Traditional Cuisine

Bulgarian cuisine is exceptionally diverse and delicious. Present in it are multiple salads, dough articles, stew dishes, as well as specific dishes, which you can taste only in specific regions of the country. Many of the dishes are prepared according to old recipes, transferred from generation to generation, for many centuries.

The most typical products, by which Bulgaria is famous in the entire world, are yogurt and the white brined cheese. Under various forms they are always present on the table of Bulgarians.

One of the most famous and preferred breakfasts in the country is banitsa. It is a dish made of dough, which can have various fillings – of cheese, spinach, rise, meat, etc.

Other popular breakfasts are pancakes, buhtas (fritters), mekitsas (fried dough pieces), fried slices of bread, etc. All of them are very delicious, when they are served with jam, marmalade, honey or Bulgarian yogurt.

People in the country grow vegetables with exceptional taste qualities. That is why salads occupy a basic place in our culinary tradition. The most popular Bulgarian salad is Shopska Salad, but there are also others which are worth tasting – Shepherd’s Salad, Harvest Salad, Snezhanka, Monk’s Salad, Dobrudzha Salad, Roasted Peppers Salad and many others.

One of the most popular appetizers is Tarator (Cucumber Soup). It is a cold soup, prepared of yogurt, cucumbers, dill, crushed walnuts and spices.

Soups and broths are also popular in the country – you can taste beans soups with an amazing taste in the region of the village of Smilyan in the Rhodope Mountain. There are interesting recipes for fish soup in the regions of the Black Sea and the Danube River.

Some of the most popular among the basic dishes are those prepared on barbeque – meat balls, kebapches, grilled meat pieces, grilled sausages, etc. Various stews and dishes in clay pots are prepared in Bulgaria (hotchpotch and casseroles – Chomlek, Kavarma, Kapama (in the Bansko region), etc.

Another favorite Bulgarian dish is stuffed cabbage/vine leaves – small or large ones. They are balls made of filling wrapped in vine or cabbage leaves. They are very popular in the Thracian region.

One of the trademarks of the Bulgarian cuisine is Cheverme – an entire lamb, roasted on a spit. This dish is typical for the Rhodope region, but it is prepared all over the country.

Potatoes are a product which is present in many Bulgarian recipes. The most popular potato dishes are Ogreten, Patatnik (in the Rhodope region), potato stew, fried potatoes, etc.

In Bulgaria you can taste various meat cold cuts and delicacies. Flat sausage is the most famous one. It is prepared all over the country, but it has the greatest traditions in the town of Gorna Oryahovitsa. Another popular delicacy is the Banski Starets (Bansko Old Man) – as the name shows, it is prepared in the mountain town of Bansko. In the region of the town of Elena and the Elena Balkan Mountain, you can taste the so called Elena Pork Leg. It is prepared by salted pork meat.

Such delicacies are usually consumed with good wine. Bulgaria is a country where wine with wonderful taste is made. This is due to the unique climate and the typical soils, as well as to some local sorts of grapes – Gamza (North Bulgaria), Wide Melnik Vine (in the region of Melnik and Sandanski), Dimyat (in the regions of Varna, Shumen and Stara Zagora), Mavrud (Plovdiv, Pazardzhik, Asenovgrad), Red Misket (Straldzha and Sungurlare), Ruby (Plovdiv and Septemvri) and Pamid (Pazardzhik, Pamidovo and Plovdiv).

Another popular alcoholic drink in the country is Rakia. It is made of grapes or other fruits – plums (in the region of the town of Troyan, Teteven), apricots (in the region of Tutrakan, Silistra, Dobrich), figs, pears, etc. Rose rakia is prepared in the Valley of Roses (Karlovo and Kazanlak) by the Bulgarian oil-yielding rose.

This does not exhaust at all the diversity of Bulgarian dishes and drinks. In order to get to know the culinary magic of the country, you must cross its entire territory, because every region keeps its traditions and offers various culinary delights.

The lifestyle and culture of the Bulgarian

The lifestyle and culture of the Bulgarian nation had formed for thousands of years. It is located on the crossroad between Europe and Asia, and the lands of Bulgaria have been populated since antiquity. The Thracians, Illyrians and Greeks were those from whom the Slavs and the ancient Bulgarians inherited high antique culture. All peoples who resided on these lands – Thracians, Romans, Slavs, Bulgarians – left their mark in the global cultural treasury. It is not accidental that the first European civilization was born here. Some of the most famous treasures in the whole world are the treasure of the Varna necropolis, which was the oldest processed gold, ever found in the entire world; the Thracian tombs and sanctuaries in Kazanlak, Sveshtari, Starosel, Aleksandrovo, Perperikon, Tatul; the multiple golden treasures – the Panagyurishte, Valchitran, Rogozen treasure, etc. The remains of the Thracian, Hellenistic and Roman culture are multiple. In the dozens of discovered tombs the Thracians had left us unique high artistic models of the material and spiritual culture. Entire city complexes had been found – Augusta Trayana, Trimontium, Nikopolis ad Istrum, Pautalia, Akre, Mesemvria, Apolonia, Serdika and many others. The traditions, festivals, customs, rituals, preserved through the living memory of Bulgarians, are evidences of the great spirituality, lifestyle and culture of the Bulgarian people during the centuries.

The Bulgarian customs are rooted in antiquity and they are tightly entwined in the history and Christian religion. Dancing on live coals is a very old Bulgarian ritual, which was practiced in a few villages in the Balkan Mountain. The ritual in its authentic form is performed on the day of St. Konstantin and St. Helena – 21 May or 3 June (in the old calendar). Fire dancers prepare for their dance by staying the whole locked in a chapel, keeping the icons of St. Konstantin and St. Helena, and listening to drums and bagpipes, performing the special fire dancing melody, after which they often fall into trance. In the evening they perform their special dance on live coals. During their dance they always carry in their two hands an icon of St. Konstantin and St. Helena. The interesting thing is that they never get hurt or burn their feet.

“Mummers” is another local tradition, which has its analogs in other societies in the world. The Mummer games are special custom rituals, conducted most often at the New Year’s Eve and Shrovetide. They are only performed by men, who dress up with special masks and costumes, preliminarily made by each of the participants. With mummers and their ritual dance people chase away bad spirits and demons in the beginning of every year, in order to go on cleansed and charged with positive energy.

“Laduvane” is another interesting ritual, which is performed on the New Year’s Eve, George’s Day, Midsummer’s Eve and St. Lazar’s Day. At this ritual maidens predict their future in marriage and the people to whom they will get married. They turn to the goddess Lada, the goddess of love and family life, to ask her about their future husbands.

“Lazaruvane” is a ritual, which is related to coming of spring. It is conducted on St. Lazar’s Day, 8 days before Easter. The date of the celebration varies, but it is always on Saturday, a day before the celebration of Palm Sunday. On this day willow branches are picked, by which the entrance doors of houses are decorated on the following day. Then the young maidens in the villages pick flowers, by which they wreathe garlands on Palm Sunday. On Saturday maidens gather in the home of one of them and they dress themselves in festive clothes, decorated with flowers and branches. After that they walk through the village from house to house and bless people for health and rich harvest. Hosts receive them and give them small gifts. Probably the most important symbol of Bulgaria is the ritual of making and giving martenitsas for health and happiness in the beginning of March. For Bulgarians this is a symbol of the new beginning, health and rich harvest.

Especially well respected in Bulgaria are the traditions related to the circle of life – birth, christening, wedding and funeral. The name days are also respected in the country, as the most famous ones among them are St. John’s day, St. George’s Day and St. Dimitar’s Day.

The greatest holidays, honored by Bulgarians, are undoubtedly Christmas and Easter – this is the time when the entire family gathers, a number of generations celebrate together, united by the feeling of belonging to the healthy Bulgarian family. Especially highly honored are also the first Sunday before Lent, the second Sunday before Lent, Mothering Day, All Soul’s Day and Lent.

Hiking all over the country, tourists will get acquainted with various rituals and customs, many of which are typical only for specific regions in Bulgaria.

Rose is the symbol of Bulgaria. Rose picking, which was once a real ritual, has presently turned into a tourist attraction. Rose picking is one of the oldest and traditional customs of Bulgarians. Carpets from the age of Revival are pieces of art. The basic centers of carpet making are Kotel, Chiprovtsi and Samokov. The people have also preserved the cultural diversity in the popular customs and songs, as well as in the popular crafts.

There are a number of architectural reserves in the country, which preserve the unique Bulgarian architecture from the age of Revival (the 18th – 19th century) – Koprivshtitsa, Tryavna, Bozhentsi, Zheravna, Bansko, Melnik, etc. In some of the ethnographic complexes (Etara, Zlatograd, the Old Dobrich, etc.) you can get acquainted with Bulgarian lifestyle and the mastery of crafts, which continue making their articles according to old technologies, inherited from our ancestors.

During the Bulgarian Revival the monasteries formed as centers of artistic and educational activity. Many monasteries are preserved on the territory of the country – Rila Monastery, Bachkovo Monastery, Troyan Monastery, Zemen Monastery, Glozhene Monastery, Kilifarevo Monastery, Shipchenski Monastery, etc. Our country is also famous for the established national artistic schools of icon painting and wood carving. The most famous of them are the Samokov, Tryavna and Bansko Schools.

The Bulgarian national costume is an irreversible part of the Bulgarian lifestyle and culture. With time it interweaved Thracian, Slavonic and ancient Bulgarian motives. The main cloth is a white shirt with long sleeves. Top clothes, various in shape, material and decoration are dressed over it. There are 4 types of national female costumes: one-apron, two-apron, tunic and sayana, and there are 2 types of national male costumes: white-shirt and black-shirt. Each ethnographic area (Dobrich, Pirin, Rhodope, Northern, Thracian and Sofia) has its own typical workday, holiday and wedding costume.

Important parts of the Bulgarian culture are also folklore music, folklore songs and the Bulgarian national dances (horo). Various typical instruments are used for performing Bulgarian national music. Some of those are fiddle, mandolin, flute, bagpipe, pipe, dvoyanka (double pipe), drum and taranbuka. Bulgarian folklore songs are transferred orally from generation to generation. The ensembles “Cosmic Voices”, “The Mystery of Bulgarian Voices” and the folklore ensemble “Pirin” are globally famous. The Bulgarian traditional dances are some of the most vivid forms of artistic presentations of Bulgarian people. Most often they are performed by a group of people, caught palm to palm in a closed or open circle, semicircle, twisted form or in a straight line. At the same time the participants perform similar movements, gestures and steps in a specific melody (horo). Depending on the rhythm and the steps, there are a number of types of horo: straight horo, rachenitsa, paydushko horo and irregular horo.

The museums in Bulgaria preserve treasuries of domestic, cultural and military articles; statues, burial steles and monuments, masks, mosaics and small statuettes of ancient gods and many other precious exponents.

Bulgarians inherited this culture, enriched it with their millennial experience, preserved it and continued to develop it to the present day. In the more contemporary times the Bulgarian culture is proud of its achievements in the area of literature, arts, music and architecture. A proof of them is the rich cultural calendar, which includes international and national children festivals, as well as gatherings, cultural events, expositions, etc.

History

The territory of Bulgaria has been inhabited since antiquity. Proofs of this are the multiple settlement and burial mounds. The lands of the present Bulgaria were a cradle of some of the earliest civilizations in Europe – the oldest processed gold every found, dug out of the Chalcholite necropolis near Varna, is an evidences of that. From the age of Ancient Thrace we have inherited valuable cultural monuments - tombs (Kazanlak tomb, Aleksandrovska tomb, Sveshtarska tomb, etc.), treasures (Panagyursko, Rogozensko, Valchitransko, etc.), sanctuaries and temples (Perperikon, Starosel, Kozi Gramadi, Begliktash, etc.).

The cultural interactions between the Thracians and the Hellenistic civilization were particularly active. Multiple cities and towns, which were transfers of Greek cultural influence, were established within the period 6th-2nd century BC in Thrace, Misia and along the shores of the Black Sea. In the middle of the 1st century AD all Bulgarian lands became a part of the Roman Empire. Many architectural and archaeological monuments have been preserved from this period – the Ancient Theater and the Roman Stadium in Plovdiv, the remains of the Roman cities Ulpia Escus, Nove, Nikopolis ad Istrum, Nikopolis ad Nestum, Augusta Trayana, Abritus, etc.

After the breaking up of the Roman Empire, the present Bulgarian lands were a part of the East Roman Empire, later called Byzantium by historians. In the second half of the 7th century the proto-Bulgarians settled on the territory of the present Northeast Bulgaria. In a union with the Slavs they formed the Bulgarian state, recognized by Byzantium in 681. The head of the state was the leader of proto-Bulgarians – khan Asparuh, and the city of Pliska was declared a capital. 
During the ruling of khan Krum (803-814) Bulgaria bordered to the west with the empire of Karl the Great, and to the east the Bulgarian armies reached the gates of the Byzantium capital - Constantinople. In 864, during the reign of Prince Boris I (852-889), Bulgarians adopted Christianity as an official religion and Bulgaria became one of the oldest Christian states in Europe.

At the end of the 9th century, the brothers Cyril and Methodius created and spread the Slavonic alphabet. Ohrid and Veliki Preslav became centers of the Bulgarian and Slavonic culture. From Bulgaria the Slavonic letters spread in other Slavonic states as well. Even nowadays, countries like Russia, Serbia, Ukraine, Macedonia and Belarus use the Cyrillic alphabet, which spelling rules were established by the students of Cyril and Methodius and their followers in the Bulgarian capital Preslav. The ruling of Tsar Simeon the First (893 – 927) is famous as the Golden Age of Bulgarian Culture, and the borders of the country at that time reached the Black Sea, the Aegean Sea and the Adriatic Sea.

In 1018, after prolonged wars, Bulgaria was conquered by Byzantium. In 1186, the uprising led by the boyar brothers Asen and Peter, rejected the Byzantine ruling. The Second Bulgarian Kingdom was established, and Tarnovo was declared a capital.

The former might of Bulgaria was restored during the ruling of their youngest brother - Kaloyan (who ruled within 1197-1207), and during the ruling of tsar Ivan Asen the Second (1218-1241) the Second Bulgarian Kingdom reached its greatest zenith – it established political hegemony in Southeast Europe; it spread its borders to the Black Sea, the Aegean Sea and the Adriatic Sea; its economy and culture developed. Some of the most important monuments preserved of that time are the wall paintings in the Boyana church, the churches in Veliko Tarnovo, Zemenski Monastery, Ivanovski Rock Churches, the miniatures in the London Gospel and the Manasiy Chronicle.

In the end of the 14th century the country was conquered by the Ottoman Empire. In the first years of the Ottoman Dominion there were individual attempts for the liberation of Bulgaria. Later the Haydiouk movement created preconditions for the occurring of an organized national liberation movement.

The Bulgarian Revival began in the beginning of the 18th century. The Bulgarian church, education and culture were established. The beginning of the organized national liberation movement for rejection of the Ottoman dominion is related to the activities of Georgi Rakovski (1821-1867). Basic figures in the liberation movement were Vasil Levski (1837-1873), Lyuben Karavelov (1834-1879), Hristo Botev (1848-1876) and others.

In 1876 the April Uprising burst. This was the largest and the most organized attempt for liberation from the Ottoman Dominion. The uprising was suppressed with unheard violence, but it placed the national Bulgarian issue in the center of the international political life.

In 1878, as a result of the liberation war between Russia and Turkey, the Bulgarian state was restored. The Berlin Congress (1878) divided the former Bulgarian territories into three parts – Principality of Bulgaria, ruled by a prince, Eastern Roumelia with a Christian governor, appointed by the sultan, and Thrace and Macedonia, which were left under the ruling of the Ottoman Empire. Alexander Battenberg was selected for the first prince of the Principality of Bulgaria.

The first constitution of Bulgaria was adopted in 1879. It was one of the most democratic constitutions for its time. In 1885 the Principality of Bulgaria and Eastern Roumelia united. In 1908, the Bulgarian Prince Ferdinand Sachsen-Coburg-und-Gotha proclaimed independence of Turkey and he was declared a tsar of the Third Bulgarian Kingdom.

Bulgaria conducted the victorious Balkan War in 1912. Together with Serbia and Greece Bulgaria fought for the freedom of Thrace and Macedonia. The discords between the former allies led to the burst of the First Balkan War (1913), in which Bulgaria was defeated. As a result of this war, more territories inhabited with Bulgarians were cut off from the state. The interference of Bulgaria in the First World War on the side of the so called Allied Powers ended with a national catastrophe. The Neuilly Peace Treaty (1919) imposed strict clauses to Bulgaria. It lost a large part of its territories. In the Beginning of the 1940s Bulgaria’s policy was pointed towards the interests of Germany and the powers of the Axis. In 1941 Bulgaria was involved in the war on the side of the Axis, but the Bulgarian army did not participate in the battles on the East Front. Tsar Boris the Third supported the social pressure and did not allow the deporting of about 50,000 Bulgarian Jews. Of all European countries only Denmark and Bulgaria managed to protect their Jew population from the gas chambers of the Nazis. In the autumn of 1944 Bulgaria joined the allied forces and actively participated in the expulsion of the German forces from Southern and Central Europe.

After the Second World War, Bulgaria fell within the political and economical influence of the USSR. In 1946 the country was declared a republic. The Bulgarian communist party came to power. The political parties except for the so called Fatherland Front (Otechestven Front) were forbidden; the economy and the banks were nationalized, the agricultural land was organized in cooperations.

The democratic changes in Bulgaria started in the end of 1989. Multiparty elections were conducted. A new constitution was adopted. Bulgaria started the way towards democratic development and market economy. In its external policy Bulgaria is oriented towards rapprochement with the European structures. Since 1991 it has been a member of the Council of Europe. In 2004 Bulgaria became a member of NATO. In 1995 it filed an application for membership in the European Union. In 1999 the negotiations for joining began. On 25 April 2005 in Luxemburg was signed the Accession Treaty of Republic of Bulgaria to the European Union. As of 1 January 2007, after completing the membership criteria, Bulgaria became of full right member of the European Union.