THRACE, TRAKIA,
Thrace is the name Greeks gave to the land bordering their north-east. Today ¼ of Thrace consists of the part of Turkey that is in Europe, 1/10th is the north-eastern-most part of Greece, and 2/3 is in southeast Bulgaria.
The land, less mountainous than much of Greece and Bulgaria, contains some valleys and wide plains. Agricultural production includes tobacco, corn, wine, rice, silk, fruit, olive oil, cotton, & wheat.
Greeks (via Homer) say Thracians were allies of Troy in the Trojan war (about 3200 years ago). They were described as rural (raising crops and animals, living in fortified villages on hilltops, avoiding cities), fierce barbarian warriors and horsemen (barbarians were anyone who didn’t speak Greek). They were admired for their poetry, music, and craftsmanship in gold.
The Greek mythic hero Orpheus, who could charm all living things with his music (even stones!), was born of the Thracian king Oeagrus and the Muse Calliope. Linguists conclude the Thracians spoke an Indo-European language, brought by invaders from the steppes of Ukraine/southern Russia 5000 years ago.
Thracians were then a very loose collection of tribes occupying most of what is today’s Bulgaria. Their near relatives, the Dacians, occupied much of Romania. Although technically on par with the Greeks, constant political fragmentation made Thracians easy prey for invaders (Persian, Macedonian, Roman, Bulgar, Turk).
Between 279 and 212 BCE, Celtic Gauls occupied parts of Thrace, on their way to settling in the region of Galatia, Anatolia.
Thrace has rarely been independent politically, but has never lost its identity under other rulers. Thus, after the 1912-1913 Balkan wars, Greece and Bulgaria each called land (acquired from the Ottoman Empire) Thrace.
Below is an excerpt from the book “Border, A Journey to the Edge of Europe” by Kapka Kassabova.
Thrace today denotes a large geographical area on the map. But Thrace is also a dead civilization, a contemporary of Ancient Greece, Macedonia, and Persia. The Thracians, who never formed an empire….are perhaps the least known of the ancient peoples of Europe.
Ancient Thrace sprawled across what is today the territory of northern Greece, including the islands of Samothraki and Thassos, as well as the European part of Turkey, and all of Bulgaria; across the Danube it covered Romania up to the Carpathian Mountains, and some of Serbia and North Macedonia. The Thracians left no written traces, but a great deal of material ones. Their stone-hewed cult sites, painted tombs and golden artifacts are second to none in the ancient world, but little is known of their lives. The Thracians weren’t studied until the twentieth century, and now that they are (mostly in Bulgaria and Greece, and more recently in Turkey), new tombs and treasures are dug up by archaeologists every few years. The longest tomb corridor excavated so far is Mezek, in the Bulgarian border village of the same name. Found by villagers in the 1930’s and and already thoroughly plundered by treasure hunters after the Balkan Wars, and containing a life-sized bronze boar among other things, it is said to be the tomb of a Thracian Odrysian king from round the fifth century B.C. When you walk the thirty meters lined with giant stone slabs, your lonely steps echoing before and after you with a hollow sound, you feel the chill of twenty-five centuries in your bones. And you glance back to make sure the bored guide hasn’t locked you in. Fore more about Mezek, click here.
Herodotus, our main source on the Thracians, described them as the most numerous and powerful collection tribes of his time. If only they could be politically united, he wrote, they would rule the world – but they couldn’t be bothered. If writing is one measure of civilization, then the Thracians were literary barbarians, for they indulged in numerous and mystical pleasures instead, song and craftsmanship, revelries and solar-chthonic cults.
Unlike the Macedonians, Persians and practically everyone else, they had no great conquering ambitions. Perhaps they were just politically lazy, the first complete society of hedonists. They shocked their Greek neighbours by drinking undiluted wine, but they were also known for being formidable warriors and horse raisers and, because of their disunity and laissez-faire attitude, a source of mercenaries to others.
The gladiator Spartacus, who led the biggest revolt against Rome, was a Thracian from near today’s Bulgarian-Greek border. The peninsula was subsumed by Romans, Slavs, Vlachs, Greeks, Asiatic Bulgars, Tatars, and other ethnicities, so by the time the Seljuk Turks arrived in the late fourteenth century, Thracian blood must have been well-mixed.
No nation-state has ever been named after Thrace (Macedonia is quite enough, thanks), but a geographic and cultural Thrace remains; bordered on three sides by the Aegean, Marmara, and Black Seas, from north to south it is made up of southern Bulgaria, (northern Thrace), then European Turkey (eastern Thrace), and north-eastern Greece (western Thrace).
Oddly, perhaps symbolically, I couldn’t find central Thrace on the map, but that’s exactly where I was headed: to a fertile region of soft climate dissected by three national borders. During the Cold War, this was where the armies of Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey were massed, because the low-lying hinterland provided an obvious military corridor for invasion. The Turks were nervous about the Soviets and the Greeks, the Greeks were nervous about the Soviets and Turks, and the Bulgarians were nervous about everyone. A military buffer zone for half a century, this was the point where one ideology stopped and another began. Ideologies have come and gone, but one thing has stayed: Several thousand years after the Thracians drank their undiluted wine, this is still a land of vines.
Folkdance Footnotes 