Bulgaria's history: the country and the map it never got

Who ruled these lands before the Bulgars

The earliest human remains found in the country were excavated at the Kozarnika cave and are roughly 1.6 million years old. What the region is best known for archaeologically came out of the ground in the early 1970s: the Varna Necropolis, left by the Eneolithic Varna culture around 5000 BC, held golden rings, bracelets and ceremonial weapons made between 4600 and 4200 BC, described as the oldest gold artefacts yet discovered anywhere.

The Thracians appeared on the peninsula after 3500 BC and left the first lasting cultural traces. They stayed divided until King Teres united most of them into the Odrysian kingdom around 470 BC, which lasted until Rome finished its conquest of the region in 46 AD. In between came everyone else. A Persian army under Darius the Great crossed the Balkans in 513 BC, and eastern Thrace stayed under Persian control until 479 BC. Celtic tribes founded the kingdom of Tylis in the east in 279 BC; one of them, the serdi, gave its name to Serdica, which is now Sofia.

Under Rome the territory was divided between the provinces of Moesia and Thrace. The Slavs settled permanently after 500 AD and absorbed most of what was left of the Thracian population.

How a Turkic horde founded a Slavic state

The Bulgars were a semi-nomadic people of Turkic descent from the steppes north of the Caucasus and around the Volga, governed by hereditary khans and worshipping a supreme deity called Tangra. Around 635 Kubrat unified them into a confederation that Byzantine writers called Great Bulgaria. After his death around 642 the Khazars broke it apart and the tribes scattered. One son, Kotrag, led nine tribes north along the Volga. Another, Asparukh, moved west into southern Bessarabia, crossed to the south bank of the Danube, defeated an army led by the emperor Constantine IV, and in 681 obtained a treaty in which Byzantium recognised his control of the land between the Danube and the Balkan Mountains. That treaty is the date the Bulgarian state counts from.

The Bulgars ruled as a minority caste. Archaeological evidence suggests they kept their settlements distinct from those of the Slavs, from whom they accepted tribute. What ended the distinction was a church and an alphabet. Boris I abolished Bulgar paganism in favour of Eastern Orthodox Christianity in 864, and the Cyrillic script was developed at the Preslav Literary School, founded by his order in 886, out of the Glagolitic alphabet of Cyril and Methodius. A common religion, a common language and a common script fused the two populations into one people speaking a single Slavic language. The Bulgars left the state and the name behind them and almost nothing else.

Under Simeon I, who ruled from 893 to 927, the state reached the Peloponnese in the south and controlled all of present-day Romania and eastern Hungary in the north. Simeon proclaimed himself Tsar of the Bulgarians and the Romans, a title the Pope recognised and the Byzantine emperor refused. Under his successor Peter I, who ruled from 927 to 969, the dualist Bogomil heresy took hold, teaching that God had two sons and that Satan had made the material world.

Basil II opened a campaign of conquest in 986, inflicted a decisive defeat in 1014 and completed the work four years later. In 1018 most of the Bulgarian nobility joined the Eastern Roman Empire, and the country stayed inside it for more than a century and a half. Basil kept the local nobility in place as Byzantine archons and strategoi and recognised the autocephaly of the archbishopric of Ohrid.

Why the second empire fell to the Ottomans

In 1185 two nobles, Peter and Asen, revolted against Byzantine rule, and the following year Byzantium was forced to recognise Bulgarian independence again. Kaloyan, who ruled from 1197 to 1207, defeated the forces of the Latin Empire at Adrianople in 1205. Under Ivan Asen II, from 1218 to 1241, the country again touched the Adriatic, the Aegean and the Black Sea, the patriarchate was restored in 1235, and Tarnovo became an economic and religious centre.

Decline set in when the Asen dynasty ended in 1257, under internal conflict, Byzantine and Hungarian attacks and Mongol domination; a swineherd named Ivaylo led a peasant rebellion, beat the tsar's forces and took the throne. By 1371 the empire had split into the tsardoms of Vidin, Tarnovo and Karvuna along with several semi-independent principalities that fought each other as readily as anyone else.

The Ottomans, who had crossed into Europe in 1354, met little resistance from any of them. They captured Plovdiv in 1362 and Sofia in 1382, took Tarnovo in 1393 after a three-month siege, and in 1396 invaded Vidin after a Christian crusade was beaten at Nicopolis. Bulgarian independence ended there for close to five hundred years.

What the Ottoman centuries left behind

The new authorities dismantled Bulgarian institutions and merged the Bulgarian church into the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople, though a small autocephalous archbishopric at Ohrid survived until January 1767. Most medieval fortresses were destroyed to prevent rebellion, and the large towns stayed severely depopulated into the nineteenth century. Christians were not normally required to convert, but there were cases of forced Islamisation, especially in the Rhodopes; the Pomaks, Bulgarians who became Muslim, kept the Bulgarian language and dress.

Central government weakened through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries until local holders of large estates ran whole regions themselves. Bulgarian tradition calls the resulting decades the kurdjaliistvo, after the armed bands that plagued the countryside, and thousands of peasants fled to the towns, to the hills or across the Danube. Recovery came commercially first: Gabrovo, Karlovo and Koprivshtitsa prospered in the nineteenth century, the first factory in the Bulgarian lands opened at Sliven in 1834, and the first railway ran between Rousse and Varna in 1865.

The national movement began as a fight over a church. A Bulgarian Exarchate was created by firman in 1870 and the Patriarch of Constantinople promptly excommunicated it, which hardened the position it was meant to soften. Political revolutionaries followed, among them Vasil Levski and Hristo Botev. In April 1876 the April Uprising broke out ahead of schedule and largely inside the Plovdiv region. Irregular troops crushed it and massacred tens of thousands of people, most of them at Batak, Perushtitsa and Bratsigovo. William Ewart Gladstone campaigned in Britain against what he called the Bulgarian Horrors, the Great Powers met at Constantinople over the winter of 1876 and 1877, and when the Ottoman government refused to implement the conference's decisions Russia declared war in April 1877. Russian troops and Bulgarian volunteers won at Shipka Pass and Pleven, and by January 1878 they held most of the Bulgarian lands.

Why the national day marks a cancelled treaty

The Russians dictated their peace from the outskirts of Constantinople. The Treaty of San Stefano called for a large Bulgaria on the territory of the Bulgarian Exarchate, from the Danube to the Aegean and from the Vardar and Morava valleys to the Black Sea. Britain and Austria-Hungary read a state that size as an outpost of Russian influence and forced a revision at the Congress of Berlin four months later.

Britannica records that the San Stefano boundaries represented the fulfilment of Bulgaria's territorial aspirations and remained for generations the national ideal of the people. The date they were signed, 3 March, is a public holiday called National Liberation Day. The state itself dates from the treaty that cancelled them.

Russian occupation authorities and the Bulgarian governments that followed confiscated the Turkish estates and sold them off in small parcels, so the principality began as a country of smallholders. The constituent assembly that met at Tarnovo in February 1879 produced a constitution providing for a single National Assembly elected by universal male suffrage, guarantees of civil rights and strict limits on the power of the prince. Alexander of Battenberg, elected prince that year, suspended it in 1881 and took absolute power for seven years, then restored it in September 1883.

Eastern Rumelia settled its own status. In September 1885, with the prince's prior approval, its leaders staged a bloodless coup at Plovdiv and declared unification with Bulgaria. The Ottoman government did not resist. Russia, offended at being ignored, withdrew every Russian officer from the Bulgarian army, and King Milan of Serbia declared war on the argument that unification had upset the balance in the Balkans. An untrained Bulgarian army met the Serbs at Slivnitsa and beat them. In 1908 Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, elected prince in July 1887, declared Bulgaria independent of the Sublime Porte and took the title of tsar.

How the missing map shaped Bulgarian foreign policy

Bulgaria left Ottoman rule as a poor agricultural country: in 1900, peasants were 80% of a population of 3.8 million. Schools were built at speed, and by 1910 there were 4,800 elementary schools. Sofia went from 20,000 people in 1878 to 120,000 in 1912. The army grew alongside the schools, and the country acquired the nickname the Prussia of the Balkans for its declared intention of revising the Treaty of Berlin by war.

Why the Balkan wars cost Bulgaria its gains

Macedonia was the object throughout. The Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization rose against Ottoman rule on 2 August 1903 and was put down, sending tens of thousands of refugees into Bulgaria. In 1911 the government opened negotiations for an anti-Ottoman alliance, and treaties with Serbia in February 1912 and Greece in May left the partition of Macedonia deliberately vague.

The First Balkan War began in October 1912 and went well. Bulgarian forces won at Lozengrad and Lüleburgaz and besieged Adrianople, and by the Treaty of London of 30 May 1913 the Ottoman Empire gave up nearly all of its European territory. Dividing it proved impossible. Serbia and Greece kept most of the Macedonian land they had occupied, Romania demanded compensation for its neutrality, and on the night of 29 June 1913 Bulgarian forces attacked Greek and Serbian positions in Macedonia. The attack was repulsed, Romanian troops marched unopposed towards Sofia, and the Ottomans retook Adrianople. The Treaty of Bucharest of 10 August 1913 gave southern Dobruja and the city of Silistra to Romania and most of Macedonia to Serbia and Greece. Bulgaria kept the Pirin region and part of eastern Thrace. The two wars left 58,000 Bulgarians dead and more than 100,000 wounded.

How Bulgaria came to fight beside Germany twice

The choice in 1915 followed from that. Serbia, Greece and Romania held land Bulgaria claimed and were allied to Britain and France; the Ottoman Empire held nothing Bulgaria wanted any more. The alliance with Germany and Austria-Hungary, who offered Macedonia, was signed in September 1915. Bulgaria declared war on Serbia in October, took Skopje that month and Dobruja from Romania in September 1916. By 1917 more than a quarter of a population of 4.5 million was in an army of 1,200,000. Mutinies broke out that year, Ferdinand abdicated in September 1918 in favour of his son Boris III, and the Treaty of Neuilly of November 1919 took the Aegean coastline, nearly all the Macedonian territory and Dobruja away again, capped the army at 22,000 men and imposed reparations of more than $400 million. Bulgarians call that settlement the Second National Catastrophe, which counts 1913 as the first.

The interwar decades were spent arguing about the same question. Aleksandar Stamboliyski's Agrarian government signed an agreement with Yugoslavia in March 1923 recognising the border and undertaking to suppress the Macedonian revolutionary organisation, and a coup that June ended in his assassination and a white terror against Agrarians and Communists. A further coup came in May 1934, and from 1935 Tsar Boris III governed under his own control.

The Second World War returned the map for four years. Bulgaria recovered southern Dobruja from Romania under the Axis-sponsored Treaty of Craiova of 7 September 1940, joined the Axis on 1 March 1941 as German troops massed on its border, and in return occupied Greek Thrace, Yugoslav Macedonia and Pirot. It declared a token war on Britain and the United States on 13 December 1941, which brought Allied bombers over Sofia from the summer of 1943, and it avoided declaring war on the Soviet Union altogether.

What Bulgaria did with its Jewish citizens

In 1934 Jews were 0.8% of a population of more than six million, roughly 50,000 people. From July 1940 Bulgarian authorities passed legislation excluding Jews from public service, restricting where they could live and what work they could do, and prohibiting marriage with non-Jews.

By the winter of 1943 the government had arranged with Adolf Eichmann's office to hand over 20,000 Jews as a first stage: about 13,000 from the occupied territories and about 8,000 from Sofia. During the first half of March 1943 Bulgarian police and military units deported 11,343 Jews from occupied Thrace, Macedonia and Pirot into German custody. Almost all of them were dead at Treblinka by the end of that month.

The Sofia deportation was stopped from inside the governing party. Dimitar Peshev, deputy speaker of the National Assembly, persuaded Boris to delay it, and on 19 March 1943 he put a resolution to parliament demanding a halt; forty-three members of the majority signed a defence of Bulgarian Jews. The resolution was voted down and Peshev was forced to resign. Public protest continued, joined by the metropolitan of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church, and in May 1943 Boris cancelled the deportation orders. Weeks after that the government expelled almost 20,000 Jews from Sofia to the provinces, put the men into forced-labour camps and confiscated most of the property they left behind. In 1945 the Jewish population was still about 50,000; by 1948 more than 35,000 had emigrated to Palestine, and most of the rest had gone by 1950.

The deportation and the cancellation were carried out by one government inside eight weeks, and Bulgarian argument about the period has turned on which of the two is the country's record ever since.

How communism rebuilt a peasant country

Romania left the Axis on 23 August 1944 and opened its territory to Soviet forces. The Soviet Union declared war on Bulgaria on 5 September and entered unopposed; on 8 September the government declared war on Germany; on 9 September a coup by the Fatherland Front replaced it anyway. Bulgaria then sent three armies to fight under the Red Army's 3rd Ukrainian Front.

The reckoning was fast. People's courts tried 11,122 people by April 1945 and passed 2,730 death sentences, 1,305 life sentences and 5,119 sentences of up to twenty years; unofficial estimates put the number killed without trial as high as 30,000. A referendum in September 1946 declared a republic by a 93% majority and required the boy tsar Simeon II and the queen mother to leave. The Agrarian opposition leader Nikola Petkov was executed on 23 September 1947, the Dimitrov Constitution was enacted on 4 December 1947, and by the end of 1948 about 85% of industrial production was in state hands.

Todor Zhivkov took over as party leader in 1954 and held the post until 1989. Agriculture was collectivised and industry was built at speed. Measured against wartime levels, national output had risen five-fold and output per head four-fold by the 1980s, with debt spikes in 1960, 1977 and 1980. Between 1985 and 1990 high technology accounted for 14% of GDP, and the country made processors, hard disks, floppy disk drives and industrial robots.

The last campaign of the period was directed inward. Facing falling birth rates among the ethnic Bulgarian majority, the government in 1984 forced the ethnic Turkish minority to adopt Slavic names. Some 300,000 Bulgarian Turks emigrated to Turkey in the late 1980s, and agricultural production fell with the labour that left.

Why the country stopped chasing its borders

The Communist Party gave up its monopoly on power on 10 November 1989 and Zhivkov resigned. The first free election since 1931 was held in June 1990 and won by the party under its new name, the Bulgarian Socialist Party, and a constitution establishing a parliamentary republic with a directly elected president was adopted in July 1991.

Land and industry were privatised between 1992 and 1994 by issuing shares in state enterprises to all citizens, uncompetitive plants closed, and unemployment rose. Inflation reached 122% in 1994 and fell to 32.9% in 1995 before the lev collapsed in 1996 and inflation hit 311%. A currency board agreed with the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank in 1997 stabilised the currency, pegged to the German mark in 1999 and to the euro from 2001.

People left. More than 800,000 Bulgarians emigrated after 1989, many of them qualified professionals, and estimates of the total departure by 2005 run from 937,000 to 1,200,000. Population growth has been negative every year since 1989, and the total fertility rate was 1.59 children per woman in 2024, against 1.1 at its lowest in 1997 and 5.83 in 1905. A survey in 2009 found 76% of Bulgarians dissatisfied with the democratic system and 11% agreeing that ordinary people had benefited from the changes of 1989; a poll in 2014 found 15% who felt they had personally benefited from European Union membership.

The external record went the other way. Bulgaria joined NATO on 29 March 2004 and the European Union on 1 January 2007, became a full member of the Schengen Area in January 2025, and replaced the lev with the euro on 1 January 2026. From 1989 to the end of 2024 the European Union accounted for about 90% of external financing, some 70 billion leva, worth about 3% of average annual GDP over the last decade.

The borders drawn at Berlin in 1878 and adjusted for the last time at Craiova in 1940 have not moved since. The population inside them was 6,423,207 at 31 December 2025.