page_title: Culture of Bulgaria
hierarchical_section_title: Culture of Bulgaria
context_page_description: A number of ancient civilizations, including the Thracians, Ancient Greeks, Scythians, Celts, Ancient Romans, Goths, Slavs, Varangians and the Bulgars have left their mark on the culture, history and heritage of Bulgaria. Due to this great variety of influences, Bulgaria has adopted many unusual traditions, including nodding to mean "no" and shaking head for when you mean "yes". Thracian artifacts include numerous temples, tombs, golden treasures and ancient rites and rituals, while ancient Bulgars have left traces of their heritage in statehood, early architecture, music and dances. Thracian rituals such as the Tryphon Zarezan which is dedicated to Saint Tryphon of Campsada, Kukeri and Martenitza are to this day kept alive in the modern Bulgarian culture.
  The oldest 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 the hub of Slavic Europe during much of the Middle Ages, exerting considerable literary and cultural influence over the Eastern Orthodox Slavic world by means of the Preslav and Ohrid Literary Schools.
context_section_description: A number of ancient civilizations, including the Thracians, Ancient Greeks, Scythians, Celts, Ancient Romans, Goths (Ostrogoths and Visigoths), Slavs (East and West Slavs), Varangians and the Bulgars have left their mark on the culture, history and heritage of Bulgaria. Due to this great variety of influences, Bulgaria has adopted many unusual traditions, including nodding to mean "no" and shaking head for when you mean "yes". Thracian artifacts include numerous temples, tombs, golden treasures and ancient rites and rituals, while ancient Bulgars have left traces of their heritage in statehood, early architecture, music and dances. Thracian rituals such as the Tryphon Zarezan which is dedicated to Saint Tryphon of Campsada, Kukeri and Martenitza are to this day kept alive in the modern Bulgarian culture.
  The oldest 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 the hub of Slavic Europe during much of the Middle Ages, exerting considerable literary and cultural influence over the Eastern Orthodox Slavic world by means of the Preslav and Ohrid Literary Schools. Bulgaria also gave the world the Cyrillic script, the second most widely used alphabet and sixth writing system in the world, which originated in these two schools in the tenth century AD.
  Bulgaria's contribution to humanity continued throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with individuals such as John Atanasoff — a United States citizen of Bulgarian and British descent, regarded as the father of the digital computer. A number of noted opera-singers (Nicolai Ghiaurov, Boris Christoff, Raina Kabaivanska, Ghena Dimitrova, Anna Tomowa-Sintow, Vesselina Kasarova), pianist Alexis Weissenberg, and successful artists (Christo, Pascin, Vladimir Dimitrov) popularized the culture of Bulgaria abroad.
caption: A man from Florence, 1888 Renaissance-style painting by Konstantin Velichkov.
exif: {}