Capital: Sofia
Area: 110 910 km²
Population: 7 707 500
Currency: 1 US$ = 1.8 Leva
GDP: 102 / 6 200 $
HDI:  63 / 0.758
CPI   :  45 / 4.0

2001 data

Ancient Thrace covered Bulgaria, Romania, Serbia, Macedonia, northern Greece and northwest Turkey. The Thracian tribes had no alphabet so we know them through others. We find some allied with the Trojans in 13th century BC and others allied with Athens during the Peloponnesian war around 500 BC. Later, they became part of the kingdom of Philip and his illustrious son Alexander but they were conquered in 46 BC by the Romans who divided their territory into Moecia in the north and Thrace south of the Balkan mountains.

Thrace prospered for several centuries under the Romans until the great migrations of "barbarians" from the east gradually extinguished the resplendent Thraco-Roman civilisation between the 3rd and 5th centuries BC. Slavic tribes from the area between the Carpathians and the Baltic then flooded into the Balkan peninsula where they soon outnumbered the original Thracians.

Further east, great migrations were moving over central Asia towards Europe. Amongst them were fierce Bulgar tribes of Turco-Altaïc culture which Byzantium used as mercenaries to repel Germanic Ostrogoth incursions in the late 5th century. Beginning around 500 AD however, the Bulgars living north of the Black Sea, the Caucasus and the Caspian raided and plundered Thrace at will after routing the Byzantine armies sent to stop them.

In 632, Khan Kubrat, who had lived in Constantinople, managed to unite all the Bulgars in a confederation of tribes independent of the Turkut Khanate that had previously ruled them. When their neighbours from north of the Caspian, the Khazars invaded their lands and dispersed them around 665 AD, Kubrat's third son Asparukh led some of the remaining tribes across the Danube where their military prowess against Byzantium led them to become the aristocracy of the previously established Slav population. In 681, they established the first Bulgarian state at Pliska in the Dobrudzha area from which they expanded at the expense of Byzantium as far as to include Macedonia. In 865 Tsar Boris I converted to Christianity and imposed it on his people.

The first Bulgar Empire reached its zenith under Tzar Simeon in the 10th century, but the Byzantines overran it and the capital was moved from Veliki Preslav in eastern Bulgaria to Ohrid, now in Macedonia, where Tzar Samuel built a great fortress from which he reigned over a reduced Bulgaria. Two centuries later the Bulgars rebelled against the Byzantines and established a second Bulgarian Empire that reached its zenith under Tzar Ivan Asen II in the 13th century.

Bulgaria had twice been the most powerful state in eastern Europe but it was overrun by the Ottoman Turks in the 14th century whose domination was complete for five centuries. Many Orthodox churches were closed and mosques were built but the Bulgarians maintained their national identity until they were liberated by the Russian-Turkish war of 1877.

With the fall of the Ottomans came the power struggles that were to plague the Balkans for decades. The most important was the second Balkan war of 1913 in which Greece and Serbia defeated Bulgaria and shared Macedonia.

Bulgaria was pressured into joining the Axis in WW II at the end of which it was invaded by the Soviet Union. The communist party took over in 1946 and held power until 1989 when it changed its name to the Bulgarian Socialist Party (BSP)