Bessarabian Bulgarians
ethnic group
The Bessarabian Bulgarians (Bulgarian: бесарабски българи, romanized: besarabski bǎlgari; Romanian: bulgari basarabeni; Ukrainian: бесарабські болгари, romanized: bessarabski bolháry) are a Bulgarian minority group of the historical region of Bessarabia, inhabiting parts of present-day Ukraine (Budjak region of the Odesa Oblast) and Moldova.
Location and number
Modern Ukraine
In Ukraine, the number of Bessarabian Bulgarians is estimated at over 129,000 in Budjak (in the Odesa Oblast in the southern part of the country), and 75,000 elsewhere (mostly in other parts of Southern Ukraine), according to the 2001 Ukrainian Census, which counted a total of 204,600 Bulgarians in Ukraine.
Bulgarians are a majority in Bolhrad District (45,600 of its 75,000 inhabitants), but they also inhabit other districts of Budjak: Artsyz – 20,200 of the 51,700, Bessarabske – 17,000 of the 45,200, Izmail – 14,100 of the 54,700, and Sarata – 10,000 of the 49,900. There are also 8,600 Bulgarians in the city of Izmail (85,100 total population).
Outside Budjak, Odesa has many Bulgarians that have moved there in recent years. The city of Bilhorod-Dnistrovsky is about 4% Bulgarian, making them the third-largest ethnicity there.
Modern Moldova
According to the results of the census held in October 2004, there are 65,072 Bessarabian Bulgarians (1.95% of the population) in Moldova (excluding the region of Transnistria), concentrated mostly in the southern parts — chiefly in Taraclia district. In the census held in November 2004 in Transnistria, 3,164 (3.16%) Bulgarians have been counted in Tighina and surroundings and further 10,515 (2.39%) on the Eastern bank of the river Dnestr.
29,447 Bulgarians live in the cities (and represent 2.26% of the urban dwellers), and 36,215 live in the countryside (1.74% of the rural inhabitants). 90.60% of ethnic Bulgarians were born in Moldova (the national average is 94.6%), 5,968 (9.09%) in other countries that were once in the Soviet Union (the national average is 5.16%), and 199 (0.30%) were born elsewhere.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 14, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q2997993. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 2001 and 2004.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bessarabian Bulgarians” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.