From Karanovo farmers to a Black Sea EU republic
Bulgaria lies on the eastern Balkans between the Danube and the Black Sea, covering 110,994 square kilometres with Sofia as its capital. Its soil holds some of Europe's deepest human history, from modern humans in Bacho Kiro cave about 47,000 years ago to the Varna culture's gold, the oldest worked jewellery known.
Romania faces it over the Danube, Serbia and North Macedonia lie westward, and Greece and Turkey border the south. Neanderthals lived here some 150,000 years ago, and the farming Karanovo culture appeared around 6,500 BC. The Thracians, stateless but gifted metalworkers, arrived before the twelfth century BC; after the Persians were beaten back in 479 BC many tribes joined King Teres in the Odrysian kingdom. Rome took the region in AD 45, and around 381 the Gothic bishop Ulfilas produced his Bible in what is now northern Bulgaria.
Slavs settled the interior in the sixth century. Then Khan Asparukh's Bulgars, remnants of Old Great Bulgaria north of the Black Sea, conquered Slavic tribes in Moesia in 680, and a treaty with Byzantium in 681 founded the First Bulgarian Empire. The name probably comes from a Turkic root meaning to mix or stir. Krum wrote a law code and killed Emperor Nicephorus I at Pliska, and in 864 Boris I adopted Orthodox Christianity, followed by the Cyrillic alphabet from Preslav.
Byzantium's Basil II crushed the Bulgarian army at Klyuch in 1014 and finished the conquest by 1018. A Second Empire under the Asen dynasty peaked under Ivan Asen II, from 1218 to 1241, reaching the coasts of Albania and Epirus. A swineherd named Ivaylo led a peasant revolt that made him emperor in 1277, but by the fourteenth century the state had broken apart, and the Ottomans sacked Tarnovo in 1393; Sozopol held out until 1453.
The Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 created the modern state, which declared full independence in 1908. Claims to Bulgarians left outside its borders pulled it to Germany's side in both world wars, and from 1946 it was a Soviet-bloc socialist state. The Communist Party gave up its monopoly after 1989, and a 1991 constitution made Bulgaria a centralised parliamentary republic of 28 provinces, now an EU member with a high-income economy.
Source: Bulgaria
