Bulgaria is situated between Roumania (to the North), and Turkey and Greece (to the South). These are three countries on the Balkan peninsula most people must have heard of, or so I hope. To the East it borders on the Black sea and to the West - on Macedonia. It is also very near Serbia and Albania - remember, the wars in Sarajevo and Kossovo, Slobodan Miloshevich, Emir Kusturitsa, stuff like that. Due to the exclusive monopolistic nature of "globalism" and the legendary tolerance of those in charge, Bulgarian movies, music, or books have not been, and will not be, able to reach international markets although the products of American mass culture are, of course, being aggressively pushed into ours. The only Bulgarian product foreigners seem to have heard about is yogurt. It is the result of the effect a bacteria, Bacilus Bulgaricus, has on milk. God knows why said bacteria dies when transplanted elsewhere. I'm sure that if that wasn't the case, the fact we are being given credit for something would have become distant past long ago.
Famous Bulgarians - in Bulgaria there are many, especially actors and musicians, and some of them are in fact worthy. Others aren't. Worldwide there are a few who are well-known, but chances are they'll only be familiar to those interested in the respective fields (computers, writing, politics, sports). Right now I can only think of two that may have been mentioned in international newscasts more than once - the soccer player Hristo Stoitchkov, and our ex-prime minister Simeon Saxe-Coburg Gotha who, as his name suggests, is related to the royal dynasties of Europe and thus (gasp) to Prince William of England. Simeon was supposed to be king after his father, Boris I, but he was exiled when Bulgaria was sold to Stalin after the end of World War 2.
Good as these two men are at what they do, people most likely are (or will be, when the movie comes out) a lot more familiar with a completely fictional Bulgarian - J. K. Rowling's Victor Kroum (this should have been the spelling so the name could be pronounced the way it should). He is the dark, ugly, short, slouchy, crooked-nosed, thick-accent-possessing and Hermiony-worshipping star of the otherwise mediocre Bulgarian quidditch team in book 4 of the Harry Potter series, "The Goblet of Fire." Bulgarians having read the book, on the other hand (at least the type that pays attention), must have got familiar with the power of stereotyping, but instead of getting annoyed going into that, I'll only address a few technical issues.
I have no idea how much reseatch Mrs Rowling did before creating the "Victor Kroum" character. Apparently she did happen to stumble onto the fact some 1000 years ago the Bulgarian and Irish schools of magic were among the most renowned in Europe and in constant competition (that's where the Bulgaria vs. Ireland quidditch match must have come from to begin with). That she did stumble onto said fact is most fortunate. By the sound of it, however, that's as far as the research went. Yes, both Victor and (especially) Kroum can be considered Bulgarian names. First names, to be exact. "Kroum" is one strongly associated with our history, the guy was head of state over 1200 years ago, you'll read about him below. (At the time no schools of magic existed in the country, however.) Nevertheless, a full name such as "Victor Kroum," cool as it must have been expected to sound to English speakers, is about as ridiculous to people familiar with Bulgaria as the "fluent" Japanese spoken in Kill Bill vol. 1 by US members of the cast would be to any speaker of that language. This is so due to the fact "Victor Kroum" is as Bulgarian a name as "Joan Rowling." Translation: it isn't. Kroum can't be a family name even if hell froze over and Bulgarian grammar was revised. Kroumov would have been.
Bulgarian family names are quite predictable in that they always end on -ov, -ev, ski or -in. 80% of the time it's one of the first two. No other options exist, there's no flexibility there. Which would be very easy to establish if one tried. And for the money writing a Harry Potter book brings, one probably should. Let's hope Victor Kroum is secretly an alias or something, like "Kroum the Winner." And that Mrs Rowling was also aware of some other (very avoidable) inaccuracies related to her Bulgarian characters. Otherwise I'll be forced to assume world-renowned writers can't be bothered to do a one-minute web search to get their details right.
My country has a complex history. I'll start with a legend, the one I like best.
Proto-Bulgarians were an Indo-European tribe that came to the Balkan peninsula from Central Asia. One day, about 1300 years ago, the Proto-Bulgarian khan Koubrat called his three sons by his deathbed. He asked them to approach and try to break a bunch of spears without separating them. Nobody did it. Then the khan got up, untied the bunch and started breaking the spears one at a time. He then told his three sons to keep together after his death as when the spears are tied up in a bunch, nobody can break them. Unfortunately when the old man died, his sons left their homeland and split. The two older brothers and their following fought with foreign tribes and were defeated.
In 681 the youngest one, Asparouch, united with several Slavic tribes and settled near the Danube. This is where my country is now, and 681 was the year it was founded. Its people were very belligerent and, reportedly, the best paid mercenaries in Europe. There are lots of stories about the pride and cruelty of Khan Asparouch's successors but I'll tell you my favorite.
Bulgarians were almost always at war with the Byzantine Empire (that would be the huge and powerful ancient version of modern Greece). It was a matter of conquering land and, of course, forcing Byzantium to pay us tribute. However, every now and then Byzantium would play absent-minded so, as you can imagine, it had to be taught a lesson. When we weren't attacking their capital it was because they were attacking ours in attempts to break free of our racketeering. At the time when the story I'm about to tell you took place, the Khan in power was Kroum, one of the most respected and revered rulers Bulgarians ever had. He was a stern leader and a mighty warrior, and ruled the country with an iron fist. Almost literally so. He was the first to introduce laws in the then relatively young country of Bulgaria, and those were laws everybody feared and obeyed. Small wonder. According to Kroum's rules, whoever was caught stealing would lose a hand, whoever drank would have his tongue cut off and so on. He led numerous attacks on the Byzantine capital, Konstantinopolis, and fought off attacks on our own. Once, however, he managed to capture not only the Byzantine troops but their leader, Emperor Nikiforos himself, as well. History says Kroum cut Nikiforos' head off and then had a goblet made out of the skull. A goblet he was, naturally, very fond of using himself (there's actually a song about that). Sadly, he didn't have long to enjoy it. Several years later, during another siege of Konstantinopolis, he was killed in his tent (in a significantly cruel manner I won't describe).
For those of you who felt sorry for the Byzantines and their Emperor, here's another story. Centuries later, when Bulgaria was under the rule of tzar (or king) Samuil, our army was captured by Vassilios II (the emperor of Byzantium at that time). He sent all the soldiers back to the tzar but before letting them go he blinded them. He divided them into groups of 100 people each; 99 had both their eyes burned out. The 100th soldier in each group was left with one eye intact so that he could lead the others back to Bulgaria. It is said that Samuil who's reported to have died this same year, actually got a heart attack at the sight of his army returning in such a pitiful condition. This story is the reason everybody in both Greece and Bulgaria knows Emperor Vassilios as "Vassilios II, The Killer of Bulgarians." However, something tells me nobody bothers to teach Greek kids about Khan Kroum and his goblet *grin*
Anyway, enough with the myths and legends. One of the few more things I'd like to mention about this period is the fact that contrary to what Russian linguists headed by Roman Yakobson have been preaching for years, "Church Slavonic" does in fact mean Ancient Bulgarian (language). In other words, in East Orthodox sermons the language used is Bulgarian the way it was spoken some 1000 years ago.
Just as importantly, the Cyrillic script which some European peoples, the Russians included, use to read and write, was NOT invented by a Russian. (Some 10 years back I heard it was invented by Lenin but then whatever wasn't, at least according to communist propaganda.) The script is the creation of Cyril and Methodius (hence the name. A Methodian script exists as well but it never got to be used). They were the sons of a Byzantine noble and his Bulgarian wife, and created the script at a time our historians call the Golden Age as Bulgarian culture and literature flourished greatly under the avid supervision of tzar Simeon I himself, who was a dedicated scholar as well as a warrior. Cyril and Methodius created the Cyrillic script so "All Slavs could read and write books of their own" and were offered aid and protection by the Bulgarian king who had very much taken to heart the idea of a separate alphabet for his people to use. Shortly, the script was officially adopted state-wide. Cyril's and Methodius' disciples tried to spread it among other Slavic states. In some, such as today's Poland, Czech and Slovakia, they failed. In the others, they succeeded.
That's the story. It pains me immensely when, while talking to foreigners who are attempting to be nice and express interest in my language, I hear the inevitable "you are using the Russian alphabet in Bulgaria, aren't you?" As it happened quite recently, I am even informed that Bulgarian is a Russian dialect. Obviously (but not to all), this is not true. If somebody tries to tell you that Slavic languages are all Russian dialects, or that the Cyrillic script is just your average brilliant Russian invention, please remember what you read here. The Cyrillic script is not the "Russian alphabet", just like the Latin script isn't the British or American alphabet. It's the script from which the alphabets of 60% of all Slavic languages, including Russian, originated. (The remaining 40% use the Latin script like I do here - or a mix of the two.) In any case, all these languages are completely independent of each other, and nothing makes Russian superior to, say, Serbian or Polish. All Slavic languages have some common roots but they did NOT originate from Russian. It's a shame indeed but Russian came to life the way all the rest did. What's even worse, some of these languages are in fact older than it is.
How did Russians themselves get to use the Cyrillic script, you might ask. Now there's a funny story. As you might imagine, royal families intermarried a lot at the time. I fail to remember the name of the Russian king that Irina, a Bulgarian princess, married, but the script, already in use in Bulgaria, was among her wedding gifts to her husband. The king found it useful, it seems, because as we all know, Russians use the Cyrillic script today.
The script itself is loosely based on the Greek one. No surprise there since for all those years before Cyril and Methodius got busy, Orthodox-Christian Bulgaria and other countries in the area were using Greek as their official written language (mostly for religious reasons and purposes).
Anyway. Many great things happened at the time Simeon I was in power, one of them being that our lands expanded even further. As our historians proudly put it, for quite a long time Bulgaria bounded on three seas.
Now it doesn't. In 1251 it was conquered and plundered by the Ottoman Turks who annexed it to the Ottoman Empire, as they had already done with all adjoining countries. They remained in our land for 5 centuries, attempting to convert the Bulgarian population (as well as that of the other Balkan countries which were predominantly Christian) to Islam as a means of erasing their separate identities. And spreading the word of Allah, of course. They employed particularly savage devices to accomplish this. Towns and villages were burned to dust because their inhabitants refused to destroy their churches. Men were killed on the street because they didn't take their hats off when a Turk was passing by. A "teeth tax" was collected when a Turk entered a Bulgarian house, took what he pleased and demanded to be fed. The tax was meant to cover the damage his teeth suffered from the food of the infidels. Girls were kidnapped and forced into harems. Every year little boys were taken away (from every family that had more than one son) and made Turkish soldiers. This was called "blood tax."
It was those conditions that gave rise to a liberation movement (a contemporary term, especially dear to Americans at this point, would be "terrorism"). Numerous groups of armed men started guarding important passages, avenging their slaughtered families and attacking Turks and their supporters among the Bulgarian... hm, upper classes. Their military bases were, predictably, in the mountains (Bulgaria has lots of those) where they couldn't be so easily tracked and caught. The Bulgarian name (although it has a Turkish root) for those men is "haiduti" and they are the protagonists in many folk songs from that time. Eventually, many intellectuals joined the liberation movement as well. Bulgaria's national hero, however, is Vassil Levski. (Which means "Vassil the Lion," the nickname Levski deriving, oddly enough, from his ability to jump far.) Levski started off as a deacon, but shortly left to spend his life secretly traveling across the country to found liberation committees and speak to ordinary people about Bulgaria's freedom and his republican ideals about its future (here, "republican" refers to anti-monarchist, not to W's party). Levski was, sadly, betrayed by one of his own and hanged by the Turkish authorities which had been pursuing him for years.
Thanks to the efforts of Levski and many others, Bulgarians rebelled year after year, with no avail until one of the rebellions - the April one - was crushed by the Turks in 1776 with cruelty that stunned Europe - over 20 000 Bulgarians were slaughtered, and a number of cities burned to the ground.
(Btw, "Levski" was also used as a quidditch player's family name by Mrs Rowling. Devoted fans of the series believe I should be flattered that Bulgaria's national hero was stuck in a quidditch match, but seeing as how Vassil Levski is in no way related to any of Bulgaria's schools of magic, I once again failed to read this as anything more than random picking of names mentioned alongside the word "Bulgaria" and a lack of concern for researching one's facts.)
Bulgaria, along with a few other Balkan states, broke free in 1778, the Ottoman Empire was defeated by Russia and a World Congress was summoned as the fate of all newly freed countries had to be decided. For the sake of their own political interests the "Great Powers" - England, France, Germany and such - ruled that Bulgaria should be torn into pieces which were then given to our neighbors - Greece, Roumania and Serbia. Some regions remained under Turk control under the name of East Roumelia, but were "allowed" to join Bulgaria on Sept. 6, 1885 after the Secret Central Bulgarian Revolutionary Committee overthrew the government there and announced Roumelia's union with Bulgaria. Still, the Great Powers' goal had been by all means accomplished. With over 1/3rd of its territory given away, Bulgaria was but a shadow of what it was supposed to be and definitely not a threat to anybody's ambitions.
As the Bulgarian royal dynasty had been annihilated during the Ottoman invasion, a king had to be "imported" from elsewhere. This was both practical and convenient as far as the strong countries of Europe were concerned, which is why they pressured Bulgaria into it. As you might imagine, having one of your own rule an "independent" country significantly diminishes its independednce as his loyalty is more likely to lie with his family and country of birth than with one he barely heard of before he was appointed king there. After a period of trying, erring and being chastized by the Great Powers when their choices weren't convenient enough, Bulgarians finally "invited" Prince Ferdinand Saxe-Coburg Gotha of Germany to become their king. Predictably, at the start of World War One he decided Bulgaria should side with the Germans and the Austrians. Bulgarians ended up paying for this decision up until the beginning of World War Two, when Ferdinand's son, Boris I, unwillingly allied with Hitler having meandered and procrastinated until the last moment. Nevertheless, he kept Bulgaria's participation in the war as passive as possible. Thanks to both his efforts and those of ordinary people, Bulgaria was one of the two countries which refused to submit to Hitler's pressure to deport its Jewish population, and thus saved the lives of 30 000 people who would have otherwise died in concentration camps.
After the end of the war, President Rooselevelt and PM Churchil made a deal with Stalin according to which a number of European countries were forcefully made subjects to Soviet influence and thus formed "The Eastern Bloc" which, having participated in creating, the US and the UK would shortly initiate the formation of NATO to defend themsevles and their allies against. Bulgaria in particular was awarded to the USSR in exchange for Greece. It "became" a communist country. In 1989 (45 years later) people revolted and demanded democracy. Or at least that's what we think happened.