Bulgarian Studies On The Origin Of The Bulgarians: Past And Present

Prof.Dr.Plamen S.Tzvetkov

Since the time, when the Ragusian writer Mauro Orbini stated back in 1601 that the Bulgarians, the Goths, and even the Etruscans belonged to the Slavic “nation”, an ever larger number of Bulgarians started to believe in a myth that conveniently rejected any hint at a possible kinship with the Turks under whose domination they were. From the beginning of the 18th century on, Russia resorted to the same myth in order to justify its expansion toward Constantinople and the Straits because that expansion was obviously incompatible with the existence of a separate Bulgarian nation and a separate Bulgarian state. Needless to say that in the years of Soviet occupation after World War II any doubt, expressed about the Slavic origin of the Bulgarians, was not only prohibited but often even punished. It was only after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 that an increasing number of Bulgarian historians and writers began to explore the past and the origin of the ancient Bulgarians and to question the correctness of the Slavic myth, but most of them still believe that in the course of two or three centuries after 681 AD the ancient Bulgarians have disappeared in the middle of the “Slavic Ocean”.

However, the Slavic myth about the origin of today’s Danubian Bulgarians had its opponents from the very beginning. Back in the 17th century a Polish traveler, who apparently considered that all the Slavic nations speak one and the same language, noticed that the Bulgarian was perhaps close to, but far from identical with the tongue of the Slavs. In the 18th century the father of the Bulgarian national revival Paisij Khilendarski assigned to his kinsmen a Slavic descent, although he had no sympathy whatsoever with the Serbs and the Russians, but the unknown author of a “Bulgarian-Slavic History” who apparently lived at approximately the same time, as well as the Dominican Blasius Kleiner made a clear distinction between the Bulgarians and the Slavs and sought the origin of the Bulgarians in the eastern part of Europe, if not in the Eurasian steppes. In the 19th century the purely lexical similarity of many Bulgarian words with their Slavic counterparts made such historians as Gavril Krustevich believe that the Huns were most probably identical with the Slavs, but a revolutionary leader, politician and scholar like Georgi Rakovski categorically rejected the Slavic myth and linked the origin of the Bulgarians with that of the Indo-Iranian peoples. Actually, Rakovski found a kinship between a number of Bulgarian words and the respective Iranian counterparts.

It was only in the 1930s that such scholars like Dimitur Susulov and Nikolaj Stanishev explored the earliest history of the Bulgarians and came to the conclusion that they were closely connected with the Huns and that the Huns themselves were probably of Ural-Altaic descent, but under strong Indo-Iranian impact.

After the 1944 Soviet invasion studies about the origin and of the early history of the Bulgarians were virtually prohibited. This kind of research was renewed only from the end of the 1960s on, but even the most fanatic exponents of the Slavic myth sometimes made fascinating discoveries. Thus, for instance, the philologist Jordan Zaimov concentrated his research on geographic names on –ishte from Proto-Slavic*-itj and he found out that this kind of toponyms are incomparably more frequent in the lands of today’s Greece and Albania, than in Moesia, Thrace and Macedonia. An archaeologist like Zhivka Vuzharova had to admit, on her part, that the Bulgarian necropolises, preserved from the Middle Ages, are more numerous than those assigned usually, but most often wrongly, to the Slavs.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the “velvet revolutions” in Eastern Europe a rapidly growing number of scholars, but also of amateurs, dedicate their efforts to the problems about the origin of the Bulgarians and about their earliest history. In this regard I would like to mention Valeri Stojanov, who formulated an interesting hypothesis about the ethnic name of Bulgar that, in his opinion, is connected with a number of Indo-European and Ural-Altaic forms and whose original meaning might have been simply “man”, “human being”. Tacho Tanev, who passed away just a couple of years ago, drew the attention to the fact that, although seemingly Slavic from a lexical point of view, the language of the present-day Bulgarians differs essentially from the Slavic idioms by its structure and by a number of fundamental words, such as pronouns, terms for designating various kinds of relatives, etc. Moreover, many words, considered to be Slavic, have come, according to Tanev, from Hun-Bulgarian to Proto-Slavic and not the other way round.

Among the amateurs I would like to mention Petur Dobrev who, no doubt, contributed greatly to raising the interest in ancient Bulgarian studies. He also seemed to reject the Slavic myth. However, at a somewhat later stage he abandoned his earlier guesses about a possible kinship of the Bulgarians not only with the Altaic peoples and the Indo-Iranians, but also with the Finno-Ugrians. In a most categorical way Mr.Dobrev refuses to admit any relationship of the Bulgarians with the Huns and he insists upon a purely Indo-Iranian, or more exactly, “Pamir” connection (after the name of a mountain, inhabited by a number of Iranian tribes). Significantly enough, lately he is apparently about to return to the Slavic dogma about the origin of today’s Bulgarians.

In conclusion I would say that there is a real Renaissance in Bulgaria, as far as studies on the origin and the earliest history of the Bulgarians are concerned. As it is well known, Renaissance means, among other things, strong passions and, sometimes, deep mistakes. Nevertheless, let us hope that this is only the beginning of a long way of catching up with reality after more than four centuries of Pan-Slavist dreams.