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Authorities agree that it was about the sixth millennium BC, when the Stone Age hunters began to be replaced by a more settled, agricultural population. Civilization in these lands was revitalized by the arrival of newcomers from Central Europe, bringing with them the metalworking techniques of the Bronze Age. By the end of the second millennium BC these migrant groups, together with the original tribes of the eastern Balkans, were coalescing into an ethnic and linguistic group subsequently known to history as the Thracians. Slavic tribes began to move into the Balkan part of the Byzantine Empire about 570–700 A.D.
The Slavs are a people whose original home is now thought to have been in the region of the Pripet marshes between Russia and Poland. Squeezed between Germanic peoples pressing from the north and west, and Asiatic peoples pushing from the east, some of the Slavs flowed southward into the Balkan Peninsula. It was an infiltrating movement rather than an invasion; its farthest spearheads penetrated and were absorbed into the Greek population.
The Bulgarians got their name from the Bulgars, an Asiatic Tartar tribe of Turkic people, which arrived in the seventh century. The newcomers were gradually absorbed into the Slavic population and took over its Slavic language. During the 7th century, the Bulgarians, who lived in the plains between the Caucasus, the Black and the Caspian seas increased their human, economic and military potential. In 632 AD, khan Kubrat declared himself an independent ruler and united all Bulgarian tribes inhabiting the region between the Black, the Azov and the Caspian Seas in one state. The Byzantine historians from that times referred to it as Bulgaria or Great Bulgaria.
It was about that time when the individual names of all Bulgarian tribes were deleted from every page written by the ancient historians. Bulgarian became the only name used from that time on. In 681 the Byzantine emperor Constantine IV recognized the independence of people north of the Balkan range. The First Bulgarian Kingdom was centred at Pliska and ruled over a Danubian state that stretched from the Carpathians in the north to the Balkan Range in the south. The years following, the "Golden years" they are called, saw the peak in territorial expansion and in 1185 the bolyari Petâr and Asen led a successful popular uprising against Byzantium, proclaiming the Second Bulgarian empire in Veliko Târnovo, henceforth its capital. Byzantium, in 1190, finally accepted Bulgarian independence.
Asen's brother and successor Tsar Kaloyan extended Bulgaria's borders further, recapturing Varna and parts of Macedonia and Thrace from Byzantium. Kaloyan succesfully negotiated union with the Catholic church in 1204 in the hope that the pope would support Bulgarian expansion, although at grass-roots level Bulgaria's church remained Orthodox in all but name. Widely admired in his own time (the name Kaloyan was derived from the Greek for "John the Handsome"), Kaloyan was also mercilessly cruel, notoriously razing Plovdiv to the ground and flaying its leading citizens alive in 1205, and hostile chroniclers were subsequently to name him Skiloyan - "John the Dog".
In 1364 the Turks invaded Bulgaria and took Central Thrace with the important towns of Borouy (today's Stara Zagora) and Plovdiv.
In 1393, Turnovo - the capital of Bulgaria fell and in 1395 the last medieval Bulgarian ruler - tsar Ivan Shishman was killed defending the fortress of Nicopol on the Danube. In 1396 the country was completely occupied which put an end to the medieval Bulgarian state and Bulgaria entered five centuries of "darkness" under the Turkish yoke.
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Bulgaria's national history is a serious business in this country which nearly lost its identity for five centuries - during that time when Bulgaria was overrun by the Ottoman Empire in 1396, beginning its "dark era". Historians believe that as much as half of the population was either massacred or enslaved and transported to another part of the Ottoman Empire within a few years of the Turkish conquest. Thus, the Ottoman Empire not only isolated Bulgaria from the European Renaissance, but imposed and maintained a harsher system of feudalism than had previously existed.
Muslim colonists occupied the most fertile land and prosperous towns, while the surviving Bulgarians became servants of the Turkish land-holders, who gouged them for their own profit and for numerous state taxes. In northern Bulgaria and the Rhodopes some Bulgarians succumbed to forced Islamicization and, as converts gained rights denied to the Christian Rayah, notably exemption from the "blood tax" or devshirme, whereby the oldest boys were taken from their families and indoctrinated before joining the elite Ottoman janissary corps. Merchants used their money to help renew the Orthodox churches, and the devshirme system gradually withered away. Since its liberation, successive regimes have tried to impress a sense of national pride among the citizens, emphasizing historical continuity between the modern state and the medieval Bulgarian empires of the past.
Thus, Bulgaria is a place where history is counted in Epochs. The first was dominated by the Thracians. These ancient Indo-European tribal people settled in that area of Eastern Europe known today as the Balkans, extending to the Danube. With no written language of their own, we are left to learn about them from their rich archaeological remains, and from the Greek writers who were their contemporaries. What modern man has learned from these remnants of Thracian myth and culture is dramatic. Based upon archaeological findings, we believe they were expert horse breeders and fierce warriors; that they produced fine wines, and have evidence that were artful metalworkers and created exquisite adornments, ritual objects and vessels in gold and silver. Bulgaria is the only country in the world which has not changed its name since its foundation.
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