Great Bulgaria

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About Great Bulgaria

Great Bulgaria

In the 632, the Bulgars, led by Khan Kubrat formed an independent state, often called Great Bulgaria, between the lower course of the Danube river to the west, the Black Sea and the Azov Sea to the south, the Kuban river to the east, and the Donets river to the north. The capital was Phanagoria, on the Azov.

One Bulgar tribe, led by Khan Asparuh, the successor of Khan Kubrat, moved west, occupying today’s southern Bessarabia. After a successful war with Byzantium in 680, Asparuh’s khan ate conquered east part of Moesia and Dobrudzha and was recognized as an independent state under the subsequent treaty signed with the Byzantine Empire in 681. That year is usually regarded as the year of the establishment of present-day Bulgaria.

But another theory suggests that the date may be considered 632, since the state of Great Bulgaria may have been continuous within the Dunabian Bulgarian state. The theory is that although Great Bulgaria lost much territory to the Khazars, it managed to defeat them in the early 670s, and Khan Asparuh conquered Moesia and Dobrudzha from Byzantium in 680.

By the late 9th and the beginning of the 10th century, Bulgaria extended to Epirus and Thessaly in the south, Bosnia in the west and controlled the whole of present-day Romania and eastern Hungary to the north. A Serbian state came into existence as a dependency of the Bulgarian Empire and was later fully subordinated under the general and possibly Count of Sofia Marmais. Under Tsar Simeon I (Simeon the Great), who was educated in Constantinople, Bulgaria became again a serious threat to the Byzantine Empire and reached its greatest territorial extension. Simeon hoped to take Constantinople and make himself Emperor of both Bulgarians and Greeks, and fought a series of wars with the Byzantines through his long reign (893-927). The war boundary towards the end of his rule reached the Peloponnese in the south. Simeon proclaimed himself "Tsar of the Bulgarians and the Greeks", a title which was recognized by the Pope, but not of course by the Byzantine Emperor nor the The Ecumenical Patriarch of the Eastern Orthodox Church.

Missionaries from Constantinople, Cyril and Methodius, devised the Glagolitic alphabet, which was adopted in the Bulgarian Empire around 886. The alphabet and the Old Bulgarian language gave rise to a rich literary and cultural activity centered around the Preslav and Ohrid Schools, established by order of Boris I in 886. In the beginning of 10th century AD, a new alphabet — the Cyrillic alphabet - was developed on the basis of Greek and Glagolitic cursive at the Preslav Literary School. According to an alternative theory, the alphabet was devised at the Ohrid Literary School by Saint Clement of Ohrid, a Bulgarian scholar and disciple of Cyril and Methodius.

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