Bulgaria

The First Bulgarian Empire — Slavs and Bulgars unite

The First Bulgarian Empire (681–1018 CE) was one of the great powers of medieval Europe — founded when the Bulgar khan Asparuh defeated the Byzantine Empire and established the right to tribute, it grew into a state that twice besieged Constantinople and at its peak under Tsar Simeon I (893–927) stretched from the Black Sea to the Adriatic.

Saints Cyril and Methodius — the alphabet that shaped a civilisation

The creation of the Glagolitic alphabet (later simplified into the Cyrillic script) by the Byzantine brothers Cyril and Methodius (c. 862 CE) gave the Slavic world its writing system — used today for Russian, Ukrainian, Serbian, Bulgarian, Mongolian, and dozens of other languages, it is the second most widely used alphabet in the world after Latin.

Five centuries under the Ottoman yoke

Bulgaria's incorporation into the Ottoman Empire (1396–1878 CE) lasted 482 years — one of the longest periods of foreign domination of any European people — during which the Bulgarian church, language, and cultural identity were suppressed, surviving mainly through the Orthodox monasteries that preserved manuscripts, art, and Slavic Christianity.

The April Uprising and Liberation — Bulgaria reborn

The April Uprising of 1876 CE was the Bulgarian national insurrection against Ottoman rule that was so savagely suppressed — approximately 30,000 civilians massacred in the Batak massacre and elsewhere — that it triggered Gladstone's pamphlet "The Bulgarian Horrors," Russian military intervention, and ultimately Bulgarian independence in 1878.

John Atanasoff — the forgotten inventor of the computer

John Vincent Atanasoff (1903–1995 CE), the son of a Bulgarian immigrant to America, designed and built the Atanasoff-Berry Computer (ABC) in 1937–1942 — the first electronic digital computing device — but failed to patent it, leading to decades of credit being given to ENIAC (1945), until a 1973 court ruling formally recognised his priority.

Communist Bulgaria and the Soviet bloc

Bulgaria under communist rule (1944–1989 CE) was the Soviet Union's most loyal satellite — Todor Zhivkov's 35-year regime (the longest in the Eastern bloc) attempted to Bulgarianise the Turkish minority by force, maintained deep Soviet integration, and collapsed almost bloodlessly in November 1989 when Zhivkov was simply removed by his own Politburo.