Bulgaria

Why Bulgaria dates itself from two treaties

The first date is 681. Asparuh, leading a Bulgar horde out of the steppe north of the Black Sea, took Byzantine Moesia in 680, and the peace treaty signed the following year is conventionally read as the foundation of the state. The Bulgars were a Turkic ruling caste governing a Slavic-speaking population, and they disappeared into it: within two centuries the country spoke one Slavic language, and the name of the vanished caste stayed on the map. Boris I gave up Bulgar paganism for Eastern Orthodox Christianity in 864, ordered literary schools at Preslav and Ohrid in 886, and the Cyrillic script came out of that work.

The second date is 1878, and it took two treaties to arrive at. San Stefano, signed on 3 March that year, drew a Bulgaria reaching from the Danube to the Aegean. The Congress of Berlin replaced it on 13 July with a principality between the Danube and the Balkan Mountains plus the region of Sofia, autonomous but still under Ottoman sovereignty, with Macedonia handed back to the empire and a separate province of Eastern Rumelia to the south. Berlin also set out how the new state was to be assembled: an assembly of notables would meet at Tarnovo, prepare a constitution, and choose a prince whom the powers would then confirm. Full independence was declared in 1908.

What Bulgarians hold in common culturally is inherited from the first date; every institution that governs them was created after the second. The history article follows what the cancelled map did to Bulgarian foreign policy for the seventy years afterwards.

How the land arranges itself in bands

The country covers 110,994 square kilometres and its borders run 2,245 kilometres, of which 686 kilometres are river, mostly the Danube along the Romanian frontier. The relief is arranged in four bands running west to east. The Danubian Plain in the north covers 31,520 square kilometres, close to a third of the territory, at an average altitude of 178 metres. The Balkan Mountains cross the middle for 555 kilometres, from the Timok valley to Cape Emine on the coast, rising to Botev Peak at 2,376 metres. South of them is a transitional belt of valleys and low ranges holding the Upper Thracian Plain, and south of that the Rila and Rhodope massif, where Musala reaches 2,925 metres.

That middle band decides the water and the weather. The Balkan range splits the country into two drainage systems of nearly equal size, one running north to the Danube and the other south to the Aegean, and it blocks air moving in either direction. The Black Sea coast runs 378 kilometres, a tenth of the sea's total shoreline, and sandy beaches occupy 34% of it. Mean annual temperature is 10.6 degrees Celsius nationally, ranging from 2.2 degrees at the summit of Musala to 14.7 degrees at Sandanski in the southern Struma valley on 1991 to 2021 normals. The geography article works through the bands and the rivers in detail.

Who lives in Bulgaria and where

The population was 6,423,207 at the end of 2025, against 6,519,789 counted in the census of 2021, and 74.2% of it was urban in 2025. Sofia held 1,213,134 people at the end of 2025, followed by Plovdiv, Varna and Burgas. Population density was 55 to 60 people per square kilometre in 2023, and the recorded growth rate was negative in 2025 at 0.1%, as it has been every year since 1989. The total fertility rate was 1.59 children per woman in 2024, up from the low of 1.1 in 1997 and below the historical high of 5.83 in 1905. Average age was 43 years. Estimates of departures after 1989 run from 937,000 to 1,200,000 people by 2005, most of them young adults. Life expectancy was 75.8 years in 2024.

In the government's 2022 estimate Bulgarians made up 84.6% of the population, Turks 8.4% and Roma 4.4%, with about forty smaller minorities accounting for another 1.3%. Census figures for the Roma population are widely held to be too low, and the true share may reach 11%. The state language is Bulgarian, a South Slavic language written in Cyrillic, and it is the only official one.

How the country is governed now

The constitution adopted in July 1991 puts almost everything in the hands of a single chamber. The National Assembly seats 240 deputies on four-year terms, and it enacts laws, approves the budget, selects and dismisses the prime minister and ratifies treaties. The directly elected president is head of state and commander-in-chief, and can return a bill for further debate, though a simple majority in the chamber overrides that. Below the centre sit 27 provinces and the capital province, subdivided into 265 municipalities with elected mayors and councils, though regional governors are appointed by the Council of Ministers and both tiers depend on it for money.

The machinery works less well when no majority exists. Elections from April 2021 onward repeatedly failed to produce a cabinet, and the constitutional clause covering that case, which lets the president appoint a caretaker government to hold the next election, was used more often in three years than in the preceding thirty. The politics article sets out the electoral system and what the caretaker arrangement does to accountability.

Membership of the outside structures arrived over seven decades.

Why the lev is fixed to the euro

One arrangement from 1997 explains most of the rest. After annualised inflation passed 2,000% in March 1997 and a third of the banking system had been closed, a currency board designed with the International Monetary Fund fixed the lev on 1 July 1997 and removed the exchange rate from political control. The anchor was the deutsche mark, the peg carried over to the euro at 1.95583 leva, and when Bulgaria adopted the euro itself on 1 January 2026 the conversion rate was that same number. Interest rates now follow the decisions of the ECB Governing Council, on which the governor of the Bulgarian National Bank sits as a full member.

Output per head was 20,328 United States dollars in 2025, or 44,451 dollars in purchasing power terms, on growth of 3.1% that year. Unemployment was 3.5% and inflation 4.6% in 2025. Goods exports came to 61,998.1 million leva in January to September 2025, down 4.8% on the same period of 2024, against imports of 75,601.7 million leva and a trade deficit of 13,603.6 million leva. Output is concentrated as sharply as the administration: the south-western planning region containing Sofia recorded per capita GDP of 29,816 dollars in purchasing power terms in 2018, and the capital with its province produced 42% of national output on 22% of the population. The economy article deals with the currency rule, the flat taxes built on top of it and what the country still makes.

What Bulgaria sent out into the world

Cyrillic is the export that travelled furthest. It was assembled at the Preslav Literary School, with an alternative account crediting the school at Ohrid and Clement, a disciple of Cyril and Methodius, and it was adapted from the Glagolitic alphabet the two brothers had devised. The Old Bulgarian written in it carried north through Eastern Europe and became the written language of the Orthodox Slavs.

Smaller exports are still measurable. The Rose Valley between Karlovo and Kazanlak produces 85% of the world's rose oil. The 2016 harvest yielded 128 million litres of wine, of which 62 million were exported, mostly to Romania, Poland and Russia. Yoghurt, banitsa, lyutenitsa and shopska salad are the domestic staples, on a table that leans more on salads and less on meat than the European average. The red and white thread called a martenitsa, worn from 1 March until the first blossom or stork appears, was inscribed on the UNESCO Representative List of Intangible Cultural Heritage in 2017 in a joint file with North Macedonia, Moldova and Romania. The culture article takes up the language, the music, the ritual year and the church.

Who comes to Bulgaria and for what

More than 13 million foreign visitors arrived in 2024 on National Statistical Institute figures, roughly two for every resident. Five nationalities accounted for about half of them: Romanian, Turkish, Greek, German and British. The traffic concentrates on two strips. The coast holds the resorts of Albena, Golden Sands and Sunny Beach; the mountains hold Bansko, Pamporovo and Borovets. Inland, the pull is Sofia, Plovdiv, Veliko Tarnovo and the Thracian tombs, of which more than eighty treasures have been excavated. Tourism accounted for 15% of GDP and about 150,000 jobs in 2014. The travel article sets out the seasons, the regions and moving around without a car.

Where to read the rest of it

Seven pages, one country. The state that began in 681 and was rebuilt to somebody else's specification in 1878 is in its history; the ground it sits on is in its geography; the constitution and the deadlock are in its politics; the currency rule that outlived every government since 1997 is in its economy; the alphabet, the music and the food are in its culture; and what a visitor actually finds is in its travel article.