Bulgaria: A Paradise On Earth

The Slavs

The Slavs are one of the indigenous peoples of Europe. When we speak of an all-Slav land of origin we mean the lands between the Carpathians and the Baltic Sea. In Greek and Roman written sources of two thousand years ago they are cited as Veneds. They began to call themselves Slavs after the fifth century.If we trace the ethnic origins of the Bulgarian people, we first of all come across its kinship with the Eastern Slavs - the distant forefathers of Russians, Ukrainians and Byelorussians; with the Western Slavs - the ancient predecessors of Poles, Czechs, Slovaks; and with the rest of the Southern Slavs - the peoples of present-day Yugoslavia. Linguistic, archaeological and ethnographic research indicates that the process of the differentiation of the two major groups of South Slavs set in as early as the fifth to seventh century: the Serbo - Croat group (Serbs, Bosnians, Croats, Montenegrins) and the group of the Bulgarian Slavs, so called because they became a part of the Bulgarian state, which was formed later. The migration of the Slavs to the South of the Danube was in fact so pervasive that Byzantium lost considerably its control over the better part of the Peninsula. The thinning numbers of the local Thracians merged completely with the Slavs.

Only a few small groups of Thracians survived in the mountain regions, where they survive to this day as, nomadic stock-breeders: they are known as Walaohians (Romanized Thracians) or as Karakachans (Hellenized Thracians). The thousand-year history of the Thracians found its continuation in the birth and Bourishment of the new Bulgarian state. Individual elemerits and features of the Thracian culture left their imprint on the formation and consolidation of the Bulgarian nation. In present times the Thracian heritage is being re-discovered to become part of the 'historical memory' of the Bulgarians and is being widely publicized.

The Slavification of the Balkans was something more than an ethno-demographic transformation; it served as a unique catalyst which accelerated the evolution of production relationships and led to a change in the social system of Byzantium itself which enabled it to survive the Western half of the Empire by a whole millennium. With the arrival of the Slavs, slave forms of dependence of farmers on the big landowners in the Balkans were replaced by the free rural communes. The free peasant emerged as the basic producer. The communal form of ownership over the basic means of production - the land - and the appearance of improved tools of production, were but a step from a superior form of ownership - feudalism. The Slavs, on their part, coming in touch with a more civilized world, quickly mastered the new instruments of labour and the art of warfare.

Seuthopolis was an ancient city founded by the Thracian king Seuthes III

By the mid-seventh century the Slavs of the Bulgarian group were almost two centuries ahead of the rest of the Slavs, standing on the threshold of the formation of a state organization. Two military-political alliances came into being: the first in the Salonika area, routed by the Byzantines in the second half of the seventh century, and the second, in the Danuberiver area. It was this alliance of seven Slav tribes which withstood the military pressure exerted by the Byzantine Empire. There was nothing left to do but to compel the empire to abandon the lands which it possessed against the will of the autochthonous population and which in the course of two centuries had acquired a Slavonic appearance. A crucial role in this process was played by Khan Asparouh's proto-Bulgarians who had settled near the mouth of the Daube after the year 665. They won two victories over Byzantium acting together with the alliance of the Slavonic tribes as well as with the Slavonic tribe of Severi from the plain near the lower reaches of the Danube. After the second victory, in the autumn of 681, the Constantinople concluded a treaty with Asparouh, extending recognition to the new political force - the first Bulgarian state.

Byalgrad aka Whitestone Town Medieval Fortress