The name of the river in the original - Bolga, not the Volga.
Bulgarian title - Toen, not khan.
The name of the Athonite monastery is Khil andar, and the saint's name remaining in the Bulgarian nominal tradition is St. Paisiy Khil endar.
Geographically Bulgaria is located in the center of the Balkan Peninsula. Here the geopolitical interests of many countries collide sharply. Each interested person plays his own card here - military, economic, ethnic. The nineteenth century has passed, the twentieth has passed, the first decade of the twenty-first century has passed, and disputes over the eternal issue for Bulgarians do not stop. So, are the Bulgarians Slavs?
Father Paisius of Hilendar - a monk in the Athos monastery Khilandar and a prominent Bulgarian educator, believed that the Bulgarians were Slavs. In 1762 St. Paisius finished his manuscript HISTORY OF SLAVIC-BULGARIAN, which marked the beginning of the Bulgarian Renaissance. We read in it:
Almost a century later, in 1844, Khristaki Pavlovich published Tsarstvennik or Bulgarian History. Taking as a basis the manuscript "History of the Slav-Bulgarian" St. Paisius, Pavlovich compiled a historical encyclopedia of the Bulgarian kings. Today some wealthy people convulsively wave this printed edition and foaming at the mouth “prove” that “Paisiy never wrote about any Slavs and his history is Bulgarian, not Slavic-Bulgarian”.
Especially for them we publish a copy of one of the inscriptions of the original manuscript of St. Paisius - admire, dear ones. You and the museums would not hurt to take a walk, at least with one eye to look at the original census of this work.
Bulgarian historiography and ethnology, relying on a lot of evidence and research, including genetic, archaeological, documentary, etc., believe that the modern Bulgarian nation is a single and indivisible alloy of two peoples - the Bulgarians and the Slavs. To correctly describe the history of the Bulgarian ethnos before its merger with the Slavic tribes on the territory of modern Bulgaria, it is customary to call the ancient Bulgarians "pro-Bulgarians".
Proto-Bulgarians - Indo-European (Aryan) people North Iranian group, which also included the Scythians, Sarmatians, Alans, Massagets, Bactrians and others. The Prabolgars left Bactria - a historical region in the adjacent territories of Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Afghanistan between the Hindu Kush mountain range in the south and the Fergana Valley in the north. The capital of the country was the city of Balkh in northern Afghanistan. Tajiks and Pashtuns are direct descendants of the ancient Bactrians. Among modern Tajiks, and especially among the Pashtuns, most of the folk customs are very similar to the Bulgarian ones, despite the huge distance separating these peoples.
In 632, shortly after the collapse of the Hunnic Empire, the kagan of the Kutrigurs Kubrat (632-665), they managed to unite their horde with other Bulgarian tribes of the Utigrs (formerly dependent on the Turkuts), and the Onogurs into a single state in the steppes of Eastern Europe, between the Caspian and Black Seas, including the Crimean Peninsula - Great Bulgaria. After the death of the great Kan Kubrat, each of his five sons led their own horde, and none of them individually had enough strength to resist the Khazars. About 671 Great Bulgaria fell under the blows of the Khazar Kaganate.
The eldest son of Kubrat Batbay (Batbayan) remained where he was. He was the leader of the so-called "Black Bulgarians". Black Bulgarians are mentioned in the treaty between Prince Igor and Byzantium. Igor undertakes to defend the Byzantine possessions in Crimea from attacks by black Bulgarians. The great Kiev prince Svyatoslav I the Glorious relies on an alliance with the peoples of the Northern Black Sea region: torques, berendey and black hoods in the fight against the Khazar Kaganate. An interesting fact is that the Kiev princes Igor, Svyatoslav and Vladimir in the "Word of Law and Grace …" by Metropolitan Hilarion of Kiev are called kagans. Today, the descendants of Black Bulgarians live on the territory of modern Russia, Ukraine, Moldova and Romania, especially in the steppe Black Sea and Azov regions.
The second son of Kubrat - Kotrag with his horde crossed the Don and settled opposite Batbai. One of the hordes, which consisted mainly of the Kutrigur tribes, under the leadership of Kotrag moved to the north and subsequently settled on the middle Volga and Kama, where the Volga Bulgaria arose. The Volga Bulgarians are the ancestors of the indigenous population of the Volga region represented by the Kazan Tatars and Chuvashes.
The fourth son of Kubrat - Kuber (Kuver), with his horde moved to Pannonia and joined the Avars. In the city of Sirmiy, he made an attempt to become the kagan of the Avar kaganate. After an unsuccessful uprising, he led his people to Macedonia. There he settled in the Keremisia region and made an unsuccessful attempt to capture the city of Thessaloniki. After that, he disappears from the pages of history, and his people united with the Slavic tribes of Macedonia.
The fifth son of Kubrat, Alcek, went with his horde to Italy. Around 662 he settled in the Lombard domain and asked for land from King Grimoald I of Benevento in Benevento in exchange for military service. King Grimuald sent the Bulgarians to his son Romuald in Benevento, where they settled in Sepini, Boviana and Inzernia. Romuald received the Bulgarians well and gave them land. He also ordered that the title of Alzek be changed from Duke, as the historian Paul the Deacon calls him, to Gastaldia (meaning perhaps the title of Prince), in accordance with the Latin name.
The third son of Kubrat - Asparuh with his horde went to the Danube and about 650, stopping in the lower Danube region, he created the Bulgarian kingdom. Local Slavic tribes merged with the Bulgarians over time. From the mixture of the Asparuh Bulgarians and the various Slavic and remnants of the Thracian tribes that became part of it, the modern Bulgarian nation was formed. The official recognition of the existence of the First Bulgarian Kingdom is considered 681 years, when the Bulgarian Kan Asparuh concluded a peace treaty with the Byzantine emperor Constantine IV, according to which Byzantium pledged to pay an annual tax to the Bulgarian Kan.
Whoever was in the Balkans when Asparuh came to the Danube in the 7th century - Slavs, Thracians, Greeks, Celts, Galatians and many others. Of all the peoples, the Bulgarians allowed only one Slavs and no one else. All other peoples and tribes were expelled or destroyed by the Bulgarians. Thracian, Celtic and many other cultures have disappeared. Today in Bulgaria the remains of these tribes and cultures are found here and there. Each find is more expensive than gold and even the smallest of them leads archaeologists into ecstasy - what will it tell them about the tribes and peoples that disappeared one and a half millennia ago? But few people care about Slavic finds, only experts admire them. Because the Slavic culture has not gone anywhere. All Slavic tribes received equal rights in the newly created Bulgarian state and developed their culture and language for 13 centuries. Slavic culture lives and lives in modern Bulgaria, every Bulgarian perceives it even with mother's milk.
For more than a hundred years, the Slavs worshiped Perun, and the great Bulgarians worshiped Tangra and Zoroastrian deities. But the state with two religions and two separate, albeit very friendly peoples, was unstable. That's why in 864 St. Prince Boris I (Boris-Mikhail) accepted Orthodox Baptism, renounced his hereditary Bulgarian title "kan" and took the Slavic title "prince", and added the name of his godfather, the Byzantine emperor Michael III, to his name. In 865 all of Bulgaria received Orthodox Baptism. In 866 Boris I suppressed a revolt of the "boil" (Bulgarian aristocrats) who resisted the introduction of Orthodoxy. From 866 to this day, there are no Bulgarians and Slavs in Bulgaria, but single Slavic-Bulgarian nation, which St. Paisius of Hilendarsky described in his "History of the Slavic-Bulgarian" back in 1762.
The Slavic component of the modern Bulgarian nation is most easily seen in the similarities between the Bulgarian and Russian languages. Thousands of words are spelled the same and have the same meaning - water, river, sea, bread, book, verse, brother, sister, bee, bird, knife, morning, star, moon and many others. If we add the correspondence "og bn - fire "," p bka - hand "," p andba - fish "," sky e - sky "," earth - earth lI”and others, it turns out that 10% of words in two languages are identical.
A lot of correspondences can be found in folk customs, in clothes, in songs, and in general in everything. Nevertheless, the “Bulgarian” media controlled by the West persistently screw the Bulgarians into the brain that “Bulgarians are not Slavs, and Slavs are subhuman”. The first statement goes straight. The second is not so obvious, veiled.
Instead of the truthful Indo-European theory of the origin of the Proto-Bulgarians, they slip into us all sorts of fictions and absurdities. The "Hunnic theory of the origin of the Proto-Bulgarians" believes that the Huns are the Proto-Bulgarians, and their leader Atilla is the Bulgarian Kan Avitohol. This is almost true, but not all. Sometimes the Proto-Bulgarian tribes fought together with the Huns, but they themselves were not Huns. The "Türkic theory" is even worse, I will not even rotten my article with it. Five hundred years of "cultural interaction" with the Ottoman and Turkic tribes will be enough.
In one illuminated Roman manuscript "Chronograph of 354" (in Latin -) they found one single sentence "Ziezi ex quo vulgares" and immediately decided that the Bulgarians were the descendants of that mythical Ziezi, the son of Sim and the grandson of Noah. The newest discovery, based on "in-depth" genetic, ethnographic and other studies, quite seriously asserts that the Bulgarians, "of course", are not at all related to the Slavs, but they turn out to be "brothers" to the English Celts and … to the North American Navajo Indians! Well. If so, we can only remember who destroyed 99.5% of the local population of the North American continent with the use of biological weapons, and the surviving 0.5% was locked in reservations like wild animals. This must be remembered and known so that the fate of our red-skinned overseas Indian "brothers" does not overtake us either.
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Historically, with the exit of the Proto-Bulgarians from Bactria almost two millennia ago, to this day, the Bulgarians have always been friends with the Slavs and fought together with them against the Turkic, Khazar and Mongol tribes. After the Russian-Turkish liberation war of 1877-1878, Russia did not have enough strength to take advantage of its military success, and Bulgaria "went" to the West. How and why this happened is described in detail in the article Bulgaria Between East and West. Today, after a quarter of a century of democracy, we are brushing it off and, as best we can, are looking for a way to our lost Slavic Orthodox roots.
Let's hope we find this path together!
