Bulgaria History

Effective family research requires some understanding of the historical events that may have affected your family and the records about them. Learning about wars, governments, laws, migrations, and religious trends may help you understand political boundaries, family movements, and settlement patterns. These events may have led to the creation of records such as land and military documents that mention your family.

Your ancestors will become more interesting to you if you learn about the events they may have participated in. For example, by using a history you might learn about the events that occurred in the year your great-grandparents were married.

Because of its proximity to Asia Minor, Bulgaria was the first of the European states to succumb to the Ottoman Turks and one of the last to be liberated from them. During five centuries of Ottoman rule (1396-1878), the country stagnated, untouched by most of the cultural, social, or political movements of Europe. The Russian army liberated Bulgarians from the Ottomans. Eastern Rumelia, the southeastern portion of Bulgaria, was added to the country in 1885 and additional territory was added to the southern end of the country during the Balkan wars in 1912-1913. Bulgaria allied itself with Germany in World Wars I and II. In 1944 the Red Army entered Bulgaria and installed a communist satellite regime. The communist regime lasted until 1990 when Bulgaria re-emerged as an independent nation.

The Bulgarian population grew slowly until the 18th century. It stood at 3 million in 1885 when it was augmented by the territory of Eastern Rumelia. There were 8.5 million Bulgarians by 1994. The distribution of the population by ethnic group was 86% Bulgarians, 9% Turks, and 5% Gypsies, Macedonians, Armenians, and Russians.

Bulgarian is the primary language. It is a southern Slavic tongue and is written in the Cyrillic script. Records were kept in Bulgarian, Turkish, Greek, and Old Church Slavonic.