Bulgaria

The country that gave the Slavic world its alphabet and spent five centuries under Ottoman rule. The First Bulgarian Empire converted to Christianity in 864 and adopted a script developed by the disciples of Cyril and Methodius - Cyrillic was formalised at the Preslav school here and spread from Bulgaria to Serbia, Romania and Rus. The Byzantines destroyed that empire, a second one followed, and the Ottomans took the country in 1396 and held it until 1878, longer than almost any European territory. The April Uprising of 1876 and its suppression produced European outrage and a Russian war that created a Bulgarian state, briefly very large under the Treaty of San Stefano, then cut down at Berlin months later - the difference between those two maps drove Bulgarian foreign policy for seventy years and put the country on the losing side of both world wars. Bulgaria's own Jewish population of around fifty thousand was not deported, after public and parliamentary protest, though Jews from occupied territories were. Communist rule ran to 1989. The country joined the EU in 2007. Sofia is among the oldest continuously inhabited European capitals. The country has about 6.4 million people and its population is falling faster than almost any other. Bulgarian was the first Slavic language written down. The Thracian tombs at Kazanlak and Sveshtari are World Heritage sites. The Rose Valley supplies much of the world's rose oil. Bulgarian yoghurt bacteria are named after the country. Bulgaria is the only European state that has never changed its name since it was founded in 681.

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