The First Prince of modern Bulgaria In 1364, the Turks invaded Bulgaria and took Central Thrace with the important towns of Borouy (today's Stara Zagora) and Plovdiv. In 1393, Turnovo - the capital of Bulgaria, fell and in 1395 the last medieval Bulgarian ruler - tsar Ivan Shishman was killed defending the fortress of Nicopol on the Danube. In 1396 the country was completely occupied which put an end to the medieval Bulgarian state and Bulgaria entered five centuries of "darkness" under [Detailed Information]

Baba Vanga (3 October 1911 - 11 August 1996) is a world renowned clairvoyant and healer from Bulgaria, was born in Strumica, Macedonia nowadays.She had the unique ability to prophet and heal people with herbs. Data shows that about 80% of the prophecies of Vanga happened. Vanga was born a premature baby, her fontanel stayed open all her life. When she was fourteen she became blind because of an accident but in her later life she was able to "see" even more than us, not only in the past but [Detailed Information]

Goce Delcev (1872-1903) was a 19th century revolutionary. He was the leader of the Internal Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organization (IMARO) that was active in Ottoman Macedonia and Thrace at the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century. Born on January 23, 1872 in Kukush (now Kilkis, northern Greece), Delcev finished the local junior high school and the Bulgarian high school "St Cyril and Methodius" in Thessaloniki. He entered the Military academy in Sofia in 1891 but [Detailed Information]

Hristo Botev is a brilliant Bulgarian poet and revolutionary. Born in Kalofer on January 6, 1848, died a heroic death in the western part of the Bulgarian Range on June 1, 1876 as a leader of 200 rebels who had set out to die for the liberation of their enslaved Fatherland. The inscription on the granite rock by which he was killed reads: "Your prophecy has come true - you live on!" The father of Hristo Botev, Botio Petkov, a famous Bulgarian teacher and writer, raised his son in a patriotic [Detailed Information]

For more than fifty years Ivan Vazov was the most prominent figure in Bulgarian literature after the liberation. He was a citizen-poet who considered the social mission of literature an organic part of the nation's life and fate. He wrote his most compelling works to glorify Bulgaria's national reawakening and to articulate the ideals of the past, lest they be forgotten by postliberation society. His view of the Bulgarian national character had an enormous impact on his people, and to this day [Detailed Information]

Paisii Hilendarski (Paisius of Hilendar) is the father of Bulgarian renaissance, the first ideologist of the national liberation movement. The discerning monk was the first person in Bulgaria to feel the tendencies for development of the society undertakes the role to awake the national conscience by writing "Slavic - Bulgarian History ". Paisii was born in Bansko in 1722. In 1745 he went to Hilendar Monastery and accepted monasticism. In the middle of XVII century Hilendar Monasery was a [Detailed Information]

"THE FIRST SIGN of true political wisdom has always been the ability to give up the unachievable," Stefan Zweig wrote. Of all post-liberation Bulgarian statesmen Stefan Stambolov seems to be the best example of the validity of this rule. He is the most enthusiastically praised and the most violently denounced politician in Bulgaria's modern history, and what could be a better proof that he was an extraordinary personality? Born in Turnovo in 1854, he made his way into political life after [Detailed Information]

Born at Pravets, near Botevgrad, Bulgaria, Todor Zhivkov was First secretary of the ruling Bulgarian Communist Party's Central Committee (1954-89) and president of Bulgaria (1971-89). His 35 years as Bulgaria's ruler made him the longest-serving leader in any of the Soviet-bloc nations of eastern Europe. The son of poor peasants, Zhivkov drifted to the Bulgarian capital of Sofia in his youth and, in the late 1920s, joined the Komsomol, the youth league of the outlawed Communist Party. He rose [Detailed Information]

Tsar Boris III of Bulgaria (January 30, 1894 - August 28, 1943), son of Ferdinand I, came to the throne in 1918 upon the abdication of his father, following Bulgaria's defeat in World War I. This was the country's second major defeat in only five years, after the disastrous Second Balkan War (1913). Under the Treaty of Neuilly, Bulgaria was forced to cede land to its neighbors and pay crippling reparations, thereby threatening political and economic stability. Two movements, the Agrarian Union [Detailed Information]

Simeon (893-927), the third son of Boris I, who came to replace his overthroned brother, received a rich legacy from his father, a legacy that gave uncountable fruit during his long reign, but - unlike most great people's descendants - he did not remain in his parent's shadow. Graduate of the brilliant Magnaur school in Constantinople, writer, philosopher and scholar, he was the favorite of both the muses and the bellicose Mars. Under his rule the Bulgarian state acquired its ever largest [Detailed Information]

Vasil Ivanov Kunchev, Levski, whom the present-day Bulgarians consider their greatest national hero of all times and epochs, was born in Karlovo, a prosperous center of craft-industry in 1837. At the age of twenty four he took the vows of a deacon. The lot in store for the young Bulgarian was obviously not the one of a monk living in resignation to the world. In 1862 he fled to Serbia and enlisted as a volunteer in the Bulgarian legion raised by Rakovski. The legion took part in the [Detailed Information]