Bulgarian

The Bulgarians are a South Slavic people forged from Slavs who settled the Balkans in the sixth and seventh centuries, the older romanized and Hellenized Thracian population, and the Bulgars, a Turkic-speaking steppe confederation whose khan Asparuh founded the First Bulgarian Empire south of the Danube in 681. The Bulgars gradually adopted the Slavic tongue, and the conversion of Boris I to Christianity in 864 opened Bulgaria's golden age: the Preslav and Ohrid schools developed the Cyrillic script, and Tsar Simeon I raised the state to rival Byzantium.

Byzantine conquest in 1018 ended the first empire, but the uprising of the brothers Asen and Peter restored it in 1185; under Ivan Asen II it again reached the Adriatic and the Black Sea. In 1337 Tsar Ivan Alexander ruled from Tarnovo; the Ottomans took the city in 1393 and extinguished the empire by 1396.

Under Ottoman rule the Bulgarian church passed to the Greek patriarchate, yet the Slavic language survived, and the monk Paisius of Hilandar kindled a national revival with his Slavonic-Bulgarian History of 1762.