This is an inside look at the current cultural, ethnic, historical, religious, social, and linguistic dimensions of Bulgaria, complete with photos from my 2007 vacation. It also analyses the issue of Islam in Europe, the Gypsy race, and the mysterious masters of gold, the Thracians.

English name: Bulgaria
Local name: Balgariya
Population: 7,322,858
Religion: Bulgarian Orthodox 82.6%, Muslim 12.2%, other Christian 1.2%, other 4%
Language: Bulgarian (Bulgarski/Balgarski), with Turkish minority
Ethnic groups: Bulgarian 83.9%, Turk 9.4%, Roma 4.7%, other 2% (including Macedonian, Armenian, Tatar, Circassian)
Average fertility/woman: 1.39 per woman
Migration rate: -3.71 migrant(s)/1,000 population [Bulgarians are leaving]
Per capita average income: $10,700
Unemployment: officially 9.6%
Population below poverty line: officially 14.1%
Extant populations elsewhere of Albanians: USA, Germany, Greece, Russia
Source: CIA World Factbook

Bulgaria is one of the more interesting former Soviet puppets in Eastern Europe, with a complicated and ancient history of its own as one of the oldest nations on earth. It prides itself as being the first Slavic nation, as the Slavic race in Central Russia had split and traveled south into modern Bulgaria, displacing the previous Greek and Thracian inhabitants to establish the First Bulgarian Empire in the 7th century CE. They quickly established themselves as one of the most powerful empires in southern Europe, annexing much of the Balkans and adopting the Orthodox faith of their Byzantine neighbors after rejecting the Catholic Papacy. By the 11th century, the Byzantine Greeks had conquered the Bulgarian state, but within a century the Bulgarian Slavs had expelled the Greeks and re-established themselves as the powerful Second Bulgarian Empire. After a series of conflicts with the increasingly powerful European empires of the northwest and other Slavic states like Serbia, the Bulgarian Christians were conquered in the wake of the Islamic Jihad of the Ottomans by the 14th century, one of its first victims. The Bulgarians endured centuries of persecution, economic exploitation, forced conversion, a required blood tax that forced at least one Bulgarian child per family into forced conversion and conscription into Istanbul's awesome janissary armies. Thousands converted in order to avoid persecution and unlivable Jizyah taxes (which in theory allowed the Christians to practice the religion that was at the same time persecuted), and thousands of Turks settled in the Christian land, a legacy that is visible today with Bulgaria having one of Europe's largest Muslim populations. Bulgaria became a source of military and economic strength for what was the world's greatest empire at the time, under the banner of Islam. By the late 20th century, however, other Christian Balkan peoples' independence movements inspired the Bulgarians -- with the help of German, British, and French military aid -- to wrest themselves free of Islamic rule, establishing the Kingdom of Bulgaria by 1908 (though independence was declared much earlier). It engaged in a military assault on its own Christian Slavic neighbors in the Second Balkan War only to fail, forfeiting Kosovo and Macedonia to Serbia for the time. It aided the Germans during World War I and World War II, where it joined the Fascist Axis against the Soviet Union. But by 1941, when its Tzar Boris III had died and the tides of the incredible Soviet might had turned against the Axis, Bulgaria broke the alliance and forfeited itself as a vassal to the USSR, later to join the Warsaw Pact as a Communist puppet. By the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, Bulgaria had re-established itself once again as a very centralized yet democratic state of today. Bulgaria's long and tumultuous history, ultraconservative Orthodox Christian heritage, ancient and unchanged Cyrillic (and Glagolitic) Slavic alphabet, and hordes of the oldest and most elaborate gold treasures in the world (both from the separate Thracian race and from Bulgarians alike) define Bulgarians with great pride to this day.

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