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 north and in Asia Minor to the east placed them at the centre of an extensive Balkan-Asian culture. Despite their subsequent absorption by a whole host of invaders and their eventual assimilation by the Slavs, the Thracians are regarded as one of the bedrock peoples of the Balkans whose ethnic stock (though much diluted) has endured - and the present-day Bulgarians are proud to claim them as ancestors. We're largely dependent on ancient Greek authors - notably Herodotus, Xenophon and Strabo - for knowledge of the Thracian world. Herodotus, in a famous passage you'll see quoted in museums throughout Bulgaria, claimed that the Thracian population was "greater than that of any country in the world except India", and would have been a force to be reckoned with had it not been for their tribal disunity.

Although the Thracians were admired for skills such as archery and horsemanship, many of their customs seemed slightly barbaric to their southerly neighbours. Certain tribes practised polygamy, others allowed their young women unlimited sexual freedom before marriage, while tattoos for both males and females were de rigueur in most areas. Strabo relates how one group of Thracians was nicknamed the Capnobatae (literally the "smoke treaders"), suggesting that they burned hemp seeds indoors and got high on the fumes. Dope-crazed hopheads or not, the Thracians practised an ecstatic, orgiastic religion , honouring deities closely linked with the Greek god Dionysus. Themes of death, rebirth and renewal figured highly in their religious rites, providing a corpus of belief from which the Greeks borrowed freely - most notably in the case of the legendary Thracian priest-king Orpheus .