Bulgaria

Roman Thrace left Plovdiv, one of Europe's oldest continuously inhabited cities. It was at the school of Preslav in the ninth century that the disciples of Cyril and Methodius devised the Cyrillic alphabet: Bulgaria is thus the matrix of the script of much of Eastern Europe.

The first Bulgarian state was born in 681 south of the Danube. The baptism of Khan Boris in 864 and the welcome given to the disciples of Cyril and Methodius made Bulgaria the heartland of written Slavic culture.

After two medieval empires the country fell under Ottoman rule in 1396 for nearly five centuries. The nineteenth-century national revival rested on the monasteries, notably Rila, and led to autonomy in 1878.

The twentieth century was marked by two Balkan wars, alliance with Germany — but also the rescue of the 48,000 Jews of Bulgaria's pre-war territory in 1943 — then forty-five years of communist rule. Bulgaria joined NATO in 2004, the Union in 2007, the Schengen area in 2025 and the euro area in 2026.