Introduction:

  Facts: 

• Bulgaria is a country of 7.5 million people located in the extreme southeastern corner of Europe, sharing borders with Romania, Yugoslavia, Macedonia, Greece and Turkey.
• Roughly 85 percent of the population is made up of Bulgarians, who speak a Slavic language akin to Russian and Serbo-Croat, and practise the Orthodox Christian faith.
• There is also a sizeable Muslim population (13 per­cent of the total), compris­ing both Pomaks (Bulgari­ans who converted to Islam from the sixteenth century onwards) and ethnic Turks. Bulgaria also plays host to as many as 500,000 Gyp­sies or Roma, many of whom represent the poor­est segment of the popula­tion.
• Much of Bulgaria's industry collapsed, along with the Communist system that developed it, after 1989, and the country is nowadays known for natural products such as fruit, vegetables, wine and yoghurt - along with tobacco, a mainstay of the rural south.
• Bulgaria's Black Sea coast was earmarked for intensive tourist develop­ment as early as the 1960s, although recent years have seen attempts to encourage village tourism and hiking holidays in the country's mountainous interior.

     Bulgarians are frustrated by their country's lack of a clearly defined image abroad. Heirs to one of Europe's great civilizations, and guardians ot Balkan Christian traditions, they have a keen sense ot national identity distilled by centuries ot turbulent history. In a constantly repeating cycle of grandeur-decline and national rebirth, successive Bulgarian states have striven to dominate the Balkan peninsula before succumbing to defeat and foreign tutelage, only to be regenerated by patriotic resistance to outside control.
   The Bulgarian nation was formed in the seventh and eighth centuries when the Bulgars, warlike nomads from central Asia, assumed the leadership of Slav tribes in the lower Danube basin and took them on a spree of conquest in southeastern Europe. The resulting First Bulgarian Kingdom, after accepting Orthodox Christianity as the state religion, became the centre of Slavonic culture and spirituality before falling victim to a resurgent Byzantine Empire in the eleventh century. Recovery came a century later when the local aristocracy broke free from Constantinople and restored past glories in the shape of the Second Bulgarian Kingdom. However, the rise of Ottoman power in the fourteenth century ushered in the 500-vear-long period of Tursko robstvo or "Turkish bondage", when the achievements of the medieval era were extinguished. Bulgarian art and culture recovered during the nineteenth-century National Revival, and the emergence of a potent revolutionary movement prepared the ground for Bulgaria's eventual Liberation in 1878, achieved with the help of Russian arms. However, Europe's other Great Powers conspired to limit the size of the infant state at the Berlin Congress of 1878, the first of a series of betrayals which denied Bulgarian claims to a territory which had long been considered an integral part of the historical Bulgarian state. Macedonia. In die twentieth century alone. Bulgaria went to war three times (in the Balkan Wars of 1912-13, World War I and World War II) to try and recover Macedonia, only to be defeated on each occasion. By 1945 it seemed like a country that had somehow missed out on its destiny, and rapidly turned in on itself during the subsequent deep sleep of Communism.