Unlike in Europe – where religious wars fought between The Ottomans would hate to see a significantĭrop in taxes collected from non-Muslims or their richest province engulfed in Little or no administrative pressure was applied to non-Muslims to convert to They were privileged over otherĮthnoreligious groups, since they paid lower taxes and had exclusive access to ReligiousĬommunities were organised into non-territorial autonomies, or millets, mainlyįor Armenian Monophysites, Judaists and Orthodox Christians. It was the richest Ottoman region, which was also the mostĮthnically and confessionally variegated in the sultan’s realm. The late 14th century, the Ottomans conquered Bulgaria and made it into theĬore of Rumelia, or “Roman Province”, which encompassed the Balkan section of Unsurprisingly after this kind of mis-education, most Bulgarians now see the ancient Bulgars as their “Slavic-speaking ancestors”.
In the Bulgarian language the same term “Bulgarians” (Българи Bılgari) is used for referring to these two different ethnic groups, thus suggesting – falsely – full historic and demographic continuity between both.
However, the teaching materials employed in Bulgarian schools prefer to dub these Turkic-speaking Bulgars as “Bulgarians” (or sometimes “Proto-Bulgarians”), so that in Bulgarian vocabulary no distinction is maintained between Turkic Bulgars and Slavophone Bulgarians. School textbooks in Bulgaria lavish much attention on the ancient Bulgars, who in the Middle Ages founded several Bulgarias from the Volga to Italy, including the surviving one in the Balkans.
Weekly Medeniyet (Civilisation, 1933-1944) Source: īulgaria, since both its ancient and modern beginnings, has been invariably a multiethnic, mainly Slavic and Turkic, polity.