The history of Bulgaria

Bulgaria occupies the eastern Balkans between the Danube and the Aegean uplands, with the Black Sea to the east and the Balkan Mountains running through its middle. Its land held some of Europe's most advanced Copper Age societies and later the kingdoms of the Thracians, before Rome and then Byzantium ruled it. In 681 a Bulgar khanate allied with local Slavs founded a state that, as the First and Second Bulgarian Empires, was at times the leading power of the Balkans, and its scholars spread the Cyrillic script across the Slavic world. Nearly five centuries of Ottoman rule followed from the 1390s, until a national revival and Russian intervention restored a Bulgarian state in 1878. The twentieth century brought lost wars, an alliance with Germany in both world wars, more than four decades of communist rule and, after 1989, a difficult transition that led to membership of NATO and the European Union.

Farming reached the region early, around 6000 BCE, as the Neolithic Revolution spread from Anatolia, and settlement mounds such as Karanovo in the Thracian plain were inhabited for thousands of years. In the fifth millennium BCE the Copper Age Varna culture on the Black Sea coast reached a remarkable level of wealth and social hierarchy. The necropolis discovered at Varna in 1972, dated to about 4600–4200 BCE, contained more than 3,000 gold objects, the oldest worked gold yet known, concentrated in a few rich graves that point to some of the first chiefs or rulers in Europe. Nearby Solnitsata, a salt-producing settlement, is often called Europe's oldest town. These societies collapsed around 4000 BCE, perhaps because of climatic change and migrations from the steppe.

In the Bronze and Iron Ages the land was home to the Thracians, a group of Indo-European peoples famous to the Greeks as warriors, horsemen and craftsmen in gold and silver. Greek cities such as Apollonia (Sozopol), Mesembria (Nesebar) and Odessos (Varna) were founded on the coast from the seventh century BCE as part of the colonising world of ancient Greece. In 513 BCE Darius the Great of Persia crossed Thrace on his campaign against the Scythians, and the region stayed under Persian control until the Persian defeats in Greece.

Around 470 BCE King Teres united many Thracian tribes into the Odrysian kingdom, which under his son Sitalces became the most powerful state in the Balkans. Philip II of Macedon conquered much of Thrace in the 340s BCE and founded Philippopolis, today's Plovdiv, and Thracian troops fought in the armies of Alexander the Great. After his death, Thrace was disputed among his successors, and a Celtic invasion in the 270s BCE founded a short-lived kingdom at Tylis, part of the wider movement of the Celts. Royal tombs at Kazanlak and Sveshtari, now UNESCO World Heritage Sites, and treasures such as the gold vessels of Panagyurishte show the wealth of the Thracian aristocracy.

The Roman Republic campaigned in the region from the second century BCE. Roman armies subdued the lands along the Danube, which became the province of Moesia, and in 46 CE Emperor Claudius annexed the last Thracian client kingdom as the province of Thracia. Cities such as Serdica, the ancestor of Sofia, Philippopolis, Augusta Traiana (Stara Zagora) and the Danube fortresses of Novae and Oescus flourished within the Roman Empire. Serdica was a favourite residence of Constantine I, who is said to have called it his Rome, and an edict of toleration for Christians was issued there in 311 by the emperor Galerius.

From the third century the Danube frontier came under repeated attack by Goths, Huns and others. Ulfilas, a Gothic bishop settled near Nicopolis ad Istrum, translated the Bible into Gothic. The Balkans became part of the eastern, Byzantine Empire, and Justinian I rebuilt its defences in the sixth century, but from the late sixth century Slavic tribes crossed the Danube and settled the land in large numbers.

The Bulgars were a Turkic-speaking people from the steppes north of the Black Sea. Around 632 Khan Kubrat united them in Old Great Bulgaria, which broke up after his death under pressure from the Khazars. One group moved north to the Volga, where it later founded Volga Bulgaria. Another, led by Asparuh, crossed the Danube, defeated a Byzantine army in 680 and in 681 forced Constantinople to recognise a new state, with its capital at Pliska. The Bulgar elite ruled over and gradually merged with the far more numerous Slavs.

The khanate grew quickly. Tervel helped the Byzantines repel the Arab siege of Constantinople in 717–718, and Krum defeated and killed the emperor Nikephoros I in 811, reputedly turning his skull into a drinking cup. In 864 Boris I accepted baptism, choosing Byzantine Christianity after negotiating with both Rome and Constantinople. He welcomed the disciples of the missionaries Cyril and Methodius, expelled from Moravia, and schools founded at Ohrid and Preslav developed Slavonic literature and church services. The script that became known as Cyrillic was created in Bulgaria at the end of the ninth century, and from there it spread to Serbia and Russia.

Under Boris's son Simeon I, who reigned from 893 to 927, Bulgaria reached its height. Simeon defeated the Byzantines at Anchialos in 917, claimed the title of tsar and ruled most of the Balkans from his new capital, Preslav, where literature and art flourished. In the tenth century the empire weakened under pressure from Magyars, Pechenegs and a Rus invasion under Sviatoslav of Kyiv, and the dualist Bogomil movement, founded by the priest Bogomil in this period, spread from Bulgaria across the Balkans and later influenced the Cathars of western Europe. Byzantium seized the eastern part of the country in 971. In the west, Tsar Samuel resisted for decades from his base at Ohrid, until Basil II destroyed his army at Kleidion in 1014 and is said to have blinded some 15,000 prisoners. Samuel died that year, and by 1018 all Bulgaria was Byzantine.

Bulgaria remained under Byzantine rule for almost two centuries. In 1185 the brothers Asen and Peter, nobles from the region of Tarnovo, rebelled against heavy taxation and founded the Second Bulgarian Empire, with Tarnovo as its capital. Their younger brother Kaloyan took advantage of the Fourth Crusade's capture of Constantinople and in 1205 defeated the new Latin emperor Baldwin I at Adrianople, capturing him. Ivan Asen II, who reigned from 1218 to 1241, defeated the ruler of Epirus at Klokotnitsa in 1230 and again made Bulgaria the leading Balkan power, with the Bulgarian church restored as an independent patriarchate in 1235.

After his death the empire was weakened by the Mongol invasion of Europe, which crossed Bulgaria in 1242 and left it paying tribute to the Golden Horde, as well as by noble rivalry and a peasant uprising led by the swineherd Ivaylo, who briefly became tsar in 1277. In the fourteenth century Ivan Alexander presided over a revival of art and learning, but the state split into rival kingdoms based at Tarnovo and Vidin just as the Ottoman Turks crossed into Europe.

The Ottoman Empire took Sofia in the 1380s and Tarnovo in 1393, and Vidin, the last Bulgarian kingdom, fell in 1396, the year a crusading army was destroyed at Nicopolis on the Danube. A further crusade led by Władysław III of Poland and Hungary ended with his death at Varna in 1444, and the fall of Constantinople in 1453 sealed Ottoman control. The Bulgarian nobility disappeared, and the land was divided into Ottoman provinces under the beylerbey of Rumelia, whose seat was at Sofia.

Christians were ruled as members of the Orthodox community under the patriarch of Constantinople, paid higher taxes and were subject to the devşirme, the levy of boys for the Janissaries and the palace. Some Bulgarians converted to Islam, including the Bulgarian-speaking Pomaks of the Rhodopes, and Turkish settlers came into the plains of the north-east and the south. Monasteries such as Rila preserved Bulgarian language and learning. Revolts at Tarnovo in 1598 and 1686 and at Chiprovtsi in 1688 were crushed. In the late eighteenth century, as central authority weakened, bandit armies known as kardzhali ravaged the countryside.

In 1762 the monk Paisius of Hilendar completed his Slavo-Bulgarian History, which called on Bulgarians to take pride in their past, and it became a founding text of the National Revival. In the nineteenth century trade and crafts made towns such as Gabrovo, Koprivshtitsa and Plovdiv prosperous, and Bulgarian schools, reading rooms and newspapers multiplied. The campaign for a church independent of the Greek patriarchate succeeded in 1870, when the sultan created the Bulgarian Exarchate. Revolutionaries organised from exile in Romania, and Vasil Levski built a secret network of committees inside the country before he was captured and hanged in Sofia in 1873.

The April Uprising of 1876 was poorly prepared and quickly suppressed. Ottoman irregulars, the bashi-bazouks, massacred thousands of civilians, most notoriously at Batak, where most of the town's inhabitants were killed in the church and streets. The poet Hristo Botev died leading a band of rebels that May. Reports of the atrocities caused outrage in western Europe, where William Gladstone denounced the Bulgarian Horrors. In 1877 the Russian Empire declared war on the Ottomans, and Russian troops with Bulgarian volunteers fought at the Shipka Pass and besieged Pleven. The Treaty of San Stefano of 3 March 1878, still Bulgaria's national day, created a large Bulgaria that included most of Macedonia, but the other great powers, fearing a Russian client state, reduced it at the Congress of Berlin to an autonomous principality between the Danube and the Balkan Mountains, leaving Eastern Rumelia as an autonomous Ottoman province and Macedonia under direct Ottoman rule.

The principality adopted the liberal Tarnovo Constitution in 1879 and chose Alexander of Battenberg as prince, with Sofia as the capital. In 1885 Eastern Rumelia was united with the principality in a bloodless coup, and the Bulgarian army defeated a Serbian attack at Slivnitsa that year. Russian displeasure led to Alexander's abdication in 1886, and Ferdinand of Saxe-Coburg-Gotha was elected prince in 1887, while the prime minister Stefan Stambolov dominated politics until 1894. On 22 September 1908 Ferdinand declared full independence and took the title of tsar.

The goal of uniting the Bulgarian-speaking population of Macedonia and Thrace drove Bulgarian policy into a series of wars. In the First Balkan War of 1912–1913 Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece and Montenegro defeated the Ottomans, but a quarrel over Macedonia led Bulgaria to attack its allies in 1913, and in the Second Balkan War it was defeated by them, Romania and the Ottomans, losing Southern Dobruja and most of its gains. In 1915 it entered the First World War on the side of the Central Powers, and occupied Macedonia, but it lost again, and the Treaty of Neuilly in 1919 took its Aegean coastline and western border districts. Ferdinand abdicated in favour of his son Boris III.

The Agrarian Union leader Aleksandar Stamboliyski governed from 1919 with radical land and social reforms until he was overthrown and murdered in a coup in June 1923. A communist uprising that September was put down, and in 1925 communists bombed Sofia's St Nedelya cathedral, killing about 150 people. After a military coup in 1934, Boris III established a royal dictatorship in 1935.

Bulgaria regained Southern Dobruja from Romania in 1940 and joined the Axis on 1 March 1941, allowing German troops to pass through to invade Greece and Yugoslavia. In return it occupied most of Yugoslav Macedonia and Greek western Thrace, though it never sent troops against the Soviet Union. The Law for the Protection of the Nation, in force from January 1941, imposed antisemitic restrictions modelled on Germany's. In March 1943 Bulgarian police deported 11,343 Jews from the occupied territories of Macedonia and Thrace, handing them to the Germans, who sent them to Treblinka, where almost all were murdered in the Holocaust. When plans to deport the Jews of Bulgaria itself became known, protests by opposition figures, intellectuals and the Orthodox Church, and the intervention of the deputy speaker Dimitar Peshev, led Boris III to halt them, and Bulgaria's own Jewish community of about 50,000 survived the war, though many were expelled from Sofia and sent to forced labour. Boris died suddenly in August 1943.

As the Second World War turned, the Soviet Union declared war on Bulgaria on 5 September 1944 and invaded. On 9 September the communist-led Fatherland Front seized power in Sofia.

In 1945 a so-called People's Court sentenced about 2,700 members of the old political elite to death, including the regents, wartime ministers and members of parliament. A referendum in September 1946 abolished the monarchy, and the young tsar Simeon II went into exile. The communist leader Georgi Dimitrov became prime minister, the Agrarian leader Nikola Petkov was hanged in 1947, and by 1948 opposition parties had been eliminated. Under Dimitrov and then Valko Chervenkov, the country was remodelled on the lines of Joseph Stalin's Soviet Union, with collectivised agriculture, nationalised industry and labour camps such as Belene.

Todor Zhivkov led the party from 1954 and remained in power until 1989, one of the longest-serving leaders in the Eastern Bloc. Bulgaria became the Soviet Union's most loyal ally in the Cold War, a member of the Warsaw Pact, and industrialised rapidly, while Black Sea tourism grew. The secret police were notorious, and in 1978 the dissident writer Georgi Markov was killed in London with a poisoned umbrella tip. From 1984 the regime forced the Turkish and Muslim minority to adopt Bulgarian names and restricted their language and religion. When this campaign provoked protests in 1989, the authorities opened the border, and some 300,000 ethnic Turks left for Turkey that summer, though many later returned.

As the Revolutions of 1989 swept Eastern Europe, party reformers removed Zhivkov on 10 November 1989. The communists, renamed the Bulgarian Socialist Party, won the first free elections in 1990, but a new constitution in 1991 established a parliamentary democracy and the opposition Union of Democratic Forces took power. The 1990s were marked by economic collapse, organised crime and corrupt privatisation, culminating in hyperinflation and mass protests in the winter of 1996–1997. A currency board fixed the lev to the Deutschmark and later the euro, stabilising the economy. In 2001 the former tsar, Simeon Saxe-Coburg-Gotha, returned to win an election and serve as prime minister. Bulgaria joined NATO in 2004 and the European Union on 1 January 2007, though it remained among the union's poorest members and under special monitoring over corruption and justice.

Boyko Borisov and his centre-right GERB party dominated politics from 2009, but protests against corruption in 2013 and 2020 brought down governments, and from 2021 the country held seven snap elections in five years. Bulgaria joined the Schengen area in full on 1 January 2025 and adopted the euro on 1 January 2026. In late 2025 mass protests against a proposed budget, led largely by young people, forced the resignation of the government of Rosen Zhelyazkov in December. President Rumen Radev resigned in January 2026, and Iliana Iotova became the country's first woman president. Radev then founded the Progressive Bulgaria coalition, which won an absolute majority in the April 2026 election, and he became prime minister in May. A presidential election was held on 25 October 2026.