Bulgaria Culture & Language

Bulgarian is an Eastern South Slavic language written in the Cyrillic alphabet that was developed here, at Preslav, after the conversion of 864 and exported to the rest of the Orthodox Slavic world; it is the official language and the country's largest cultural claim. Two-thirds of Bulgarians identify as Eastern Orthodox, in a church autocephalous since 927 with twelve dioceses; about a tenth are Muslim, a community from which some 300,000 ethnic Turks were driven to Turkey by the renaming campaign of the 1980s.

Beneath both religions are customs with pre-Christian roots that the country keeps without embarrassment: the kukeri, masked men who dance out the winter; the martenitsa, threads exchanged at the turn of spring; the fire-dance of nestinarstvo, on UNESCO's intangible list. The table is salads at every meal, dairy in every form, tarator in summer and banitsa at any hour, and rakia, mastika or menta before all of it.

The high culture is the National Revival's: Rila's painted galleries, Plovdiv's old town, and the choral tradition that the Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir carried abroad. The rose oil of Kazanlak -- close to half the world's supply, picked in May and June -- is the agricultural equivalent.

Bulgarian is an Eastern South Slavic language, closely related to Macedonian, and it is written in the Cyrillic alphabet that was developed here at Preslav in the 9th century. The alphabet is the first thing to learn: a few hours with it turn street signs, bus destinations and menus from noise into words. Phrases and the local head gestures are not listed here until they have been read on an authority's page; the monastery's rules page and the metro's fare page are both in English, which is a fair sign of how far English reaches in the tourist trade.