Two mountain ranges(2) chop Bulgaria's 111 thousand square kilometers. Across the center are the Stara(3), and slanting through the southwest, the Rodopi(4); both exceed 2,000 meters. North of the Stara is the Danube(5)'s plain. The river itself forms the national boundary until it exits into Romania to avoid some highlands near the coast. It receives the Iskur and the Yantra, which come from the Stara's north slopes. Between the two ranges flows the Maritsa and its tributary, the Tundzha. They both exit south toward the Aegean. Behind the Rodopi, and their spur, the Pirin, flows the Struma, also heading Aegean-ward; its valley is marked westward by mountains that extend into Macedonia(6) such as the Osogovske and the Ograzdan.
About eight million people live here(7). Of them, more than eight in ten speak Bulgarian as a first language, almost one in ten Turkish, and one in 20 are deaf. Most of the Turkish and other speakers learn Bulgarian.
About 17 in 20 Bulgarians are Bulgarian Orthodox Christians, with varying degrees of observance. More than one in ten are Moslems, mostly Sunni.
Sofiya(8), the capital, is the only city with a million residents. Located in a high plain just south of the main spine of the Stara Mountains, it features notable civic and religious buildings, including a church from the sixth to seventh centuries, and a mosque from the 15th.
By the second millenium B.C.E., Thracian was spoken in this area. Their religion is known entirely from monuments and Greek interpretations. It included orgiastic rituals that culminated in omophagy and were dedicated to Sabos(9), as well as cult prophecy, ascetic individuals and ritual marijuana use.(10) Their practices profoundly influenced the Greek ones: producing the cult of Dionysus and playing a role in Orphism.
The third century C.E. invasions of Huns and Germans left little trace. Slavs began to arrive in the fifth century and had covered the area by the seventh, when the Bulgars arrived. The latter were Turkic people--the word means 'mixed people' in Turkic; their langauge is now called Chuvash, but is not spoken at all in Bulgaria since the local Bulgars assumulated to the Slavs by the ninth century.
By the end of the ninth century, Bulgarians, or at least the elite among them, had converted to Orthodox Christianity, and an intermittently permitted Bulgarian Orthodox Church was established from the 14th. Heresies, like that of the Bogomils in the tenth century, added complexity to the picture.
Starting in the 14th century, Turk rule, which persisted until the late 19th century, brought many changes. Urban areas became polyglot, due to migrants from various groups of the Ottoman Empire, not least the Turks themselves, plus forced dispersions of Bulgars to the countryside. Christianity was discouraged; there were forced conversions in some areas, and enslavements of youths, subsequently raised as Moslems, in all areas. Some of the adult converts chose Shi'ism, rather than Sunni, to allow syncretic retention of Christian rituals.
By the 18th century, the church had abandoned the ancient Slavic language--Old Church Slavonic--for Bulgarian, and in that same century Bulgarians began to repopulated the cities; others left for Romania or Russia.
The 20th century communists did not succeed in eliminating religion, though their viciousness towards Moslems and non-Orthodox Christians had an impact. Orthodox ritual was so vital that the communists introduced secular baptisms. After their departure, institutional religion revived: both Christian and Moslem.
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(1) Strictly transliterated as Bâlgarija or Bâlgariya.
(2) Planina in Bulgarian.
(3) Or Balkans.
(4) Or Rhodope.
(5) Locally, in transliteration, the Dunav.
(6) Strictly transliterated as Makedonija or Makedoniya.
(7) Population estimates have fallen by about a million in the period 1995 to 2004.
(8) Also spelled Sofija, Sofia and Sophia.
(9) Or Sabazius.