Origins

Present-day Bulgaria, located in the Balkan peninsula of southeastern Europe, is only one of the countries from which Bulgarian immigrants and their descendants in Canada trace their roots. In fact, most came from territories that are today within Romania (northern Dobruja), Turkey (eastern Thrace), Greece (southern or Aegean Macedonia), and most especially the former Yugoslavia and the now independent republic of Macedonia (also known as Vardar Macedonia). Most people of Slavic origin who left Vardar and Aegean Macedonia before World War II identified themselves as Bulgarians or Bulgaro-Macedonians. Since that time Slavic immigrants and their descendants from those same territories have tended to identify themselves as Macedonians or as Greeks. (See also GREEKS; MACEDONIANS.)

The name Bulgarian is not of Slavic origin. It derives from the Bulgars, a people of Turko-Tatar origin who invaded the lower Danube valley in the seventh century. During the 680s, the Bulgars established an independent state known as the First Bulgarian Empire (Khanate). At the same time, the Bulgar leadership was gradually absorbed by Slavic peoples already in the region. At the height of its power during the ninth century, the Bulgarian Empire expanded from its base along the lower Danube to include all of present-day Bulgaria, Romania, eastern Hungary, Macedonia, Albania, and northern Greece, regions that at the time were inhabited by Slavic tribes under the rule of the Byzantine Empire.

It was from the Byzantine Empire that the eastern, or Orthodox, variety of Christianity entered Bulgaria. In 865 the First Bulgarian Empire adopted Christianity as its official religion, and during the first decades of the tenth century an independent (autocephalous) Bulgarian Orthodox Church was established. Under church auspices, liturgical texts were translated into the first Slavic written language, Old Church Slavonic (also known as Old Bulgarian), a process that was facilitated by the creation of the Slavonic alphabet by St Constantine/Cyril and his disciples, St Naum and St Clement. Thus, in the ninth and tenth centuries, when European countries within the sphere of Roman Christianity used Latin as their literary language, the Bulgarian kingdom became the centre in which Church Slavonic language and literature flourished.

At the beginning of the eleventh century, Bulgaria was conquered by the Byzantine Empire to which it remained subordinate for 170 years. Towards the end of the twelfth century, the Bulgarians regained their independence, and it was not long before the Second Bulgarian Empire become the dominant political and cultural power throughout the Balkan peninsula.

Bulgaria’s fortunes changed once again during the fourteenth century, when the Ottoman Turks arrived in the Balkans and began systematically annexing territories throughout the region. The last independent Bulgarian kingdom fell in 1396, and for the next five hundred years the Bulgarians found themselves under the rule of the Islamic Ottoman Empire. Ottoman rule brought not only political subordination for the Bulgarians but also economic stagnation. This was particularly evident during the nineteenth century, when Bulgaria remained an underdeveloped region that lacked industry and a modern transportation system and was inhabited by people who survived on subsistence-level agriculture.

Aside from Ottoman political domination, the Bulgarian Orthodox Church lost its jurisdictional independence and was subjected to the hellenizing influences of a Greek-dominated hierarchy. Therefore, when a Bulgarian national renaissance began during the first half of the nineteenth century, it was closely connected with the Orthodox Church and its struggle to extract itself from Greek dominance. One of the national revival’s goals was achieved in 1870, when the Ottoman authorities approved the establishment of what was called the Bulgarian Orthodox Exarchate. For the rest of the century, Bulgarian Orthodox priests and secular activists tried to convince all Slavs in the southern Balkans to transfer their parishes to the authority of the Bulgarian Exarchate. The struggle for religious – and therefore national – allegiance was particularly fierce in the Ottoman-ruled region of Macedonia.

The political goals of the national renaissance took longer to achieve and were closely linked to the attempt of the Russian Empire to weaken the Ottoman state and gain for itself a foothold in the Balkans. As fellow Orthodox Slavs, the Bulgarians were to benefit from tsarist Russian assistance. In 1878 the Russian army, with help from Bulgarian contingents, defeated Turkey. The resulting San Stefano Treaty gave freedom to the entire Bulgarian territory for only a few months: after the intervention of Europe’s Great Powers at the Congress of Berlin, eastern Rumelia and Macedonia were returned to the Ottomen Empire. Yet a small Bulgarian state was created which within a decade extended its borders southeastward to include East Rumelia. Technically, Bulgaria remained a vassal state of the Ottoman Empire until 1908, when it became a fully independent kingdom.

Following the Russo-Turkish War that ended in 1878 and again during the First and Second Balkan Wars (1912–13), Bulgaria hoped to expand to its southwest and include within its boundaries the Ottoman-ruled region of Macedonia. In neither instance were the Bulgarians successful, so that their efforts to gain control over that disputed region were limited to the work of the Bulgarian Orthodox Exarchate and to the underground political and military activity of the Macedonian Supreme Committee. Based in Bulgaria’s capital of Sofia, the Macedonian Committee worked to annex Macedonia to Bulgaria; it was opposed by the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO), which since its establishment in Macedonia in 1893 strove for political autonomy. Whether they supported the idea of autonomy (IMRO) or annexation to Bulgaria (Supreme Committee), most articulate Slavs in Macedonia by the end of the nineteenth century considered themselves Bulgarians and therefore identified as Bulgaro-Macedonians. It was this identity that the early Slavic immigrants from Macedonia brought to Canada.

Frustrated in its attempts to acquire Macedonia (divided between Serbia and Greece) and Thrace (divided between Greece and Turkey), Bulgaria allied with Germany in both World War I and World War II, believing that such an alliance would assist them in their territorial claims. In fact, during World War II Bulgaria was able to annex much of Macedonia, western Thrace, and southern Dobruja. When the war ended, Bulgaria was forced to give up most of these acquisitions.

The close of World War II also resulted in the fall of the monarchy and the transformation of Bulgaria into a Communist-ruled republic closely allied to the Soviet Union. During the next four decades, the economy of the country improved somewhat following a program of industrialization carried out by the state. Communist rule was also accompanied by political repression and the restriction on the movement of people, including emigration abroad. In 1989 Communist rule in Bulgaria came to an end, and since that time the country has tried to create a multi-party democratic state with a free-market economy that is similar to most other countries in Europe.

Bulgaria is a multinational country. Of its 8.7 million people, approximately 75 percent of the inhabitants are Bulgarians, 10 percent Turks, 6.5 percent Gypsies, and 2.2 percent Vlachs. Traditionally, Bulgarians are Orthodox Christians, with the exception of a small group of Slavs known as Pomaks whose ancestors converted to Islam. The Turks are Muslim; the other minorities either Christian or Muslim.