It is impossible to recognize in the proud, full-blown kingdom of to-day the down-trodden province of Turkey of three decades ago. In thirty years Bulgaria has built more than four thousand three hundred primary schools; she has established, and maintains, a standing army of one hundred and twenty thousand men and is capable of putting in the field in time of emergency two hundred and fifty thousand more; the value of her annual exports has reached the figure of $250,000,000; seventy per cent. of her total area has been rendered susceptible to the highest degree of cultivation; the agricultural and stock-raising adaptability of her peoples has opened the eyes of all Europe; while her ottar of rose industry, down in the little valley of Toundja, “The Rose Valley,” has become world-renowned.
But to fully appreciate and feel this miraculous development we must delve, briefly, into Bulgaria’s past.
The ancient Roman name of Thrace was the one generally applied to the entire territory lying between the Macedonian frontier and the Danube River, while the territory to the north of the Balkans was then called Moesia. Savage tribes, known as the Thraco-Dacians, the Thraco-Illyrians and the Thraco-Macedonians, held sway over the whole of the Balkan Peninsula until, historians tell us, Philip and his successor, Alexander, came upon and took the country. The date of the beginning of Roman conquests in Thrace is indefinite, but it remains an undisputed fact that Vespasian annexed the country and proclaimed it a Roman province in a. d. 75.
The Slavs, moving westward from their confines in Asia, and having waged successful warfare upon the Huns and the Goths, populated Bulgaria between the third and the seventh centuries. They introduced their customs and language throughout a large part of eastern and southeastern Europe, and their descendants, influenced, of course, by the later dominant races, constitute the present population of Bulgaria.
At this point of history we hear for the first time of the Bulgari, “a horde of Asiatics of Turkish strain,” who were also destined to be a prime factor in the general make-up of the present-day Bulgarians. They swarmed over the country in the seventh century and founded the first Bulgarian empire, which attained its height between the years 893 and 927 a. d. under the Tzar Simeon, only to fall ignominiously under Byzantine rule hardly a century later.
In the year 965, Greece endeavoured to subject Bulgaria to her power, and the Emperor Nikephoros Phakos sought aid in his undertakings from a tribe of Northmen (and we have every reason to believe that this tribe was composed of the antecedents of the Russians of to-day) under a leader named Sviatoslav. Sviatoslav condescended to become an ally of the Greeks, but the latter became so jealous of his many successful conquests in their behalf that they grew afraid of him and finally made a treaty with the Bulgarian Tzar, Boris II.
Upon the death of Nikephoros, Sviatoslav decided to make war on Bulgaria for his own aggrandizement, and in 969 he captured Boris, carrying him as far east as Philippopolis. Here the Greek Emperor, Zinisces, the successor of Nikephoros, with the help of the defeated Bulgarians themselves, drove the Northmen back. Sviatoslav was compelled to seek refuge in Silistria, where he sustained a siege of three months. After his final capture he was liberated and allowed to return to his native land, but, while on the march, he and his few surviving adherents were ruthlessly slain by a marauding band of hostile tribesmen.
THE SAINT CRAL CATHEDRAL, SOPHIA.
This may be said to have been the first Russian invasion of Bulgaria, the direct result of which was the fusion of the Northern and the Southern Slavs. Bulgarian history proper begins, however, with the nation’s conversion to Christianity under the Tzar Boris, late in the ninth century. About the same time the Cyrillic alphabet—now adopted by all Slav peoples, including the Russians—was introduced by the great apostles, Cyril and Methodius.