A (short) History of Bulgaria

Bulgaria. For me the name conjures up a decades old image of postage stamps.  Stamps found in packets, cheaply bought. Foreign stamps, plentiful and of varied but colourful designs, intended to appeal to a young person, old enough to have a hobby but too young to give it any focus.

 
There must have been a lot of Bulgarian stamps in those packets for that country to have lodged in my mind. At the time it was just a name. Another country that seemed far away, inaccessible, unknown. I guess in the intervening decades despite cheaper travel and an increased knowledge of geography and geopolitics, little seems to have changed for me. Until now. 

The land that is now Bulgaria is another region shaped by regional conflict over the centuries, battles of empires and nationalism, with Bulgaria at times the aggressor and at other times the defender. When the Romans invaded the area it was known as Thrace and despite the efforts of probably the most famous Thracian - Spartacus - the area fell to Roman rule.

With the eventual fall of the Western Roman Empire, Slavs invaded in the 5th and 6th centuries and they in turn were subjugated a century later by the Bulgars (from where the name Bulgaria is derived). The Bulgars absorbed the Slavic language, carved out the Bulgarian state and went on to create the First Bulgarian Empire covering an area from the Adriatic to the whole west coast of the Black Sea. However, conflict with the Eastern Roman Empire of Byzantium was commonplace and defeat eventually led to the fall of the Bulgarian Empire. More fighting and victory over a century later led to the rise of the Second Bulgarian Empire but this then fell to the Ottomans who took advantage of weakness in the region resulting from continual regional fighting. This was the beginning of nearly 500 years of Ottoman rule. 

During the period of Ottoman rule any nationalist uprisings were viciously squashed. The particularly brutal treatment of Bulgarians by their Ottoman overlords in the the late 19th century led to international outrage (Gladstone wrote on the issue in Britain condemning the lack of action by the Britsh government). As a result the Russian Empire initiated the Russo-Turkish war to defend their Christian Orthodox brothers the result of which was that Bulgaria once again became free.

In the first years of the 20th century, Bulgaria allied with Serbia, Greece and Montenegro to fight the First Balkan War aimed at driving the last remnants of the Ottoman Empire from the region. This was immediately followed by the Second Balkan War when Bulgaria turned on its allies after feeling cheated of lands it should have received after victory over the Ottomans. This left her even weaker. The country was further ravaged during both World Wars and fell under communist control after the Second World War until democracy returned in 1990. Bulgaria has been a member of the EU since 2007.