at this point as well. Historians have long marked the failed siege of Vienna in 1683 as the start of the Ottoman Empire’s decline, and it is clear that this date was indeed the beginning of the end as it pertained to the Ottoman Empire. Certain tenets of the Ottoman civil administration, such as the timar system (a land grant system), no longer worked as well as it had in the past. There was also the issue over who would inherit land and how it would be distributed.

At the same time, there was a general decline in troop recruitment and a greater dependence upon the Janissaries. This meant that more and more people were being recruited from non-Muslim families, largely from the Balkans, to fill up not just the ranks of the troops but also to fill important administrative posts. This gave the Bulgarians yet another card to play since they were being groomed as insiders at the heart of the Ottoman regime.

Even so, one small act of rebellion was all it took for the Ottoman hammer to come down hard on the Bulgarians. In 1688, around the town of Chiprovtsi, the townspeople responded to rumors that Austrian Habsburg troops were on their way to the Balkans to take on the Turks. This led many to believe that their liberation was imminent, and many dropped what they were doing to join the approaching army. Shopkeepers dropped their brooms, and farmers dropped their plows in order to break through the Ottoman lines and daringly join the Hapsburg forces. However, the Hapsburgs, though engaged in intermittent skirmishes with the Ottomans, were not yet ready to actually try and liberate Bulgaria. Once this latest round of fighting with the Habsburgs was over, the Bulgarian town of Chiprovtsi was made to face the dire consequences, as collective punishment was leveled against the whole town in response to the Bulgarians who went south to aid the Habsburgs. It has been suggested that roughly 75 percent of the town’s inhabitants were put to the sword.​[45]

However, the world was changing, and slowly but surely, the Ottoman grip was slipping. The Ottomans were not just losing battles on the battlefield; more importantly, they were also losing on the economic front. After the fall of Constantinople in 1453, for a brief time, the Ottomans had a stranglehold on trade from the East since they were on top of the old Silk Road that ran through Constantinople. The West had to rely on middlemen that jacked up the prices. The Westerners defeated this unfair system by building huge boats called galleons, which were able to sail the darkened seas and circumvent the tip of Africa to reach India and the rest of the East so that they could cut out the middlemen and get the goods directly.

These efforts to find precious spices and other prized commodities also led to Christopher Columbus accidentally “discovering” the Americas. This had a great impact on the Ottoman economy because the markets were suddenly flooded with gold and silver from the Americas, leading to rampant inflation in the Ottoman Empire. The double blows of the Austrians halting the Ottoman advance in the 1680s and the effect of the loss of trade due to Europeans securing permanent backdoor access to the East by way of the high seas transformed the Ottoman Empire into a shell of its former self.

The Bulgarians, in the meantime, were disconnected from the central authority of Istanbul (formerly Constantinople) and continued to tend to their own affairs. Although their freedom had not yet been given to them, everyone seemed to know that it was just a matter of time before their independence would arrive. There is a word for that independence in the Bulgarian tongue, vazrazhdane, which roughly translates as “national revival.” Though often glossed over in simplistic and romantic terms, the actual process of this national revival was complex and multifaceted. There were certain cultural components at work in the march toward independence, but there were also economic matters to consider.

Many aspects of Bulgarian freedom could be said to have been won by virtue of Bulgarian economic know-how; no shots had to be fired on this front. The initial declarations for independence began to be made in earnest in the late 1700s, roughly a century after the Austrians thwarted a Turkish invasion of Vienna. The Turks had been on their heels for about one hundred years since then, and in the face of this long, steady decline in Ottoman prestige and power, the Bulgarians finally felt comfortable enough to assert their own rights. They came to realize that before becoming free from what they viewed as the alien power of the Ottomans, who ruled them from afar, the Bulgarians had to revive their own sense of national culture.

The Bulgarians had been under the Ottoman yoke for so long that it was easy to forget who they were. So, before they had a full-blown identity crisis, they had to rediscover what it meant to be a Bulgarian in the first place. Reclaiming the Bulgarian language, culture, and religious practices was the first step to reclaiming the sense of national identity needed to assert their independence from the Ottomans.

One of the Bulgarian figures who greatly aided in this quest to reclaim a national identity was a Bulgarian monk named Paisus of Hilendar. He hailed from the Bulgarian town of Bansko, where he was born in 1722. By 1745, he had become a full-fledged monk and was traveling from one monastery to another all over Bulgaria.

During his sojourns, he was able to gain a keen view of both the Bulgarian people and the many problems that they faced under Ottoman dominion. This troubled Paisus of Hilendar to no end. He himself was a student of history, and he knew full well that Bulgaria had once been a mighty empire in its own right. It pained him to see how far Bulgaria had fallen. He decided to make it his own personal mission to restore the greatness of Bulgaria’s past.​[46]

First, he felt the need to remind others of Bulgaria’s past, and what better way to remind them than to compile a book on Bulgarian history? In the 1760s, he set to work on compiling a text entitled A Slavonic-Bulgarian History of the Peoples, Tsars, Saints, and of All Their Deeds and of the Bulgarian Way of Life. That lengthy title may sound like a mouthful, but this monk-turned-historian likely felt that it encapsulated all of the things that very much needed to be said in regard to Bulgarian history and culture.

The book itself was a revival of language since it was written in the old tongue, Old Church Slavonic. It also included some more recent dialects that added to the potency of what was being said in the book. This was a great way to introduce the concept of Bulgarian culture, language, religion, and even nationalism to a wider audience. The book had an interesting take on both history and current events, with the writer taking a look at the past as well as looking forward to the future.​[47] The writer spoke of the greatness of Bulgaria’s past, its current predicament, and the best way to move forward from the problems that currently beset Bulgaria. Here, he stressed not only the obvious danger posed by the Turks but also the supposed danger of the Greeks. Ever since the days of the Byzantines, Greek culture had a heavy influence on Bulgaria. For instance, the Bulgarian Church was placed under the general oversight of Greek-speaking priests in Constantinople.

The Ottomans also tended to lump the Bulgarians in with the Greeks as if they were Greeks themselves, which obviously they were not. Greek nationalism was on the rise as well, and as the Greeks struggled to throw off the Turkish yoke, many outsiders identified the Balkans, as a whole, as part of the same struggle and were tempted to lump the Bulgarians right in with the Greeks. So, as silly as it might sound, one of the main goals of Paisus of Hilendar’s book was to simply remind Bulgarians (as well as the rest of the world) that they were not Greek and that they were, in fact, Bulgarian.

Essentially, this text was as much a history book as it was a nationalist call to cultural arms. As such, there are more than a few passages that read more like political arguments than a neutral, cut-and-dry history lesson. This monk actually went on tour to preach about what he wrote. In 1765, during one of these promotional engagements, he ran into a man by the name of Sophronius of Vratsa. This man was so impressed by what he heard and read that he took a copy of Paisus of Hilendar’s book and posted it in his local place of worship.​[48]

Several copies of the book were made after that, and in 1844, a copy surfaced as far afield as Budapest, Hungary. At this point, the text did not even list the author and was considered anonymous. It would not be reidentified until 1871 when Bulgarian historian Marin Drinov tracked down the authorship back to Paisus of Hilendar. Anonymous or known, the words of this writer would go on to influence countless Bulgarian revolutionaries.

As much as Paisus of Hilendar’s writings advised to avoid Hellenistic influence, it is worth noting that the revolt of the Greeks in 1821 had a great impact and influence on the rest of the Balkans, including Bulgaria. Although they were inspired by the Greeks, the Bulgarians, true to form, looked on with their typical resentment and suspicion due to their history of Turkish oppression and Greek-Byzantine political and religious oppression. Both the Greeks and the Turks had more or less treated the Bulgarians as a backyard colony, and the memories of the Bulgarians were long enough that they made sure not to forget it.

Despite the Greeks’ early success in the revolt of 1821, the Bulgarians were more likely to turn to the Russians. The Russians were also Orthodox Christians, and since many Bulgarians identified with the Slavic portion of Bulgaria’s roots, Russia seemed to be in closer cultural proximity than the Greeks. As early as 1686, the Russian Orthodox Church sent a delegation to the patriarch of Istanbul to see if Russia could gain a greater say in at least the religious lives of the Bulgarians. Although some historians debate this point, it has long been suggested that prior to getting to Istanbul, the delegation made a pit stop in Tarnovo, Bulgaria. If true, it would indicate that, despite the centuries of oppression that the Bulgarians had already endured, the fiery flame of freedom was still burning by the end of the 17th century.

As mentioned in the previous chapter, when the Bulgarians actually did revolt in 1688, it was brutally suppressed by the Turks, who were still more than willing to show their teeth. The Bulgarians who perished in the Chiprovtsi revolt were largely Catholic and were angling for the support of the Catholic West by way of the Austrians. So, after this revolt was brutally crushed, the pendulum of Bulgarian resistance swung even further toward the Eastern Orthodox camp, and Russia began to loom even larger as a potential ally in the struggle for freedom.

The Russian army, in the meantime, was literally on the march. In 1696, Tsar Peter the Great of Russia managed to capture the Turkish port of Azov, giving the Russians strategic access to the Sea of Azov and, by extension, the Black Sea itself. This military victory was followed up by another diplomatic one in 1700, in which the tsar negotiated express permission to navigate the Black Sea from the Turks.​[49] Sure, Peter the Great could have tried to force his way into these waters by military might, but why waste one’s strength for something that could be achieved through diplomacy? Part of Peter’s greatness was knowing when to use the hammer and when to extend the olive branch.

Russia came to blows with the Ottoman Empire again in 1711 in what was initially a battle over the fate of Ukraine and the Crimean Peninsula. The Crimean Peninsula was a piece of strategic real estate and of extreme importance since it jutted out into the Black Sea. The Russians got the worst of it this time around and ended up suing for peace.

As part of the official Treaty of Pruth, the terms that the Russians agreed to saw Russia hand the port of Azov back to the Turks. The Russians would regain Azov once again in 1737, reversing their previous concessions. The fact that the Russians were willing to go toe to toe with the Turks served as an inspiration to the Bulgarians, who increasingly identified as being a part of the larger Slavic people group. The Russians also began to view the Bulgarians as a clear asset in the region and did not hesitate to encourage unrest among them as a means of destabilizing the Ottomans.

Around the time of Paisus of Hilendar’s passing in 1773, a renewed series of wars between Russia and the Ottoman Empire ensued. In 1774, one of these wars resulted in the signing of a peace treaty that had the Ottomans cough up more concessions on the Black Sea, providing Russia even greater access to the Balkans and, ultimately, Bulgaria itself. This particular treaty, known officially as the Treaty of Kucuk Kaynarca, had long-lasting implications for Crimea.

At this time, the Crimean Peninsula was still under the control of a Mongol Muslim group known as the Tartars, who existed in the semi-autonomous state known as the Crimean Khanate. Ever since the days of the Golden Horde, when Russia itself was under the so-called “Mongol Yoke,” the Crimean Khanate had been a dreadful thorn in the side of Russia, Ukraine, and virtually all of the Balkans. This was due to the nasty habit of the Crimean Tartars, as they conducted slave raids on their Christian European neighbors. This part of history is often so overlooked that some may even question its validity, but it is absolutely true.

Read up on Russian history, Ukrainian history, and the history of Balkan states, such as Bulgaria, and you will find it full of tales of Tartars raiding poor, defenseless villages to capture hapless residents so that they could be enslaved. Just think of the term used to designate the Slavic peoples—Slav. Add an “e” at the end of it, and what do you get? Slave. It is a well-known fact among linguists that the word “slave” was derived from Slav, and this association developed by virtue of the fact that the Slavic people were enslaved during these slave raids. The slave raids conducted by the Crimean Tartars sent countless Slavic souls off to the markets of the Ottoman Empire, where they would bring in a hefty profit for the slave raiders.

Even though the Russians surely had their own territorial ambition and ulterior motives in mind when focusing on Crimea, the Crimean Tartars and their penchant for slave raids also represented a threat, not just to the Russians but also to the whole surrounding region. As such, it should not come as much of a surprise that they decided to break their treaty with the Ottomans and unilaterally seize Crimea by force in 1783.

Another series of Russo-Turkish wars erupted in 1787 and 1791, which ultimately saw the Turks be pushed back to the Danube River. The Russians put a halt to Crimean slave raids and also put the Ottomans on their heels. In the eyes of many Bulgarians, the Russians were their champions.

This set the stage for the Bulgarian revolts of the 1800s, which were timed and coordinated with all of the latest happenings between the Russian Empire and the Ottoman Empire. By the time war broke out once again in 1828, the Bulgarians actively enlisted with the Russians. This, of course, was the Turks’ worst nightmare and something they had long feared would happen.

​

Chapter 9 – Bulgarian Independence

“Of all the Slav peoples the most glorious were the Bulgarians; they were the first who called themselves tsars, the first to have a patriarch, the first to adopt the Christian faith, and they it was who conquered the largest amount of territory. Thus, of all the Slav peoples they were the strongest and the most honored, and the first Slav saints cast their radiance from amongst the Bulgarian people and through the Bulgarian language.”

- Paisus of Hilendar​[50]

Just as the Ottoman grip was beginning to really slip, conditions among the Bulgarians got worse instead of getting better. This was due to the fact that the stressed Ottoman government could no longer exert a strong, uniform central authority over the Balkans, which led to so-called “bandit” local administrators taking advantage of the situation so that they could use and abuse the locals as much as they saw fit without any real oversight from Constantinople. They overtaxed the people, handed out unfair punishments, and were generally harsh on the populace they administered.

The Bulgarians referred to this chaotic and essentially lawless period as the kurdjaliistvo.​[51] It was called this due to the phenomenon of armed Turks, referred to as the kurdjalii, who went around preying on and oppressing local villages. The term is actually a Turkish one and is said to be in reference to the open plains or fields that these Turkish bandits liked to roam on.

This oppression caused many Bulgarians to flee to higher ground. This higher ground, more often than not, led refugees to move to Ukraine and Russian lands. These refugees were quick to inform their supposed Slavic brothers of all the horrors they had experienced, which helped to continue beating the drum that would lead to further war between Russia and the Ottoman Empire.

The Greeks, in the meantime, had already ripped free from the Ottoman grip, becoming an independent nation for the first time in centuries in 1830. Also, around this time, the beleaguered Ottomans sought to reform their ranks, and a big part of this reform occurred when the Ottomans disbanded their elite fighting force known as the Janissaries. This had a major effect on the Balkans and particularly Bulgaria, which was a main source of the Janissaries by way of the blood tax that had long been levied against them. This was not only done to end the system of the devshirme but also for the pragmatic reason that the Janissaries were an outdated military corps that desperately needed to be replaced. Their heyday had long come and gone, and the Turks desired a more modern military model upon which to base their armed services. The Turks wanted an industrialized national army similar to what the Western nations had.

This retooled Turkish army needed new uniforms, and Bulgaria provided much of it by way of their livestock. Sheep, in particular, had long been a great commodity in Bulgaria, and now, the Bulgarians were sheering their sheep and turning out uniforms for Turkish troops. This need led to the industrialization of Bulgaria itself, with its first factory appearing in the Bulgarian town of Sliven in the 1830s. This was followed by a textile mill in the town of Plovdiv a short time later. This led to a boon in short-term wealth for the manufacturers and merchants who profited from the enterprise.​[52]

Not all of these newly rich Bulgarians were self-centered in their indulgence. Some were quite generous when it came to charitable contributions to the community, particularly in the building up of Bulgarian civil infrastructure. This was very important because, prior to this, Bulgarian infrastructure had been in serious decline. At the start of the Turkish occupation, the Turks themselves had destroyed much of this infrastructure, fearing that it would be used as fortresses to stage revolts. In the intervening years, not a whole lot else had been built. Thanks to the newly rich Bulgarians’ contributions, many new public buildings, such as schools and governmental offices, were put up all throughout Bulgaria.

Perhaps most crucial, though, were the scholarships that were established for young Bulgarians to gain a good education. And even more important were the scholarships that enabled them to travel outside of the Balkans. The students who were sent abroad were able to learn firsthand what life was like out of Bulgaria. Upon their return, they established a lifeline of independent thought for the rest of Bulgaria. Under the Turkish yoke, Bulgaria had long been isolated from the rest of the world. However, as time passed, they were rapidly gaining connections to the outside world.

Interestingly, the Turks had been cultivating their own outside relations. In particular, they had become increasingly close to the Western powers of Britain and France, two nations that had become quite worried about the prospect of Russia dominating the East. So, in a move that would have absolutely stunned their Christian forebearers, these nations of the Christian West teamed up with their ancient enemy, the Ottoman Empire, against the Russians.

This set the stage for the Crimean War, which erupted in the year 1853. The Russians had the objective of seizing even more territory and perhaps even dealing the Ottoman Empire a fatal blow. These efforts were thwarted when the Ottomans rallied, and with the help of their Western allies, they prevailed. Although this was ostensibly an Ottoman victory and stopped the Russians from having warships in the Black Sea, the Ottomans had to give some important concessions of their own. The terms of the 1856 Treaty of Paris, which ended the war, dictated that the Ottomans were to give their Christian subjects the same equality as Muslim subjects, and the Orthodox Church was to have the final say over church affairs in the Ottoman Empire.

As an interesting aside, after this crushing defeat and thanks to the allied powers, Russia decided to sell its territory of Alaska to the United States. They did so out of fear that they would be unable to defend it should they have to face off against Western powers, in particular the British.

The Russians were not going to leave the so-called “Eastern Question” alone, and as the Ottoman Empire continued to falter, the Russians declared war on them again. The next round of the Russo-Turkish wars erupted in 1877. This war would finally break Bulgaria loose from the Ottoman grip once and for all.

In fact, the year prior to this outbreak of war, the Bulgarians were chomping at the bit for their own political autonomy, if not outright independence.​[53] That April, they even dared to stage an outright revolt. The revolt was perhaps doomed from the start, but one cannot help but admire the ingenuity of these Bulgarian rebels. They did not have weapons of their own since such things were forbidden, but utilizing their newly industrialized factories, they made their own makeshift weapons. They actually manufactured their own cannons by taking tree trunks and encasing them with copper, which had been melted down from pipes!

Nevertheless, the revolt was a failure, and the wholesale reprisal leveled against the Bulgarians was shocking. Villages were completely demolished, and tens of thousands of people were put to the sword. It is said that in one instance alone, approximately five thousand people were shut up in a church (it must have been one of the bigger churches) and burned alive.​[54]

In the past, such terrible instances would have been kept quiet within the borders of the Ottoman Empire. However, the Bulgarian people had grown quite connected to the outside world, and soon, the terrible deeds of the Turks had leaked outside the empire’s borders. The international press rightfully heralded the destruction as the Bulgarian atrocities, highlighting the terrible collective punishment that had been exacted against the Bulgarians by the Ottomans.

One correspondent on the ground, Januarius MacGahan, even documented some firsthand accounts. In a publication for the London Daily News, MacGahan described an absolutely horrible scene in which Bulgarian villages had been turned into graveyards, with dogs fighting over the bones of the villagers.​[55]

Unlike during the Crimean War, in which strategic interests trumped any natural solidarity that might have been found among Christian Europeans, this atrocity seemed to give Russia a blank check to come down hard on the Ottomans. Rather than being feared as an aggressive expansionist, the Russians had the chance to appear as the avenging angels of Bulgaria. So, with the winds of public opinion filling up their political sails, the Russians struck back at the Ottoman Empire in 1877.

Russia openly claimed to be fighting on behalf of its fellow Slavic peoples of the Balkans, who had been so sorely mistreated by the Ottomans. Never mind the fact that imperial Russia was eager to expand its own territory and influence; the Russians were able to galvanize the masses both in Bulgaria and Russia itself by rallying to what seemed to be a noble cause.

Perhaps not since the Crusades had popular sentiment among Christian Europeans been so high. This latest Russo-Turkish war began in earnest in April 1877 and would last until 1878. During this time, Russian troops stormed into the Balkans, picking up what seemed like an endless supply of Bulgarian troops. They did not want to miss out on the fight for their own independence.

The first main engagement was the Battle of Shipka Pass. This battle had the Russians and their Bulgarian allies entirely outgunned by the Turks. Even so, the Russians and their Bulgarian auxiliaries fought so intensely and relentlessly that the Turks could not stand against them. Around thirteen thousand perished in this early stage of the fighting.

The intensity of this battle likely had a lot to do with the Bulgarians themselves. Although this was just the opening salvo in the latest war between Russia and the Ottoman Empire, for the Bulgarians, it felt like their war of independence. And it was. After the smoke from that first engagement cleared, Bulgaria was declared an independent nation—at least by the Bulgarian rebels who aspired to achieve such a thing. But declaring independence and maintaining it are, of course, two very different things.

Initially, Bulgarian hopes were high. There was even talk of creating a greater Bulgarian state bordering the Danube and the Black Sea.​[56] However, when the war came to a close in 1878, the status of Bulgaria ended up falling short of any greater Bulgaria or even full independence for that matter. Bulgaria would be considered an autonomous republic but still within the boundaries of the Ottoman Empire.​[57]

The treaty also had some unexpected last-minute stipulations that greatly disturbed the Bulgarians, such as the unexpected division of Bulgaria into three sections. Northern Bulgaria would be considered an independent Bulgarian principality. The southern district would be dubbed Eastern Rumelia, and it would be autonomous only in domestic matters, as it would still technically be part of the Ottoman Empire. The district that contained Thrace and Macedonia would be annexed by the Ottomans outright.​[58]

The borders of Bulgaria after the Russo-Turkish War.

TodorBozhinov, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bulgaria_San_Stefano_Berlin_1878_TB.png

This was all done at the last minute to appease the fears of Britain and Austria-Hungary, which were worried that a large Bulgarian state would essentially become an active Russian territory in the Balkans. Always concerned with maintaining the status quo, it was for this reason that they preferred for Bulgaria to remain divided and relatively weak.​[59]

The Bulgarians must have thought to themselves that they went through all of that fighting just to end up with a terrible bargain. This was just too hard for many of the Bulgarians, who had fought, died, bled, and struggled to believe they could achieve their own independence. They had risen up and gave their lives only to get the short end of the stick once the time came to negotiate the outcome of the war.

However, it soon became clear that the main reason why the Bulgarians had been so shorted was because they had allowed others to speak for them. They were not at the table when these decisions were made. They did not have a voice, so they did not have a say in the matter. Such things would instill much bitterness into the Bulgarians and would not soon be forgotten.

It taught the Bulgarians a very important lesson, though. It taught them that picking up arms on the battlefield was not always enough. They also had to find a means to give voice to their own political aspirations. They could not allow others to decide their fate for them.

Despite this setback, the Bulgarians refused to give up on their dream of full sovereignty and independence. Just a few years later, in 1885, the Bulgarians led yet another armed conflict against the Turks. This time around, they had decent weapons at their disposal and were victorious.

Not only did they get what they wanted, but the fact they beat the Turks on their own without outside assistance was a great boon to national pride. They had stood on their own, and they had won. This victory led to the Treaty of Bucharest, which was signed in 1885.

Once their complete independence had been won, there was the question of how the independent state of Bulgaria would be ruled. Prior to the Ottoman conquest, Bulgaria was a monarchy. However, with their own traditional royal family long snuffed out, the Bulgarians decided they would just have to import royalty from somewhere else. For a time, it seemed that Russian royalty would be tapped for the role, but ultimately, the Bulgarians ended up with a German prince named Ferdinand sitting on the throne. In 1887, Ferdinand stood in as crown prince, with prominent Bulgarian statesman Stefan Stambolov at the helm as prime minister. Ferdinand was the prince of Bulgaria from 1887 to 1908, after which he was hailed as the tsar of Bulgaria.​[60]

The aforementioned Bulgarian politician Stambolov is noteworthy for his views that Bulgaria should try and pull away from Russia’s embrace. Stambolov was worried that Russia was too eager to view Bulgaria as a protectorate and that such arrangements—whether real or merely perceived—stifled Bulgaria’s growth. In order to offset this perception, the Bulgarians began to build up their army. They wanted to prove to the world that they could stand on their own two feet. Along with building up the ranks of the army, Stambolov sought to build up the banks of Bulgaria. He sought international loans to build up solvency and bring Bulgaria into the international market.

In 1888, Bulgaria secured a multi-million dollar loan from Britain, which allowed the Bulgarians to spend money on important infrastructure projects. More importantly, it greased international banking wheels enough to convince other nations to participate in the Bulgarian economy. Soon, money from nations such as Germany and Austria came pouring in. Bulgaria also entered into important tariff agreements with the major nations of Europe, making Bulgaria an active member of the international financial system with its own established rules and regulations.

All was not well in Bulgaria, though, as not everyone was happy with Stambolov or Ferdinand. In 1890, an assassination plot was uncovered. The plot was led by a member of the Bulgarian Armed Forces, Major Kosta Panitsa.​[61] Major Kosta Panitsa, who originally hailed from Macedonia, was apparently frustrated over the lingering question of what to do with the Macedonian region of his birth. Panitsa felt that closer ties with Russia were needed in order to settle the Macedonia question, yet under the German Prince Ferdinand and Prime Minister Stambolov, Bulgaria seemed to be drifting further out of Russia’s orbit.

Major Kosta Panitsa was ready to take some rather drastic measures to correct this perceived shift. He planned to storm into an official court ball that was being held for the prince on February 2nd, 1890, and shoot him on sight. However, Panitsa was not good at keeping secrets and had apparently told what he had planned to do to his chauffeur. The chauffeur then tipped off the police, and Panitsa was taken into custody.

Back in the days of the Ottoman Empire, a Bulgarian engaged in such diabolical plotting against the government likely would have been snatched up and executed without so much as a trial. To demonstrate that Bulgaria had developed its own sense of fair and equal justice, Panitsa got his time in court before he was found guilty as charged. Only then was then killed by a firing squad.

Stambolov did not let a good crisis go to waste. He managed to use it for his political benefit. He declared that a major conspiracy against the government had occurred and utilized this perception to root out any opposition to Prince Ferdinand and himself. Not all of these efforts were successful, as was demonstrated in March of 1891 when the finance minister was actually shot and killed simply because the assassin mistook him for Stambolov! He was saved by an assassin’s bullet because of a case of mistaken identity, but obviously, there were still those who were (quite literally) gunning for him.

The prime minister was also worried about the prince. What if an assassin did kill him? That certainly would have sent the government into chaos. As such, he began to pressure the prince to come up with an heir. That was, of course, the age-old solution to continuing a royal government after all. So, Stambolov began to whisper into the young prince’s ear that it was time for him to get married and have a family. He even found a bride for him in the form of Princess Marie-Louise of Bourbon-Parma.

The prince married Princess Marie-Louise as planned, and soon, the heir to the throne arrived in the form of a son named Boris. Stambolov was happy to have made such a lasting effect on the royal government of Bulgaria. He had safeguarded Prince Ferdinand and ensured that there was a royal line of succession. In many ways, he likely felt that his work was done.​[62] Regardless, his own popularity was in decline, and by 1894, he had become so unpopular that he was forced to resign from office. Sadly enough, just one year later, his many opponents finally did the former prime minister in. He was killed right in the middle of the street.

Bulgaria, as a whole, had come a long way. It had struggled under the yoke of the Ottoman Empire for centuries and had fought and won its independence. During the first decades of their independence, the Bulgarians struggled to assert themselves on the world stage. They made much progress, but by the dawning of the 20th century, Bulgaria was still a poor and backward country. By the year 1900, 80 percent of Bulgarians lived in abject poverty.

Little did anyone know this was setting the stage for a powder keg to be lit and for wars to start. The first sign that all was not well came in the year 1912. That year, the First Balkan War erupted, which had Bulgaria and Serbia team up against Turkey. The war was supposedly another noble one, tasked with the goal of freeing the rest of Ottoman-controlled Europe from the grip of the Ottoman Empire.

The Turks were already quite distracted due to a brewing conflict with Italy over the fate of Libya in North Africa, and they were ultimately defeated in this engagement, which ended its status as a European power.​[63] This war in the Balkans would soon lead to another one, with the Second Balkan War erupted in 1913.

This engagement had Bulgaria shifting its gaze from the Turks to their other ancient antagonist: the Greeks. This war was fought over the status of Thrace, a region that both Bulgaria and Greece laid claim to. Demonstrating how easily alliances could shift in the region, Bulgaria waged war against both Greece and Serbia. In this brutal contest of warfare, Bulgaria sought to have its traditional stomping grounds of Macedonia returned. However, during this exchange, Bulgaria did not fare so well and ultimately lost land instead of gaining it.

The war ended in the signing of another treaty in Bucharest, which saw Bulgaria giving up its ambition in Macedonia and ceding territory it had already claimed in the region of southern Dobruja. This piece of Balkan real estate was handed to Romania.​[64] This war not only had Bulgaria lose land, but it also had an adverse effect on the Bulgarian economy, making what was once a vibrant, industrious economy suddenly stall out and fall stagnant. The war also caused great cost in terms of human life.

Even worse was to come, though, since it was in the Balkans that the stage would be set for World War I. First of all, it must be noted that World War I began in the Balkans, as much of the conflict was a spillover from the unsettled questions left by the Balkan Wars. Serbia, in particular, was seething with resentment. Although Serbia had gained much in the Second Balkan War, it wanted more. In particular, the Serbians wanted to gain control of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which had become a fief of the Austro-Hungarian Empire.

Nationalism and resentment made for a heady mix when the archduke of Austria-Hungary, Franz Ferdinand, arrived on the scene in Bosnia in June 1914. Waiting for him was a determined Serbian nationalist named Gavrilo Princip. He opened fire and killed the archduke, along with his wife. As it has often been said, this was the spark that lit the fuse of the First World War. Austria-Hungary was naturally upset to have the archduke, who was the heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, killed. As such, they began to issue certain demands to the Serbs.

However, the demands were deemed to be far too harsh, which led the Serbs to appeal to their Russian benefactors. The Russians agreed to back the Serbs up. The Austrians had the Germans in their corner, goading them on and encouraging them to do whatever it took to teach the Serbs a lesson. Neither side backed down, and the next thing anyone knew, Austria-Hungary and Serbia were at war. This meant Germany and Russia were at war as well. However, Russia was allied with Britain and France, so this meant that Britain and France were also pulled into the fray.

The Germans and the Austrians gained an unlikely ally in the form of the Ottoman Empire. Even more unlikely and in one of the strangest, most ironic twists of fate, spiteful Bulgaria, which was still smarting from its last go-round with Serbia, actually joined forces with Germany, Austria, and the Ottoman Empire. Yes, Bulgaria was now teaming up as an ally with its old foe, the Turks!

The Central Powers, which consisted of those nations, went toe to toe with the Allied Powers, which were led by Britain, France, Russia, and later the United States of America. The stage had been set for World War I, and all of the pieces were in place. The war that was supposed to end all wars would be fought in one bloody trench after another.

The fact that Bulgaria’s leaders had felt it prudent to fight alongside the Turks was not popular with the average Bulgarian. There were even some demonstrations that erupted.​[65] At this time, Bulgaria had a growing Communist Party, and the Communists, in particular, vigorously denounced the war. The Communists had their own reasons for doing so, but by latching onto the populist discontent with the war, they were able to gain popularity for their own movement. Nevertheless, the government overruled the will of the people and marched to war regardless.

Bulgarian soldiers cutting barbed wire in World War I.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Bulgarian_soldiers_with_wire_cutters_WWI_(contrasted).jpg

The Germans and Austrians were glad to have Bulgaria’s support since Bulgaria was viewed as necessary to keep Serbia preoccupied enough in the Balkans to keep the vital supply lines that ran from Germany to the Ottoman Empire open. The Bulgarians were also viewed as a vital thorn in the side of Russia, even though the Germans did do their best to tear into the Russians on the Eastern Front. Because of the role that they agreed to play, the Bulgarians were promised their long-coveted territorial claims in Macedonia.

For being such a small country, Bulgaria was able to field a large army, which consisted of well over one million troops. Perhaps the most stunning moment during Bulgaria’s participation in this war was when Bulgarian troops, alongside Ottoman soldiers, stormed into southern Dobruja and battled the Romanians, who were on the side of the Allies at the time. They ferociously fought the Romanians and managed to cross the Danube to take the battle to Romania itself.

This is rather ironic in consideration of the long history of Balkan partisans and their Crusader allies doing everything they could to prevent the Ottomans from crossing the Danube. In the past, much blood and treasure had been spilled to keep the Ottomans on the other side of that fateful river, and yet here were the Bulgarians, willfully assisting this crossing.

However, once they dug their heels in, trench warfare did not go so well for the Bulgarians or their allies. Bulgaria was ultimately forced to surrender and sign an armistice on September 28th, 1918. Bulgaria’s defeat in the war led to the abdication of Tsar Ferdinand I. He stepped down from the throne on October 3rd, 1918, and handed his crown to his son and heir, Prince Boris III.​[66]

Boris III.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:BASA-3K-7-342-28-Boris_III_of_Bulgaria.jpeg

Boris III oversaw the signing of the final terms of Bulgaria’s surrender on November 27th, 1919. There were many territorial concessions to consider in light of this military defeat, such as the handing over of Bulgaria’s coasts on the Aegean Sea to Bulgaria’s historic rival, the Greeks. Interestingly, the terms that were stipulated stated that Bulgaria would still have economic access to the Aegean, although without direct access to the coast. How this was to work in practice was not entirely clear. Along with these concessions, Bulgaria was also forced to acknowledge the existence of Yugoslavia.​[67]

As for Macedonia, rather than gaining territory, it had to give up the little portion it had. This particular chunk of Macedonia became the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Bulgaria was also forced to hand over the coveted territory of Dobruja to Romania. And as for that million-man army that wreaked so much havoc? Well, according to the terms of the armistice, it had to be reduced to no more than twenty-two thousand troops. And to add even more of a burden on the beleaguered Bulgarians, they were asked to pay out some rather hefty reparations.​[68] For a country like Bulgaria, which was poor to begin with, this was a tremendous burden to be saddled with, and this burden would pave the way for even more difficulty in the future.

​

Chapter 10 – World War II, the Cold War, and the Modern Day 

“I’ll do what I can, but I do not have the vocation of a spare wheel. If things go fine without me, then this is a blessing for Bulgaria and for me.”

-King Simeon II​[69]

Bulgaria’s defeat in World War I left the Balkan nation of Bulgaria in a shattered state. Once the poster child of a rising democracy, the Bulgarians were now being ground into the dirt by harsh and draconian postwar punishment. However, it was nothing compared to what happened to the Ottoman Empire. At the end of this conflict, Bulgaria’s old antagonist ceased to exist. The Ottoman Empire collapsed after the war and shrunk down to simply the nation-state of Tukey. This left whatever extra territory that had not already been plucked and purloined from the Turks up for grabs. For example, after this fateful war came to a close, the much-contested piece of Middle Eastern real estate in the Levant, today known as Israel and Palestine, was placed under a British mandate. This British mandate would one day give way to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948.

Many other territories were also freed from the Ottomans’ grip, changing countless maps in North Africa, the Middle East, and the Balkans. Of the latter, the Ottomans lost what remained of their territory in Macedonia and Albania. The Macedonia question still deeply bothered the Bulgarians. Despite plenty of international wrangling after World War I, the question had not by any means been resolved in the Balkans.

In the early 1920s, chaos seemed to reign in much of the region, and in 1923, one particular corner of Macedonia came under the control of a Bulgarian nationalist named Ivan Mihailov. He was the leader of the International Macedonian Revolutionary Organization. By taking a small chunk of lawless Macedonia, Mihailov managed to carve out what was essentially a “state within a state.”​[70] This enclave of rogue Bulgarian nationalists was nestled right in the wild borderlands that intersected Bulgaria, Greece, and Yugoslavia.

Although the official Bulgarian state denounced these rogue Bulgarian actors, it seemed unable to stop them. Nevertheless, efforts were made, and after the signing of the Nish Convention, Bulgaria teamed up with the government of Yugoslavia to crack down on these rogue Bulgarian nationals who were running amok in Macedonia.

In the meantime, everyday Bulgarians were really suffering. Inflation was through the roof and seemed to be climbing higher and higher with every trip to the grocery store. It got to the point that the average Bulgarian of the 1920s could barely afford to buy a loaf of bread. The Bulgarian people were looking for answers to solve their many financial woes. There were two groups that seemed to be ready to at least try and address the problem. These were the communists and the agrarians.​[71]

The agrarians began their political life out of concern for the farmers and rural peasantry of Bulgaria. The group ultimately morphed into its own political party that had socialist, leftist leanings. It was dubbed the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BANU) Party. This political party gained a majority after the war and tapped agrarian firebrand Aleksandar Stamboliyski to be prime minister. He focused on tax and land reform as a means to ease the burden of Bulgaria’s large peasant class.

However, in doing so, he alienated the smaller but quite influential upper-class establishment of Bulgaria. This discontent led to a coup orchestrated by the Bulgarian Armed Forces with the tacit approval of the political elite. It seems that Stamboliyski had gotten on the bad side of the armed forces by ignoring many of their most pressing needs in order to focus his attention more fully on agrarian reform. As a clear demonstration of this, even though postwar terms dictated that Bulgaria was allowed a standing army of twenty thousand, under Prime Minister Stamboliyski, not even this minimum threshold of recruitment had been met.

The political elite looked at Stamboliyski’s populist rabble-rousing with even deeper suspicion. In 1922, in Italy, fascist leader Benito Mussolini rose to power using very similar tactics. There were those among the elite of Bulgaria who feared that if Prime Minister Stamboliyski was not stopped, he would do the same exact thing.

All of these factors apparently coalesced together, and Bulgaria was rocked by a sudden and unexpected coup on June 9th, 1923. Prime Minister Stamboliyski was entirely caught off guard but attempted to rally his base to stand against the forces that had risen up against them. His efforts ended when he was seized and summarily executed.​[72] It was a brutal end for an altogether brutal period in Bulgarian politics.

After Stamboliyski’s demise, a new government was hurriedly put together, and a new prime minister, Aleksandar Tsankov, was installed. This new government quickly tried to assert its authority, but such things are easier said than done in the aftermath of decapitating the leadership of a popular political movement. There were many Stamboliyski supporters who were infuriated at the course of recent events, and they were determined to resist what they saw as an illegitimate government in any way that they could.

This dissent erupted on April 16th, 1925, in an explosive fashion. A bomb was detonated at Nedelya Cathedral in the Bulgarian capital of Sofia. This bomb was set off during a state funeral and was chosen because the king, as well as basically everyone who was noteworthy in the Bulgarian political establishment, would be present. It seems that after one political movement had ended, Bulgarian political dissidents were attempting to accomplish more of the same.

The chaotic carnage would have been terrible if the king and other prominent officials had been killed. Over one hundred people were killed that day in the blast, but amazingly, no one of any real importance to the governance of Bulgaria was harmed. Even so, the crackdown that followed was severe. Martial law was declared, and a manhunt was launched to find anyone who was involved in the plotting and execution of the attack. Of those captured, hardly any of them saw the light of day again. It seems that they went into the police station and simply never came out again. There were even rumors among the populace that perhaps their bodies had been burned in the furnace at the police station.​[73]

Even so, this crackdown did not stop dissent. On the contrary, terrorist plots and assassination attacks only increased throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s. The other wing of Bulgarian dissidents—the communists—forged the Bulgarian Workers’ Party (BWP) in 1927.​[74]

By the time the early 1930s had come around, Bulgarians had become so disaffected by the state of affairs that several anti-government-styled groups had emerged. The stock market crash of 1929 only worsened these conditions, as the whole world went into an economic depression. Things were already bad, but they got even worse. It is said that from 1929 to 1934, the average income of the peasant class was half of what it had been just a few years prior.​[75]

All of this distress and turmoil once again led to the toppling of the Bulgarian government due to a military coup in 1934. This coup put a military dictatorship led by Kimon Georgiev in place. This time around, the ruling tsar, Boris III, was able to intervene, and the following year, the coup was reversed, and the civilian government was restored. Bulgaria was still trying to keep its head above these turbulent political waters when World War II broke out in 1939.

Initially, Bulgaria attempted to maintain its neutrality, but after Nazi Germany won a string of victories against the Allies, the Bulgarians began to give their aid to the Germans. Bulgaria was not yet an active belligerent, but it quietly played a supporting role. They were rewarded by the Germans, who ripped the coveted region of southern Dobruja away from Romania and handed it over to Bulgaria.

However, in the spring of 1941, when the Germans were marching through the Balkans on their way to occupy Greece, the Germans demanded Bulgaria allow them passage. It is hard for a country to stay neutral in a war, especially when they help facilitate the invasion of their neighbors. It was now clear that Bulgaria had to make a choice. Either the Bulgarians were on the side of the Germans, or they were not.

On March 1st, 1941, Tsar Boris III made the fateful decision to join forces with Germany, Italy, Japan, and the other Axis Powers. Bulgarians were sent right along with the Germans to Greece, as well as Macedonia and Serbia. It was like the Balkan Wars all over again, except with the backing of Nazi Germany.

The Bulgarians, to their credit, refused to cooperate when the Nazis demanded that they turn over Jewish Bulgarians. However, to their shame, the Bulgarians did participate in the mass extermination of Jews in the territories that they helped to forcibly occupy. During this terrible period, the communist factions within Bulgaria began an underground movement to take on the fascists. Although the communists would later become the bane of the monarchy, they can be credited with taking a strong stand against fascism.

Tsar Boris III ended up with a rather complicated legacy due to all of this. On the one hand, he collaborated with the Nazis, yet at the same time, he dared to resist them. Making the end of his life even more complicated was the fact that in September of 1943, after paying a visit to Adolf Hitler in Germany, Boris III returned to Bulgaria, only to die under mysterious circumstances.

To this day, no one seems to know for sure what happened to this complicated Bulgarian tsar who had to face so many daunting challenges near the end of his reign.​[76] After his passing, his son, Simeon II, was made the new ruler by the inner circle that had surrounded his father. Simeon was only six years old at the time, so his immediate handlers were the ones who were really running the show in Bulgaria.

This was the state of affairs in 1944 when Bulgaria officially switched sides. As the Germans were retreating from the resilient Russians on the Eastern Front, Bulgaria turned around and declared war on the fleeing Germans. This declaration was made on September 5th, 1944. A few days later, another coup took place, which managed to reinstall the aforementioned Kimon Georgiev as the Bulgarian prime minister.

World War II came to a close in 1945, but it was not the end of the turmoil in Bulgaria; in many ways, it was just the beginning. For those pinning their hopes on Tsar Simeon one day coming of age to rectify the situation, those hopes were dashed when he was deposed in 1946. This was done by way of a Soviet-backed referendum, which supposedly had an overwhelming majority that voted to abolish the monarchy. Supporters of communist ideology were the main force behind this push, even though it was presented as being supported across all factions of Bulgarian society. The legitimacy of this referendum has since been called into question, but with Soviet troops backing up the results, the embattled Bulgarians could do little but agree.

Bulgaria would transform into a communist state under the leadership of Soviet-backed Bulgarian Prime Minister Georgi Dimitrov. Prior to the referendum, Dimitrov had been living in exile in Russia. Known as one of the founders of communism in Bulgaria, Georgi Dimitrov had a colorful past. He helped forge Bulgaria’s first communist party in 1919. It was just one political party among many at that time, but Dimitrov was not interested in merely getting votes at the ballot box; he was interested in toppling governments by force if necessary. He and his fellow communists attempted to forcibly overthrow Bulgarian Prime Minister Aleksandar Tsankov in 1923.

Georgi Dimitrov.

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Georgi_Dimitrov.jpg

After this failed attempt, Georgi Dimitrov fled to the Soviet Union to live in exile. In 1929, though, the political winds of fate sent him from Soviet Russia to Germany. Dimitrov was sent there to shore up communist support, and he had a front-row seat to Hitler’s rise to power in 1933.

Although the Nazis called themselves “National Socialists,” they were not socialists in the typical sense of the term. They were certainly not communists. The Nazis partially rose to power on a staunchly anti-communist platform. Nevertheless, Georgi Dimitrov and his fellow communists were on the scene when Hitler came to power, and they were there (perhaps in more ways than one) when the Reichstag was infamously set ablaze in 1933. Georgi Dimitrov was accused of being part of the plot, but he was acquitted after going to trial.​[77] After this close call, Georgi Dimitrov, still unable to return to his native Bulgaria, resumed his exile in Soviet Russia until the overthrow of Tsar Simeon II in 1946 allowed for him to return.

Just after World War II, the chill of the Cold War started to creep in. Although Soviet Russia had been allied with the Western powers of the United States, Britain, France, and the like during the war, the communist ideology it espoused put it at odds with the capitalist West. After the war, an iron curtain (both literal and metaphorical) descended over much of Eastern Europe, cutting it off from the West.

However, it must be noted that Bulgaria, in many ways, fared better under the Soviet communist system than many other countries in Eastern Europe did at the time. For one thing, the Bulgarians had a strong affinity for the Russians. The Russians were historically remembered as being the champions of Bulgaria when the people had been oppressed and downtrodden by the Ottoman Turks. Bulgaria had also been in constant social upheaval even prior to World War II, and the Soviets brought a level of stability and predictability that had not been enjoyed before.

Having said that, the experience of communism for the East Germans, who had enjoyed a high quality of life prior to the drawing of the Iron Curtain, was a totally different experience than what the Bulgarians faced. For the beleaguered Bulgarians, the communists actually offered an improvement. Many of the cities that had not yet experienced widespread industrialization suddenly had major factories built, and the peasant class located there had—for the first time in a long time—steady work.

In the past, many Bulgarians were farmers because there was simply no other means of sustenance. This industrialization gave them a choice. They could either till the soil or work in one of the new factories that were being built. At first glance, such things might not seem like much, but considering how meager the options were for the average Bulgarian at the time, it actually meant quite a bit.

Their options dramatically increased in 1965 when the Soviet Union entered into a special agreement with Bulgaria to outsource the assembly of Soviet-manufactured cars, tractors, and other equipment in Bulgaria. Just one hundred years prior, the Bulgarians were trying their own luck at making cannons out of copper-encased tree trunks, and now, they were actually manufacturing cars. Building upon this initiative, by 1975, the Bulgarians had become a key hub for shipbuilding.​[78] This was a definite step up.

And unlike most of the other nations that had been forced into communism, the Bulgarians, for the most part, were happy to go along. As much as the Bulgarians might have looked at Russia as their big brother, the favor was returned with communist leaders in Russia fondly referring to Bulgaria as their “little brother.”​[79] From 1946 to 1991, the Bulgarian Communist Party was calling the shots in the People’s Republic of Bulgaria, and most Bulgarians

were totally okay with that. Many of the other satellite states gave Russia reason to worry during these years, but there was not so much as a peep from the people of Bulgaria. Interestingly, while other parts of the communist bloc were dissolving in the 1980s, Bulgaria seemed to be doing just fine. The 1980s were actually a high point in Bulgaria. The Bulgarians made great profits from the technological sector, investing in everything from floppy disk drives to robots.

It would be wrong to say that everyone was always happy with how communist Bulgaria was run. The Muslim population of Bulgaria, who still identified with the Turkish past, became the most disenchanted. Their dissatisfaction was most keenly felt during the 1970s when there were calls for them to better integrate into Bulgarian society. There was even pressure for those with Turkish-sounding names to modify them to sound more Slavic. The whole notion is a bit preposterous since the Slavs do not have a corner on the market for communist ideology any more than the Turks, but a pressure campaign of this nature emerged in Bulgaria during the 1970s. For those who did not wish to assimilate, emigration to Turkey was encouraged.

It is hard to believe that a nation would encourage some of its own citizens to leave, but that is what happened. During this period, approximately 130,000 Bulgarians with a Muslim or Turkish background left the country.​[80]

Even though the country was obscured by the Iron Curtain (the imaginary boundary dividing Europe into the capitalist West and the communist East), such things did not go unnoticed on the world stage. Pretty soon, Bulgaria was being condemned by everyone, from the United Nations to the Organisation of Islamic Conference, for their actions.​[81]

All of these extraordinary efforts to reclaim Bulgarian identity happened just in time for the momentous celebration held in 1981. In that year, the people of Bulgaria celebrated the 1,300-year anniversary of the first founding of Bulgaria, which many believe dates back to the year 681 CE.​[82] This was a lavish event that was full of nationalistic pride rather than an endorsement of communism.

Riding fairly high for the rest of the decade, Bulgaria seemed to still be wrapped up in its own personal revelry when many other nations of the communist bloc began to crumble in 1989. It was that year, of course, that the Berlin Wall famously came crashing down, and with it, many communist governments followed suit. Bulgaria itself was not under any immediate pressure to cave, but pockets of demonstrators cropped up. They were not quite as vocal as others, but they called for certain reforms to be made.

Not wishing to be caught off guard by the rapidly changing times, Bulgaria’s communist leadership sought to adjust course. In June of 1990, they allowed free elections to be held so the people could decide the fate of their nation. These were the first free and fair elections held in Bulgaria since 1931.

After the elections were held, the communists were able to make a comeback, except this time, they had changed their name to the Bulgarian Socialist Party. In July 1991, a brand-new constitution was crafted, which ensured that going forward, there would be regular free and fair elections under the framework of a parliamentary republic, with a president, as well as a prime minister, presiding over the legislative body of government.

The people might have had more of a voice, but after the economy stalled in the early 1990s, many began to look back at the good old days of communism! The immediate economic pain that the Bulgarians felt began in the spring of 1991 when the traditional economic controls on market goods were lifted in order for Bulgaria to transition into a market-based economy.​[83] Prices on basic food skyrocketed, while clothing and rent doubled or tripled. At the same time, factories buckled. National output dropped 11 percent, and thousands lost jobs overnight. The state teetered under crushing debt and defaulted on foreign obligations.

Shortly into the pain of entering into this new economic system, the Bulgarians began to look toward the European Union as a means to alleviate some of the issues they were facing. As early as 1993, Bulgaria made efforts to link up with the EU, which itself was still in its earliest stages of development. In December of that year, Bulgaria entered into a special trade agreement with the EU.​[84]

Fast forward to 2007, and Bulgaria would become an official member of the European Union. Bulgaria was part of the fifth wave of EU membership, which largely consisted of former communist bloc states such as Bulgaria, Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Hungary, and Romania. These former communist states of Eastern Europe, which were used to being part of a larger conglomeration of nations linked to the Soviet Union, were seeking to gain the same sort of solidarity from the rapidly rising intergovernmental entity dubbed the European Union.

For them, it was an easy trade-off to leave the Soviet Union (whether they had been an integral part of the Soviet Union or a satellite state) for the European Union. One could even argue that Ukraine is the latest incarnation of this phenomenon since Ukraine, despite Russia’s efforts to reel it back into its sphere of influence, has been desperately trying to join the European Union for several years.

Bulgaria’s road to the EU might not have been blocked by the machinations of Russia, but Bulgaria’s journey to EU statehood still had its own problems. The economy was in severe turbulence, and so was simple civility. Crime had skyrocketed ever since the heavy fist of communist directives had been lifted. The streets of Bulgaria were nowhere near as safe as they had been. Street corners were suddenly full of prostitutes, muggers, and crooks. Even worse than petty crime was the criminal corruption that had become endemic in Bulgarian business. This was the most glaring problem that had to be resolved before Bulgaria could join the EU.

All of these problems led to the collapse of the post-communist regime of Bulgarian Prime Minister Lyuben Berov and his Union of Democratic Forces (UDF for short) government in 1994. He was followed by Zhan Videnov, who came to power as prime minister in 1995.

Videnov was only thirty-five years old at the time, and although he had a socialist background, many saw him as being pro-Western. They saw Videnov as a kind of sophisticated technocrat and felt that he would usher in a new era for Bulgaria. However, once Videnov became prime minister, rather than move the country forward, many saw him as moving the country backward. Previous reforms aimed at greater privatization of previously state-run industries slowed to a halt. He also gave a cold shoulder to NATO at a time when many other Eastern European nations of the former communist bloc were interested in strengthening ties with the organization.

Many Bulgarians were dissatisfied with what was happening to their country. This dissatisfaction was made evident in October 1996 during the presidential election. Here, an important distinction must be made. In Bulgaria, there is the office of the prime minister and the office of the president. The prime minister is considered the head of government, while the president is considered the head of state. This means the prime minister is mostly in charge of domestic matters, whereas the president is primarily in charge of international affairs and matters of national security.

During the 1996 election, the UDF returned under the leadership of Petar Stoyanov, who was elected president. Initially, Videnov tried to hang on as prime minister, but after several large protests were held to express the public’s desire for him to leave office, he took the hint. In December of 1996, he resigned.

On January 19th, 1997, Petar Stoyanov was sworn into office. Despite the unrest, hopes were quite high at the time. President Stoyanov was a former football (soccer in the US) star, so his road into office saw an energetic wave of populist enthusiasm. Bulgarians were looking for a change, and they hoped they had found it in the charismatic, world-wise, and sophisticated Stoyanov.​[85]

Petar Stoyanov.

European People’s Party, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Petar_Stoyanov_2006.jpg

President Stoyanov criticized other politicians, whom he claimed had corrupted the Bulgarian government and showed a callous disregard for the Bulgarian people. Petar Stoyanov promised to help rebuild the institutions of Bulgaria and make the Bulgarian government work for the Bulgarian people. Yes, he was indeed a populist, and his sentiments echoed his power-to-the-people approach.

However, despite all of his soaring rhetoric, the problems that plagued Bulgaria would be very challenging to overcome.​[86] Bulgaria faced an economic crisis, rising crime, and difficulty integrating with the rest of the democratic states of Europe.

Interestingly, the Stoyanov government would ultimately be toppled by the unlikely return of the Bulgarian royalty. The exiled Bulgarian tsar, Simeon II, returned to Bulgaria in 1996. He had briefly become tsar when his father, Boris, died in 1943. After the monarchy was abolished by the communists, Simeon II went into exile.​[87] He had apparently been invited to try his luck at leading Bulgaria by a handful of Bulgarian intellectuals searching for answers from Bulgaria’s past. As the hype around Simeon II continued to grow, for a time, some wondered if perhaps Bulgaria was on the verge of restoring its old monarchy.​[88]

The former child tsar did not return as king. Instead, he became the prime minister. He and his party, which was dubbed the “National Movement Simeon II” party, came to power with a slim majority in 2001. Once prime minister, Simeon II’s administration was almost like a sugar high for nostalgic Bulgarians, but the high quickly subsided as the reality of the many problems facing Bulgaria once again surfaced. By the time Simeon II ended his four-year term in 2005, the prices of everyday goods had soared.​[89]

Many hoped that this former royal would somehow have an answer for the problems they faced, but Bulgarians were terribly disappointed. Their disenchantment with Simeon led to his ouster after just four short years. Several more prime ministers would come and go in rapid succession afterward.

Bulgaria has since struggled to gain an economic foothold. In 2010, it ranked just thirty-second on the globalization index. Interestingly enough, one sector in which the Bulgarians continued to do surprisingly well was the technology sector. In 2019, Bulgaria’s tech sector was bringing in 6.6 percent of the gross domestic product.​[90] It seems that no matter what happened to Bulgaria, the technological roots that had been laid down in the last days of communism in the 1980s had managed to blossom into something noteworthy.

The following year, though, the tech sector and just about everything else in Bulgaria would be put on hold, thanks to the outbreak of the 2020 pandemic. The pandemic rocked the Balkans and Bulgaria, just like it did the rest of the world. Unfortunately, Bulgaria was found woefully unprepared for such an outbreak, and the death toll for Bulgarians was high.

Some blame the deaths directly on the government of Bulgaria, claiming that they mismanaged the situation, although such things—as was the case with many aspects of this global pandemic—are still considered controversial, debatable, and, in some instances, even perhaps a bit taboo. It is still a topic of conversation and debate in Bulgaria.

Nevertheless, the situation in Bulgaria has largely turned back to normal. Tourism is booming. Bulgaria has become one of the hottest tourist destinations in southeastern Europe. Aiding this rise in tourism is the recent announcement that Bulgaria has been officially accepted into the eurozone. This means that Bulgaria, as a member of the European Union, will be able to use the euro, opening up a huge market for commerce since tourists from all over the European continent will be able to spend their hard-earned money in Bulgaria without any impediments or restrictions. This is a great boon for a country that consistently ranks as one of the poorest member nations of the European Union. The fact that tourists from rich European nations, such as Germany and France, could invest their cash in Bulgaria just might be the jolt that the Bulgarian economy needs to get moving again.

As of this writing, on January 1st, 2026, Bulgaria will become the twenty-first nation to make the euro part of its official currency. No one could have imagined such a thing either in recent years or the distant past. Currently, the future of Bulgaria is really anyone’s guess.

Conclusion: The Future of Bulgaria

The land of Bulgaria is an ancient crossroads that has seen various peoples, nations, and empires take part in its long and rich history. Alexander the Great knew Bulgaria as Thrace, and one of the first things he did was try and subdue the people living there. He did not do this to defeat them; rather, he wanted them on his side. Alexander the Great knew that the mighty Bulgarian bowmen were skilled archers, and he was eager to incorporate them into his own armed forces.

The Greeks and Romans looked upon the Bulgarians with equal parts disdain and wonder. The Greeks felt they were a mighty people with an indomitable spirit yet had a penchant for disunity and chaos. The Greeks colonized much of the ancient Bulgar lands without much resistance from this divided bunch. Once the Romans rose to prominence, they did not think much better of those who resided in the lands of Bulgaria. To them, they were just a pesky nuisance.

After the Western Roman Empire fell, the Eastern half, better known as the Byzantine Empire, began to see great value in the Bulgars. They began to utilize them as a buffer zone against the many dangerous tribal groups passing through the Balkans. They even recruited them as mercenaries when it seemed wise to do so.

As the two peoples became more acquainted with each other, the Byzantines exerted even more influence over them. They saw to it that they were converted to Christianity and sought to make lasting alliances with them. There were problems along the way, and disagreements were frequent, but the Byzantines and Bulgars seemed to have more in common than differences. Even after an all-out war erupted between them, they usually came to terms afterward. The first real rift occurred only after the Latin West temporarily toppled the government in Constantinople on one of their infamous crusades.

The Bulgarians then found themselves on the front lines against an alien threat. The Byzantines eventually reclaimed their throne but were severely weakened, which paved the way for a new menace to rise to prominence in the region—the Ottoman Turks. The Ottomans would begin to call the shots in the region, intimidating the Byzantines into submission.

The Byzantines were soon surrounded by Turkish armies, leaving them unable to have much influence on Bulgaria. The Bulgarians were soon subsumed by this threat and were annexed to the Ottoman Empire before Constantinople fell to the same menace in 1453. Bulgaria and the rest of the Balkans would be under Ottoman rule for the next few centuries.

The Ottomans were eventually driven out, but there would not be peace in the land. There would be wars, including world wars and the Cold War. Communism would fall by the early 1990s, but it would take some time for Bulgaria to find its footing. Bulgaria was unexpectedly rocked by a pandemic in 2020 but has proven to be rather resilient. The tech sector, in particular, is on the rise in what seems to be a testament to early tech investment in the 1980s. Despite the hardships of the past, the future still seems rather bright for Bulgaria.

Reading and References 

Banac, Ivo. The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov: 1933-1949. 2003.

Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. 1997.

Jordanov, Galin. Glimpses of the History of Bulgaria. 2005.

Lalkov, Milcho. Rulers of Bulgaria: Khans, Tsars and Statesmen. 1995.

Otfinoski, Steven. Bulgaria: Nations in Transition. 1998.

Petrov, Victor. Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernization, and the Information Age Behind the Iron Curtain. 2023.

Popescu, Julian. Bulgaria. 1987.

Turnbull, Stephen. The Ottoman Empire: 1326-1699. 2003.

Tzvetkov, S. Plamen. A History of the Balkans: A Regional Overview from a Bulgarian Perspective. 1993.

[1] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. 1997. Pg. 1.

[2] Otfinoski, Steven. Bulgaria: Nations in Transition. 1998. Pg. 93.

[3] Tzvetkov, S. Plamen. A History of the Balkans: A Regional Overview from a Bulgarian Perspective. 1993. Pg. 83.

[4] Tzvetkov, S. Plamen. A History of the Balkans: A Regional Overview from a Bulgarian Perspective. Pg. 85.

[5] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 4.

[6] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 4.

[7] Turnbull, Stephen. The Ottoman Empire: 1326-1699. 2003. Pg. 68.

[8] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 11.

[9] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 11.

[10] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 11.

[11] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 11.

[12] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 12.

[13] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 12.

[14] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 12.

[15] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 15.

[16] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 15.

[17] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 17.

[18] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 17.

[19] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 17.

[20] Otfinoski, Steven. Bulgaria: Nations in Transition. Pg. 54.

[21] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 21.

[22] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 21.

[23] Turnbull, Stephen. The Ottoman Empire: 1326-1699. Pg. 28.

[24] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 21.

[25] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 24.

[26] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 26.

[27] Turnbull, Stephen. The Ottoman Empire: 1326-1699. Pg. 17.

[28] Turnbull, Stephen. The Ottoman Empire: 1326-1699. Pg. 10.

[29] Turnbull, Stephen. The Ottoman Empire: 1326-1699. Pg. 12.

[30] Turnbull, Stephen. The Ottoman Empire: 1326-1699. Pg. 13.

[31] Turnbull, Stephen. The Ottoman Empire: 1326-1699. Pg. 13.

[32] Jordanov, Galin. Glimpses of the History of Bulgaria. 2005. Pg. 27.

[33] Jordanov, Galin. Glimpses of the History of Bulgaria. Pg. 27.

[34] Turnbull, Stephen. The Ottoman Empire: 1326-1699. Pg. 25.

[35] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 31.

[36] Turnbull, Stephen. The Ottoman Empire: 1326-1699. Pg. 34.

[37] Turnbull, Stephen. The Ottoman Empire: 1326-1699. Pg. 34.

[38] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 36.

[39] Otfinoski, Steven. Bulgaria: Nations in Transition. Pg. 16.

[40] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 42.

[41] Turnbull, Stephen. The Ottoman Empire: 1326-1699. Pg. 46.

[42] Turnbull, Stephen. The Ottoman Empire: 1326-1699. Pg. 49.

[43] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 53.

[44] Turnbull, Stephen. The Ottoman Empire: 1326-1699. Pgs. 49-50.

[45] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 42.

[46] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 47.

[47] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 47.

[48] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 49.

[49] Tzvetkov, S. Plamen. A History of the Balkans: A Regional Overview from a Bulgarian Perspective. Pg. 322.

[50] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 47.

[51] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 53.

[52] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 59.

[53] Otfinoski, Steven. Bulgaria: Nations in Transition. Pg. 15.

[54] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 82.

[55] Otfinoski, Steven. Bulgaria: Nations in Transition. Pg. 15.

[56] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 85.

[57] Otfinoski, Steven. Bulgaria: Nations in Transition. Pg. 16.

[58] Popescu, Julian. Bulgaria. 1987. Pg. 32.

[59] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 85.

[60] Otfinoski, Steven. Bulgaria: Nations in Transition. Pg. 17.

[61] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 108.

[62] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 111.

[63] Popescu, Julian. Bulgaria. Pg. 33.

[64] Popescu, Julian. Bulgaria. Pg. 33.

[65] Otfinoski, Steven. Bulgaria: Nations in Transition. Pg. 18.

[66] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 147.

[67] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 148.

[68] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 148.

[69] Otfinoski, Steven. Bulgaria: Nations in Transition. Pg. 48.

[70] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 155.

[71] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 155.

[72] Lalkov, Milcho. Rulers of Bulgaria: Khans, Tsars and Statesmen. 1995. Pg. 55.

[73] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 158.

[74] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 159.

[75] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 161.

[76] Otfinoski, Steven. Bulgaria: Nations in Transition. Pg. 23.

[77] Banac, Ivo. The Diary of Georgi Dimitrov: 1933-1949. 2003. Pg. 2.

[78] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 100.

[79] Otfinoski, Steven. Bulgaria: Nations in Transition. Pg. 26.

[80] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 203.

[81] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 209.

[82] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 204.

[83] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 222.

[84] Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. Pg. 229.

[85] Otfinoski, Steven. Bulgaria: Nations in Transition. Pg. 47.

[86] Otfinoski, Steven. Bulgaria: Nations in Transition. Pg. 42.

[87] Otfinoski, Steven. Bulgaria: Nations in Transition. Pg. 48.

[88] Otfinoski, Steven. Bulgaria: Nations in Transition. Pg. 48.

[89] Jordanov, Galin. Glimpses of the History of Bulgaria. Pg. 62.

[90] Petrov, Victor. Balkan Cyberia: Cold War Computing, Bulgarian Modernization, and the Information Age Behind the Iron Curtain. 2023. Pg. 313.