ASIANOVERLAND.NET WINTER EUROPEAN DAY 37/210: ISTANBUL, TURKEY TO BULGARIA

“17-1-81 - BULGARIA"

We already know from our drive to Istanbul from Thessaloniki, that the usual routes from Turkey to Greece along the coast are icy and treacherous in these blizzard-like conditions, so we decide to drive to Venice via Bulgaria. It's a great drive to the Turkish/Bulgarian border, where we all have to fill in Turkish Departure Forms, one of which is filled in for Dale (pictured), our Donald Duck duckie we use for Dummy awards. The Form is surprisingly accurate, giving his Nationailty as Disneyland and Passport date 1933, ready for Donald Duck's movie debut in 1934. The answer to the SEX question – PLEASE, is pretty funny, but I don't see the joke in this being described as a disorganised tour rather than an organised tour. Sometimes the punters seem to forget that the Top Deck brochure accurately desxscribed Top Deck trips as "ADVENTURE TRAVEL", and we deliver on that promise, even if we don't exactly follow the itinerary listed in the brochure.

However, despite our change of itinerary, things quickly go from bad to worse in Bulgaria. Whereas the Greek Aegean coast had gale force winds and blizzard like conditions, in Bulgaria there was absolutely NO WIND, and  HEAVY FOG which seemed everywhere. When we tried to skirt around Sofia, the Bulgarian capital, the fog was so thick we could hardly see the windscreen, so I had to resume my navigation position on the engine cowling and try to navigate Gary Hayes through the fog. The slowest drive ever, even slower than the desert drive from the Iran border at Zahedan to Nok Kundi in Pakistan, where top speed was 8 miles only per hour and we drove from dawn to dusk to cover less than 90 miles.

The earliest societies in the lands of modern-day Bulgaria date back to 6,500 BC. In the 6th to 3rd century BC the region was a battleground for Thracians, Persians, and Macedonians, but stability came when the Roman Empire conquered the region in AD 45.

By the end of the 1st century AD, Roman governance was established over the entire Balkan Peninsula and Christianity began spreading in the region around the 4th century. The Gothic Bible—the first Germanic language book—was created by Gothic bishop Ulfilas in what is today northern Bulgaria around 381. The region came under Byzantine control after the fall of Rome in 476. The Byzantines were engaged in prolonged warfare against Persia and could not defend their Balkan territories. This enabled the Slavs to enter the Balkan Peninsula as marauders, primarily through an area between the Danube River and the Balkan Mountains (Moesia). Gradually, the interior of the peninsula became a country of the South Slavs, who lived under a democracy. The Slavs assimilated the partially Hellenized, Romanized, and Gothicized Thracians in the rural areas.

Not long after the Slavic incursion, in the late 7th century, Moesia was again invaded, this time by the Bulgars, Turkic semi-nomadic warrior tribes. Their horde was a remnant of Old Great Bulgaria, a tribal confederacy situated north of the Black Sea in what is now Ukraine and southern Russia. The Bulgars attacked Byzantine territories in Moesia and conquered the Slavic tribes there in 680. A peace treaty with the Byzantine Empire was signed in 681, marking the foundation of the First Bulgarian Empire.

Succeeding rulers strengthened the Bulgarian state throughout the 8th and 9th centuries, and abolished paganism in favour of Eastern Orthodox Christianity in 864. The conversion was followed by a Byzantine recognition of the Bulgarian church and the adoption of the Cyrillic alphabet. The common language, religion and script strengthened central authority and gradually fused the Slavs and Bulgars into a unified people speaking a single Slavic language. A golden age began during the 34-year rule of Simeon the Great, who oversaw the largest territorial expansion of Bulgaria.

After Simeon's death, Bulgaria was weakened by wars with Magyars and  Preslav was seized by the Byzantine army in 971 after consecutive Rus' and Byzantine invasions. After the conquest, Basil II prevented revolts by retaining the rule of local nobility, integrating them in Byzantine bureaucracy and aristocracy, and relieving their lands of the obligation to pay taxes in gold, allowing tax in kind instead

 A successful Bulgarian revolt in 1185 established a Second Bulgarian Empire, which reached its apex in 1218–1241. The Ottomans were employed as mercenaries by the Byzantines in the 1340s but later became invaders in their own right. Sultan Murad I took Adrianople from the Byzantines in 1362, and Sofia fell in 1382. After numerous exhausting wars and feudal strife, the empire disintegrated in 1396 and fell under Ottoman rule for nearly five centuries. The Bulgarian nobility was eliminated and the peasantry was enserfed to Ottoman masters, while much of the educated clergy fled to other countries.

As Ottoman power began to wane, Habsburg Austria and Russia saw Bulgarian Christians as potential allies. The Austrians first backed an uprising  in 1598, then 1686,  1688 and finally 1689. The Russian Empire also asserted itself as a protector of Christians in Ottoman lands with the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in 1774, ending the Russo-Turkish War of 1768–74 with many concessions to Russia, a most humiliating blow to the once-mighty Ottoman Empire.

In the 18th century a national awakening of Bulgaria restored national consciousness and provided an ideological basis for the liberation struggle, resulting in the 1876 Uprising. Up to 30,000 Bulgarians were killed as Ottoman authorities put down the rebellion. The massacres prompted the Great Powers to take action, and they convened the Constantinople Conference in 1876, but their decisions were rejected by the Ottomans. This allowed the Russian Empire to seek a military solution without risking confrontation with other Great Powers, as had happened in the Crimean War. In 1877 Russia declared war on the Ottomans and defeated them with the help of Bulgarian rebels, particularly during the crucial Battle of Shipka Pass which secured Russian control over the main road to Constantinople.

The Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 resulted in the formation of the third and current Bulgarian state. Many ethnic Bulgarians were left outside the new nation's borders, which led to conflicts with its neighbours and alliances with Germany in both world wars.

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