National history is a serious business in a country that was virtually effaced for five hundred years - when this part of the Ottoman Empire was referred to by Westerners as "European Turkey". Since the Liberation in 1877-78, successive regimes have tried to inculcate a sense of national pride among their citizens, emphasizing historical continuity between the modern state and the medieval Bulgarian empires of the past
Neolithic beginnings
Despite several Paleolithic finds in the caves of the Balkan Mountains, the early inhabitants of the Bulgarian lands don't really enter the limelight of history until the sixth millennium BC, when the Balkans were a major centre of the so-called
...
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The Thracians
Ruled by a powerful warrior aristocracy rich in gold treasures, the ancient Thracians inhabited an area extending over most of modern Bulgaria, northern Greece and European Turkey. Close ethnic links with their neighbours in both the Danube basin to the...
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Rome and Byzantium
The
Romans
became the dominant power in the region after their defeat of Macedonia in 168 BC, but it took almost two centuries for the empire to subdue the Thracians, who were in constant revolt. It wasn't until about 50 AD that the conquerors...
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Slavs and Bulgars
The
Slavs
who migrated into the Balkan peninsula from the late fifth century onwards were one of the indigenous races of Europe, the distant forebears of the Russians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats and Serbs - and, of course, the...
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The First Bulgarian Kingdom
Theophanes the Confessor records that in 681 the Byzantine emperor Constantine IV was forced to recognize the independence of a "new and vulgar people" north of the Balkan range. Asparuh's new
Bulgar Khanate
, subsequently known as...
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The Second Kingdom
In 1185 the
bolyari
Petâr and Asen led a successful popular uprising against Byzantium, proclaiming the
Second Kingdom
in Veliko Târnovo, henceforth its capital. Byzantine forces under Emperor Isaac Angelus confidently expected to...
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"Under the yoke"
It's estimated that almost half of Bulgaria's population was massacred or enslaved and transported to another part of the empire within a few years of the Turkish conquest, whose long-term effects were equally profound. The
Ottoman Empire
not...
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The "Eastern Question"
Despite these valiant efforts, the fate of Bulgaria didn't really rest with the Bulgarians themselves. The gradual stagnation of Ottoman power in Europe had raised the problem - dubbed the "
Eastern Question
" by contemporary...
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From Independence to World War II
In the immediate post-Liberation years, attempts to build a stable
democracy
in the principality were hampered by continuing Great Power interest in Balkan affairs. The Russians still regarded Bulgaria as a potential instrument of Tsarist...
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The People's Republic
After September 9, the
Bulgarian Communist Party
emerged from two decades of clandestine existence to become the leading political force in the country. Initially their radicalism was hidden behind the ostensibly moderate
Fatherland...
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The Zhivkov era
For much of the
Zhivkov era
, Bulgarian conformity to Soviet wishes became a cliché of East European politics, with the country jokingly referred to - even by Bulgarians themselves - as the sixteenth republic of the USSR. However, this...
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The demise of the Communist regime
Bulgaria's socialist economy was beginning to stall well before the emergence of
perestroika
in the Soviet Union began to raise fundamental questions about the continuing viability of the whole system. Summer droughts in 1984 and 1985 had...
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Post-Communist Bulgaria: a slow start
The reformist wing of the Bulgarian Communist Party had obviously thought that by ditching Zhivkov and committing themselves to the idea of a multi-party system, they stood a good chance of being perceived as the authors of democratic change, thereby...
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October 1991 and after
As the
elections of October 1991
approached, Bulgarian society appeared to be as divided as at any time in its history. The most visible results of post-Zhivkov change - rising prices, declining social services and the ostentation of those who...
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Towards the winter of discontent
The next parliamentary
elections
, in
December 1994
, resulted in a crippling defeat for the SDS and handed an absolute majority in the National Assembly to a rejuvenated BSP. Led by the young and popular Zhan Videnov, the BSP was by...
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Another false dawn
Bulgaria's
economy
had been left in such bad shape by the departing administration that the new government had little choice but to swallow the medicine offered by the IMF - by now the real power in Bulgarian affairs. An economic austerity...
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The return of the king
With the lack of any real improvement in living standards, support for the Kostov government simply withered away. Only in the relatively prosperous SDS strongholds of Sofia, Plovdiv and Varna was there any remaining enthusiasm for his unexciting...
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Bulgaria's position in the world
After November 1989 Bulgaria was eager to be accepted as a political and economic partner of the Western world, but found progress frustratingly slow on both counts. The series of wars in the former Yugoslavia provoked a muddled response from a Western...
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