Bulgaria

From the Thracian kurgans and Asparukh's khanate to the cradle of Cyrillic, five centuries under the Ottomans, and a hard road back to Europe.

Bulgaria is one of Europe's oldest states, founded in 681 when Khan Asparukh led his Bulgars across the Danube and wrung from Byzantium recognition of a realm south of the river. Under Boris I the country accepted Christianity in 864, and in the literary schools of Preslav and Ohrid the disciples of Saints Cyril and Methodius forged the Cyrillic script that Bulgaria gave to the wider Slavic and Orthodox world. The First Empire reached a golden age under Simeon the Great before falling to Byzantium in 1018; a Second Empire rose at Tarnovo in 1185, only to be overwhelmed by the Ottomans by 1396. Nearly five centuries of Ottoman rule were broken by a National Revival and the April Uprising of 1876, whose brutal suppression provoked the war that produced the short-lived Greater Bulgaria of the Treaty of San Stefano (1878), immediately dismembered by the Treaty of Berlin, the founding grievance of modern Bulgarian irredentism. Unification with Eastern Rumelia (1885) and independence (1908) were followed by the catastrophe of the Balkan Wars, two world wars in which Bulgaria nonetheless saved its own Jewish community, four decades of communism ended in 1989, and a return to Europe through NATO (2004) and the European Union (2007).