Culture of Bulgaria

The culture of Bulgaria has deep roots in the traditions of the Slavic peoples who settled the Balkans in the early Middle Ages, with influence from Byzantine civilisation, Thracian heritage, medieval Bulgarian statehood, Eastern Christianity and the cultural interaction of the Ottoman period.

Thracian heritage in the Bulgarian lands includes numerous temples, tombs, golden treasures and ancient ritual traditions. Some customs with pre-Christian roots, such as Kukeri, Martenitsa and rites connected with seasonal fertility, remain part of modern Bulgarian culture. The oldest known treasure of worked gold in the world, dating back to the 5th millennium BC, comes from the site of the Varna Necropolis.

Bulgaria functioned as a cultural hub of Slavic Europe during much of the Middle Ages, exerting considerable literary and cultural influence over the Eastern Orthodox Slavic world through the Preslav and Ohrid Literary Schools. Bulgaria also gave the world the Cyrillic script, the second most widely used alphabet and sixth most-used writing system in the world, which originated in these two schools in the tenth century.

Bulgaria's cultural contribution continued throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in literature, music, theatre, visual arts and science. Internationally recognised Bulgarian figures include John Atanasoff, a United States citizen of Bulgarian and British descent regarded as one of the pioneers of the digital computer, the pianist Alexis Weissenberg, and visual artists such as Christo, Pascin and Vladimir Dimitrov.

Music

Bulgaria has a long-standing musical tradition dating to the early Middle Ages. One of the earliest known composers of Medieval Europe, Yoan Kukuzel (ca.