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Bulgars in the Lower Danube Region. a Survey of the Archaeological Evidence and of the State of Current Research

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Bulgars in the Lower Danube Region. a Survey of the Archaeological Evidence and of the State of Current Research BULGARS IN THE LOWER DANUBE REGION. A SURVEY OF THE ARCHAEOLOGICAL EVIDENCE AND OF THE STATE OF CURRENT RESEARCH Uwe Fiedler During the early Middle Ages, pre-Christian Bulgaria (680–864/5) was one of the most important powers of Southeastern Europe. Historians have commonly explained its survival and success in terms of a par- ticular ethnic symbiosis between Slavic commoners and Bulgar elites of Turkic origin, who ultimately gave their name to the Slavic-speaking Bulgarians.1 Bulgar khans, archons, or kings2 ruled over territories that are now within Bulgaria and Romania. In Romanian historiography, which has traditionally viewed Romanians as a Romance-language island in a Slavic and Hungarian sea, the Bulgars play no serious role in national history. Archaeological assemblages that can be dated between the late seventh and the late ninth century are consistently attributed to “proto-Romanians.” By contrast, the Bulgars are the quintessential part of Bulgarian national identity, a marker of distinction from all other histories of Slavic-speaking nations. As a consequence, studying the Bulgar (or, as it is commonly known in Bulgaria, “proto-Bulgarian”) archaeology was an essential component of Bulgarian nationalism, especially in the interwar decades, as well as recently. It is only in the 1 Ever since Runciman 1930, the fi rst scholarly book in English on medieval Bul- garia, the tendency among English-speaking scholars has been to distinguish between Bulgars (before the conversion to Christianity) and Bulgarians (aft er the conversion). For the sake of clarity and following Florin Curta’s friendly advice, I decided to adopt Runciman’s distinction in this paper. 2 Bulgar rulers are repeatedly and consistently called khans in modern scholarship, despite the fact that this common title of nomadic tradition is not attested in any con- temporary sources. In Bulgar stone-inscriptions, khan appears only in combination with other titles, and as a consequence its precise meaning remains a matter of debate (see Beshevliev 1963, 43–44 and 47 no. 4; Beshevliev 1981, 333–34). In Byzantine sources, the Bulgar ruler is commonly called archon, while West European authors writing in Latin prefer rex Bulgarorum. Khan, archon, or rex Bulgarorum are ultimately descriptions of the same form of royal power (see Bakalov 1995, 113–31; Havlíková 1999, 408–15; Stepanov 2005, 275–278; Curta 2006). 152 uwe fiedler years aft er the Soviet occupation of 1944 that the emphasis in Bulgarian archaeology was forcefully shift ed to the study of the Slavs.3 Th e Beginnings of Bulgaria on the Lower Danube Bulgar groups appear in the Late Roman sources as early as the late 400s. During the early 630s, an independent Bulgar polity was established in the steppe corridor to the east of the Sea of Azov under the rule of Kubrat. Later Byzantine chroniclers called that polity “Great Bulgaria.”4 Th ere is only little archaeological evidence pertaining to those Bulgars, while the results of the Bulgarian archaeologists’ search for evidence of early Bulgar presence in the lands north of the Black Sea are not very convincing.5 More than two decades ago, the German archaeologist Joachim Werner has advanced the idea that the assemblage found in 1912 in Malaia Pereshchepina near Poltava (now Malo Pereshchepyne in Left -Bank Ukraine) was Kubrat’s tomb, and that interpretation is now widely accepted.6 According to the Byzantine chroniclers, following Kubrat’s death, his polity collapsed. Both Th eophanes and Nicephorus maintain that Kubrat’s fi ve sons divided the Bulgars among themselves. Th e oldest son, Batbaian or Baian, submitted to Khazar conquerors. Th e other four sons and their respective groups of Bulgars chose to move from Great Bulgaria to diff erent directions. Th e Bulgars following Kubrat’s third son, Asparukh, migrated to the west, across the Dnieper and Dniester rivers. Th ey settled in an area close to the Danube Delta named Onglos. Much ink has been spilled on the issue of the exact location of Onglos. Th e most convincing solution seems to be that advanc by the Bulgarian archaeologist Rasho Rashev, according to whom the Bulgars settled in northern Dobrudja, an area secured to the west and to the north by the Danube and limited to the east by the Black Sea.7 3 Dimitrov 1981, 26–27. 4 “Great” (megale or magna) does not describe territorial expansion, but is in fact a particularly Roman and Byzantine way of distinguishing between territories inside and outside the borders (fi ctitious or not) of the Empire. “Great Bulgaria” was thus the opposite of the later (or “Small”) Bulgaria on the Danube, inside the formerly Roman territory in the Balkans (see Veselina Vachkova, in this volume). 5 Dimitrov 1987 (for its review, see Bozhilov and Dimitrov 1995); Rashev 2005a. 6 Werner 1984. Full catalogue of the assemblage in Bulgarian: Zalesskaia et al. 2006. 7 For the debates surrounding the location of Onglos, see now Madgearu 2000. For Rashev’s theory, see Rashev 1982b; Rashev 2004a..
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