Thracians

Across most of the eastern Balkans, in lands now divided between Bulgaria, Romania, northern Greece, North Macedonia and European Turkey, lived the many tribes that Greek writers lumped together as Thracians. They spoke an Indo-European language that is now lost, were famed as horsemen and soldiers, left some of the richest gold work and painted tombs of ancient Europe, and were gradually absorbed into the Roman, Byzantine and early Bulgarian worlds.

The word Thracian is Greek, not native, and it covered a patchwork of peoples rather than one nation; modern scholars count around 200 named Thracian tribes, among them the Odrysae, Getae, Triballi and Bessi. The earliest mention is in Homer's Iliad, which places Thracians among the allies of Troy. Their deeper origins are uncertain because they left almost no writing. Most researchers see them as a blend of earlier Balkan farming peoples with Indo-European newcomers, and a 2019 genetic study of 25 individuals from Bronze Age Bulgaria, dating to the third and second millennia BCE, found exactly such a mixture of steppe-herder and early farmer ancestry.

Greek colonies were founded along the Thracian coasts from the eighth century BCE. In the seventh century the Treres, a Thracian group, crossed into Anatolia and in 637 BCE joined the Cimmerians in an attack on Lydia that took all of Sardis but its citadel. In 513 BCE the Persian king Darius the Great marched through Thrace and brought the tribes between the Aegean and the Danube under Persian rule. When Persian power in Europe faded, around 465 BCE, Teres I of the Odrysae built the first lasting Thracian state, the Odrysian kingdom. Herodotus remarked that the Thracians were the most numerous people he knew of after the Indians, and would have been unbeatable had they ever united.

Philip II of Macedon overran southern Thrace in the 340s BCE, and Thracian cavalry and javelin troops went on to fight in the armies of Alexander the Great. A smaller Odrysian state revived under Seuthes III, whose capital, Seuthopolis, was the only true Thracian city. Celtic Gauls invaded in 279 BCE and stayed into the late third century. After Rome defeated Macedon at Pydna in 168 BCE, Thrace came under growing Roman sway and later became a client kingdom, whose last king was murdered in 46 CE, when Thrace became a province of the Roman Empire. North of the Danube, the related Dacians built a powerful kingdom under Burebista before Trajan's conquest. The best-known Thracian of all, the gladiator Spartacus, led the great slave revolt in Italy in 73 to 71 BCE.

Greek and Roman writers called the Thracians savage, citing tattooing, polygamy and the sale of children, though modern historians treat these portraits with caution. The Thracians were known for music and poetry, and Greek myth made the singer Orpheus a Thracian. A widespread cult honoured the Thracian Horseman, often shown spearing a beast, and the Getae worshipped Zalmoxis. Their soldiers included the light peltast skirmishers later copied by the Greeks and fighters wielding the rhomphaia, a long curved blade. Archaeology since the twentieth century, especially in Bulgaria, has uncovered tombs such as Kazanlak and Sveshtari and treasures like Panagyurishte and Rogozen.

Thracian speech survived longest in the hills. A pilgrim in 570 reported Bessian, a Thracian dialect, still spoken by monks near Mount Sinai. Over the following centuries most Thracians blended into Greek- and Latin-speaking Byzantine society or into the new Slavic and Bulgar world after 680, and Bulgarian historians and geneticists stress Thracian ancestry among modern Bulgarians. A theory that Albanians descend from the Bessi has found no archaeological or linguistic support.

Our maps for 1500, 1000 and 700 BCE draw an approximate Thracian region, labelled Thrace, across the eastern Balkans. It borders the Illyrians to the west, the Phrygians and Greek city-states to the south, and the steppe lands shown as the Cimmerians to the north-east.