The edifice of the state fell after Kubrat’s death and the Bulgarians followed a tradition they had kept from time immemorial. They split into several large groups and sought deliverance and happiness elsewhere.
A large portion of the Bulgarians, led by the youngest son of Kubrat, Asparuh /or Ispor/, headed west along the familiar route to Europe. They settled in the so-called Ongul, in the delta of the Danube. There they encountered both Slavs
and Byzantines.
The culture of the Bulgarians was quite different from that of the Slavs and on a higher level in many respects. They had long left behind familial community relations. Their traditions in statehood were impressive. They had been making attempts to establish a stable state structure for hundreds of years. They had both familial hereditary aristocracy, and an administrative apparatus. They were proud of their past. They drew up genealogical lists of their rulers, which went back to time immemorial.
Continue reading An Ancient Horseman Clad In Iron part II
Solar calendar
The Bulgars had travelled a long way before they reached the Balkans. Thousands of kilometres in terms of distance; thousands of years in terms of time. Although there are quite a number of written sources about them, their original homeland is still enshrouded in mystery. Historians have come up with dozens of hypotheses about their origin. Recently, the most prevalent theory is that they lived in the lands around Pamir in the beginning of the first millennium AD and they were an Iranian people with substantial Turkic admixtures. Then they headed west long before the so-called Volkerwanderung. It seems that even in the 2nd century some groups of Bulgars had settled in Europe north of the Danube.
Continue reading An Ancient Horseman Clad In Iron part I
The Hero god, also known as the Thracian Horseman, as he was worshiped by the Thracians, was not a specific person. Although ancestor worship of real people who had done great deeds bled into it, the Thracian Hero was an abstract figure, the idea of a Hero. It is this metaphysical entity around which worship centered. The Hero was no doubt the central figure in Thracian Sleepwalking movie religion, the hope and faith of the people. Their hero was allÂseeing and allÂhearing, he was the sun and also the ruler of the nether world, he was the protector of life and health, and kept the forces of evil at bay. In modern Bulgaria he continues to perform that function going by the name of St. George.
Creepshow 2 on dvd The Thracian Hero was depicted all the time, all over the place. Always on a horse, slaying something, slaying anything, usually with a spear. Over 1500 stone reliefs and more than 100 bronze statuettes of the Horseman have been uncovered on the territory of present-day Bulgaria. From antiquity, through Roman times, through the middle ages, and today, the immage of the Horseman is inescapable in Bulgaria.
The Thracian Hero is also responsible for the Greek word ‘Heros’ from which the English word ‘hero’ is derived.
Continue reading The Hero god also known as the Thracian Horseman
