Reuters Fellowship Paper, Oxford University

THE DEBATE ON THRACE

How New Discoveries and Balkan Politics Are Changing Bulgaria's Understanding of its Ancient Past

By John Dyer

Michaelmas 2006/Hilary 2007

2

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and the Gerda Henkel Foundation for granting me the opportunity and resources to write this paper. I would also like to thank my advisor, Richard Crampton, for his guidance, and Boryana Dzhambazova and Polina Slavcheva for their ongoing assistance with my reporting in Bulgaria. Also, I am grateful to Dan Perry, the AP's Europe and Africa editor, who was receptive to the news story that became the seed of this project.

3

CONTENTS Chapter One Introduction 4 Chapter Two Orpheus is Ours: Alexander Fol 8 and the Institute for Thracian Studies Chapter Three Orpheus Unknown 21 Chapter Four History and Archaeology in 35 Bulgaria Chapter Five Bulgaria's Thracian Identity 49 Chapter Six Conclusion 58

4

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

Few gain entrance to the painted tomb of Kazanlak. A journey into the

2,300-year-old UNESCO World Heritage site usually begins months ahead of

time, with requests to the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture or the cultivation of

sources in Kazanlak's Iskra Museum. Once allowed through the tomb’s iron

gates, you are greeted by a watchful, stone-faced attendant who orders you to

don a white lab coat. No contaminating the place, she says. Then she escorts

you through a few more locked doors and climate-controlled antechambers filled

with bulky computers and temperature sensors. The machinery and the woman

seem to date from the communist era.

In the tomb, modern-day inconveniences are forgotten. Crouching, you

make your way down the corridor leading to the bee-hive-shaped burial chamber.

Standing in the silence of the crypt, you gaze at the brilliant funeral scene on the

inside of its dome — a Thracian king and queen in white and red robes attended

by soldiers, servants and horses. It is humbling to stand deep inside the

cramped, ancient space. There is barely enough room for two people. What

might it been like to lay at rest here? For a moment, one is in the past, in history.

How odd, then, to leave the tomb for the light of day to encounter a throng

of tourists queuing up to enter a second painted tomb of Kazanlak just a stone’s

5

throw away from the first. For while most do not have a chance to view the real

millennia-old tomb, thousands flock every year to view the copy built to scale

nearby, on the same hill in Kazanlak’s Tyulbeto Park. The thought strikes one

immediately: visitors to the copy cannot experience the same sense of history as

those who venture inside the real thing.

The replica of the painted tomb is accurate, but it lacks the sensation of

the real, the aura of authenticity. The frieze in the replica tomb feels garish. Next

to the replica’s entrance a saleswomen hocks guidebooks, refrigerator magnets

and Kazanlak’s other claim to fame, rose oil. But for most people, of course, the

painted tomb’s copy might as well be real. It is their best link to ancient Thracian

history. In a way, the copy is more popular, more influential, than the original.

I do not raise this point to disparage or praise an educational tourist

attraction. It would hardly be practical, after all, to allow busloads of camera-

toting visitors to rampage through the real painted tomb. Rather, the tomb’s copy

is an apt symbol for how Thrace is presented to the public today, the Bulgarian

public especially. While the real thing is kept under lock and key, another

representation of the tomb — of history — has been invented for a mass

audience. The same can be said for the subject of Thrace itself.

Ancient Thrace

The Balkan Peninsula is one of the oldest inhabited regions on earth.

Stone Age settlements in the region are widespread. Around 2800 BC, Thrace

6

became the first large-scale, organized civilization to emerge there (Venedikov

7). One would be wrong to say that culture developed sui generis, however. Like

modern Bulgaria, Thrace was a contact zone, a crossroads and meeting point for

numerous powerful cultures. Persia to the east, Scythians to the north, Greeks to

the south and in colonies on the Black Sea coast, migrating Celts and others

impacted Thrace at different periods of its development. Unlike some of their

neighbours, however, Thrace did not develop a written language. This lack of

writing has prompted scholars in the past to consider Thrace less advanced than

Greek or Persian civilization. Now historians are reconsidering that assessment,

but a final verdict on the level of Thracian civilization has yet to be made.

Further complicating studies of Thrace was its political composition. It was

an agglomeration of many tribes, not a single, unified kingdom. In an oft-quoted

passage, Herodotus in the Histories of the mid-fifth century BC described the

northern barbarians who sided with Troy in the Trojan War of the late Bronze Age

(1600-1200 BC):

The Thracians are the most powerful

people in the world, except, of course,

the Indians; and if they had one head, or

were agreed among themselves, it is my

belief that their match could not be

found anywhere, and that they would

very far surpass all other nations. But

7

such union is impossible for them, and

there are no means of ever bringing it

about. Herein therefore consists their

weakness. (5.3)

Thrace indeed was vast. If one imposed ancient Thrace on a current map

of the Balkans, it would stretch from eastern Serbia to western Turkey and from

northern Greece, past the northern shores of the Danube in Romania and on to

the Ukrainian frontier. At the heart of Thrace, therefore, was modern Bulgaria. It

comes as no surprise, then, that the most exciting archaeological finds related to

Thrace — and to classical studies — have been found in Bulgaria recently. Also,

Bulgarian scholars are among those devoting the most time and energy to

researching Thrace. Until his recent death, foremost among those scholars was

Alexander Fol.

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CHAPTER TWO

ORPHEUS IS OURS: ALEXANDER FOL AND THE INSTITUTE OF THRACIAN

STUDIES

Fol was the founder of the Institute of Thracian Studies, or ITS, a division

of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Before his death in 2006, Fol and his

colleagues were tireless advocates of Thrace in the field of ancient history. The

thrust of Fol’s scholarship — as seen in Thracian Orphism, Thracian Dionysus ,

Ancient Thrace and other texts — is that classicists have overlooked thousands

of years of Thracian culture and its influence on the Hellenic world. Much of his

work focuses on esoteric Thracian religious beliefs and practises. Thracian

culture, he claims, was the source of important aspects of Greek mythology,

particularly the mythical figure of Orpheus and Orphism, a label for a host of

ancient cult beliefs. Before dealing with Fol’s work, however, we should review

the Orpheus myth.

Writers have recorded many versions of Orpheus’ story since it first

appeared in the archaeological record in the sixth century (Guthrie 1). The core is

as follows: distraught at the death of his wife Eurydice, Orpheus descended into

the afterlife to fetch her. Being the world’s greatest poet and singer, he played a

song on his lyre and convinced the lord of death, Hades, to allow him to bring

Eurydice back to the land of the living. But on the way out of the underworld,

9

Orpheus broke his pledge not to gaze upon Eurydice before they reached the

sunlight on the surface. The promise broken, his love returned to the land of the

dead.

Again, Orpheus was despondent . He shunned women and retreated to the

wilderness to play his lyre. There, his music was so compelling, it literally moved

rocks and trees. Some versions of the myth say his experience in Hades caused

him to forswear Dionysus, thus incurring the wrath of the god, who sent a group

of female followers to attack and tear Orpheus to shreds. Later, Orpheus' head

continued to live, spouting prophecies and founding an oracle. The lyre

constellation became a memorial to his tragedy.

From his first appearance, Orpheus was linked to Thrace. He was the son

of the muse Calliope and Oiagros, a Thracian river god. Eurydice was likely a

Thracian nymph. He was murdered in Thrace. In some versions of his story, he

shunned women but continued to charm Thracian men with his music. The

women who kill him were usually described as Thracian. Finally, his remains (not

his head) were buried near Mount Olympus, on the frontier between Thrace and

Northern Greece (Guthrie 27-35). Orpheus was also often said to have been one

of the Argonauts, the crew Jason took on his search for the Golden Fleece. On

that trip he was described as a Thracian reputed to have used his music to evade

monsters and to initiate Jason into the mysteries of Samothrace, an island in the

North Aegean (Guthrie 28).

Thus many ancient Greek writers assert that Orpheus and his myth came

from Thrace. Here Fol enters. He makes a distinction between the Thracian

10

origins of myths like that of Orpheus and the way the Greek writers represented

them:

…when talking of “Thracian myths,” we

should have in mind that they represent

literary conditioned subject-matters and

personages that become known to the

Hellenes during the internal

Hellenization of some lands previously

populated with Thracians…these

subject-matters and personages were

taken chiefly as moral admonitions. (Fol,

Ancient Thrace 43)

Gods and myths were not only worshipped or revered in ancient Greece, Fol

claims. They epitomized social norms, or “moral admonitions.” Heracles

personified physical courage, for example. Athena signified wisdom. Orpheus’

story might have been employed to teach the benefits of keeping promises or —

in light of how he snatched defeat from the jaws of victory — not to count one's

chickens before they hatch. But in Thrace, Fol argues, the myth of Orpheus was

not a myth, per se. Rather, Fol claims Thracian religious rituals inspired the

Greeks to create the myth. To understand this claim, one needs to read

backwards from the Greek myth, to decode it to reveal its historical

11

underpinnings in Thracian Orphism.

Fol’s analysis of Thracian Orphism and its manifestation in Greek myth is

difficult. His writing on the subject is more philosophical or anthropological than

historical, though he cites writers like Homer and Plato and archaeological

evidence to support his ideas. At the heart of Fol’s Orphism lies a ritual originally

practised in caves and stone constructions called dolmans or rock-cut

sanctuaries built from the middle of the second millennium to the middle of the

first millennium BC in territory encompassing much of the central Balkans (172).

The popular tourist site, Tatyl, in the Rhodope Mountains near the Bulgarian town

of Kardjali, dating from the late Bronze Age, is an example of such a sanctuary

(75).

Devotees of Orphism in Thrace — particularly aristocrats — conducted

these rituals, which Fol argues are allegorically mirrored in the Greek Orpheus

myth. First, devotees would sacrifice animals, often horses, in the caves or rock-

cut sanctuaries. The horse was a crucial animal in Thracian culture. The

Thracians were renowned for their horsemanship and Fol suggests that a horse’s

life was as valued as a human’s (Fol, Thracian Orphism 237). Thus, Orphists

participating in the sacrifice identified with the dead animal, as if they had died,

too. The devotees would then enter the cave or sanctuary — metaphorically

entering the underworld like Orpheus. Inside, the devotees would conduct a ritual

that culminated in the priest drawing away a slab that covered a hole in the cave

or roof of the sanctuary. When the slab was removed, the sun’s rays entered the

hole, symbolizing an exit from the underworld, an Orpheus -like ascent to the land

12

of the living (Fol, Ancient Thrace 176). A similar version of the story involves

sacrifices before dawn, where worshippers welcomed the sunrise as a rebirth or

return to earth (Kraev). Greek writers used these rituals, Fol argues, as the basis

of their Orpheus myth. In a sense, they acted like modern-day anthropologists,

but in reverse. Instead of witnessing rituals and describing them with a pretence

of objectivity, they created a myth based on the rituals.

Thracian Orphism

Fol’s description of Thracian Orphism makes still deeper claims on the

popular myth of Orpheus . Again, these claims assume Greek mythology was laid

over Thracian culture, like a palimpsest, with Greeks often employing their

mythological vocabulary to identify Thracian cult figures. Fol and his colleagues

saw this analytical strategy as a decoding process. ITS scholar Ivan Marazov, for

example, described it revelatory:

It is not an easy thing to see the light of

truth across the millennia. The ancient

writers have left us scanty, confused

and often contradictory information on

Thracian religion, representing some

beliefs and cult customs as exotic

oddities or as illustrations of barbarian

13

ways. More often than not, they gave

the Thracian deities the names of Greek

or Roman gods. (17)

The Thracians believed in an Earth Mother. This mother self-fertilized

herself to give birth to the sun, which was personified as a male child. In an

oedipal twist, the son then copulated with his mother to sire another child who

served as king and high-priest for an individual Thracian tribe. The high-priest

acted as mediator between the Earth Mother and her son, the sun. Among his

duties as mediator, he initiated new people into these beliefs. The cave and rock-

cut sanctuary rituals derived from this cosmology. When the priest pulled away

the slab in the sanctuary or cave's roof, he symbolically allowed the sun to enter

the Earth Mother, recreating their incest (176). When Greek writers documented

these rituals, Marazov writes, they used their native vocabulary to identify this

son/sun figure. They called him Apollo (30).

Orpheus is most often identified as the king and high-priest who

conducted the rock sanctuary rituals. Thus, he initiated cult members and was

the son of Apollo. He has the same traits in Greek myth. Orpheus initiated the

Argonauts into secret cults. His decapitated head tells the future and founds an

oracle, while priests of Apollo foretold the future at Greece's most important

oracle at Delphi (Guthrie 35). The sun god played the lyre, Orpheus' forte.

Orphists espoused doctrines related to the art of healing, which Greek myth says

was a gift from Apollo to mankind.

14

Fol repeatedly emphasizes the aristocratic appeal of the rock sanctuary

cults. The king and high priest inducted only a small stratum of Thracian society.

How, then, could a secret cult outside Greece grow popular enough to inspire a

Greek myth? To understand how the majority of Thracian people worshipped —

and how that mass culture filtered into Greek mythology and society — we must

consider another alleged Thracian export to Greece: Dionysus.

Dionysus and Orphism

In the Greek world, Dionysus, not Apollo, was the god of Orphism. Indeed,

in Greece the two gods were polar opposites, with the sun god Apollo

representing logic and reason and Dionysus, the god of wine, signifying ecstasy

and irrationality. If we are to believe Fol's assertion that Orphism originated in

Thrace, we therefore must explain how — even as Orpheus retained some

aspects of the sun god, like the lyre — Dionysus usurped Apollo as the cult’s

patron god as it traveled south.

At the end of the Bronze Age, they argue, the solar aspect of Thracian

Orphism that the Greeks affiliated with Apollo was widespread. At this time,

however, the god Dionysus appeared in Thrace as an import from the East and

merged with Thracian religion. The Greeks later assimilated this Eastern god into

their pantheon, saying he was from Thrace even though he was foreign to

Thracians, too.

15

Not only Herodotus, but all the ancients

believed that Dionysus was a Thracian

god and that he had come to Greece

from the north. Many modern scholars

share this belief. Initially, however,

Dionysus was alien both to the Greeks

and the Thracians, though it is probable

that his religion was established in

Thrace before it spread to Greece. His

Asia Minor origins are beyond dispute.

He came to the Balkans across the

Hellespont, the most convenient

passage between the two continents,

and from the Thracian shore of the

Propontis began his victorious progress

among Barbarians and Greeks

(Marazov 25).

How did Dionysus make this victorious progress? Fol contends Dionysus

worship spread because it contributed a new ritual to Orphism that, unlike the

secret initiations, appealed to Thracian society at large. This popular ritual was

undoubtedly crucial if Thrace did in fact export Orphism to Greece.

16

The people professing the cults would

split. Some would gather…to hear the

Teacher and attain a state of solitary

concentration, without having the right to

speak. Others would wait for the night to

light their torches and to start roaming in

the mountains of Parnassus and Thrace

with their tympans, cymbals and flutes.

The silent ones were the aristocrats, the

raging group consisted of all the rest,

men and women alike, the participants

in the Orphic and Bacchic rites (Fol,

Orphism and the Arts 122).

"Burlesque scenes set in an atmosphere of Dionysian revelry spread like wildfire

in Corinthian vase painting" in Greece during the late seventh century (Burkert,

Greek Religion 290). It is not implausible to believe the aristocratic mystery cult

piggybacked on the raucous communal rites' movement south.

Thus, over time, according to Fol's line of thought, Dionysus became a

central part of the Thracian beliefs exported to Greece to become known as

Orphism. The transfer was not simple, however. By the time Orphism appears in

Greece, it had become a mixed collection of different and often overlapping

17

concepts and traditions, what Plato in The Republic called a "hubbub of books""

(364e) and what prompted the narrator of Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited

to portray his poor cousin Jasper as struggling in vain with the subject in

preparation for his Oxford examinations. This perplexity makes it hard to explain

the exact nature of Orphism, the same way one might be hard pressed to

compose a one-size-fits-all definition of Pentecostalism today.

As it was practised in Greece, Orphism has often been compared to

Puritanism. Aristocratic or initiated practitioners maintained dietary restrictions ,

including vegetarianism, and held theories about the immortality of the soul, how

it was imprisoned in the body and how one's actions while living affected one's

fate in the afterlife, or how one was reincarnated. The so-called Orphic poems

from the second half of the sixth century in Greece refer to man possessing

'divine' and 'criminal' natures. One was supposed to live up to one’s divine

essence today in this world, where his soul was currently suffering for sins

committed in former lives that were attributable to the latter essence.

These beliefs reflect the myth about the creation of man from the ashes of

the 'criminal' or 'sinful' Titans who consumed 'divine' Dionysus. In a common

version of Dionysus’ story, he was the son of Zeus and Persephone. Zeus’ wife,

Hera, is jealous of their affair and, while distracting the child with a mirror, sent

Titans to kill him. The Titans tore Dionysus to shreds and ate him, but failed to

consume his heart. Zeus, angry, destroyed the Titans with a thunderbolt. From

their ashes rose human beings. Later, Dionysus is regenerated from his heart.

He becomes the god of wine.

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These beliefs also gel with the Orpheus myth, because, as a reward for

following the poems' strictures, one learns one's soul is immortal, an echo of the

poet's descent and return from the land of the dead. The theme in the Orpheus

myth of transgression and punishment, which culminates in the women

murdering Orpheus, also infuses the poems.

Burkert writes that the Orphic poems denoted a transformed Greek

concept of the soul. They articulated a doctrine of transmigration that

"presupposes that in a living being, man as animal, there is an individual,

constant something, an ego that preserves its identity by force of its own

essence, independent of the body which passes away" (Burkert Greek Religion

300). Orphic poems, in other words, were new and revolutionary in the Greek

pantheon because they posited that man, not only gods, were immortal. The

radicalism of these ideas supports the argument that they originated in Thrace, or

another foreign culture, where the Greek pantheon was not sacrosanct.

However, people in both regions also engaged in the inclusive, wild rites

— which clearly cannot be labeled as Puritanical. In fact, they were often labeled

as bacchanalias that were also dedicated to Dionysus, whose death the frenzied

rites supposedly reenacted. Thus Greek Orphism itself seemed to be split into an

Apollonian, rational side and a crazy, Dionysian side. Fol and his colleagues

argue this contradiction stems from the Greeks misinterpreting Thracian culture

as they appropriated it. One sees this confusion in the way many of these Greek

ideas overlap with one another, as if they came from a single source but were

transmitted to Greece through different authors and avenues.

19

The Greek Dionysus myth parallels Thracian cult practises that Fol argues

inspired the Orpheus myth. Dionysus resembles the sacrificial animal whose

death precedes, and whose rebirth follows, the Thracian cult's metaphoric

descent into and exit from the underworld in the rock sanctuaries. Marazov also

argues that Persephone, the wife of Hades whose myth involved the regulation of

the seasons, was a Greek version of the Thracian Earth Mother. That would

make Dionysus her son, a fitting role for a god who is reborn like the sun rising

and who is then the father of the king and high priest (Marazov 27). Thus

Dionysus would be the father of Orpheus, the namesake of the wine god's cult,

Orphism.

Fol paints a picture of Orpheus, Apollo and Dionysus melding into each

other as the Greeks assimilate Thracian cultural elements. The poet's expertise

with music and prophecy reflect Apollo. His violent demise is like that of

Dionysus. Some even blame Orpheus' death on the conflict inherent in this

duality. Some versions of the Orpheus myth say the poet's bitter experience in

Hades moved him to foreswear the underworld-related Dionysus in favour of

Apollo, the sun god. Dionysus sought revenge by sending the maenads, his

female followers, to kill him (Guthrie 32).

Fol and his colleagues at the Institute for Thracian Studies make a

compelling case for Thracian influence on Greek mythology. But are they

correct? Certainly it is possible Thrace exported Orphism to Greece. By the fifth

century, Thracian Orphism had long been established as the religion of the

leaders of the most powerful tribe in Thracian history, the Odrysians (Fol, Ancient

20

Thrace 178). The Odrysians were allies and adversaries of Athens and other

Greek city states and their colonies during the Golden Age of Greece, especially

those established on the Black Sea in the modern day Bulgarian cities of

Nesebar and Sozopol.

Greek influence appears in thousands of sophisticated tombs built over

hundreds of years, including the painted tomb of Kazanlak, which had holes in

the top of their roofs covered by slabs, like a rock-cut sanctuary, and where

archaeologists have found stellar artifacts and other pieces proving Thrace

enjoyed close contacts with Greeks, whether because Greek artisans made the

artifacts or because the pieces display Greek aesthetic influences (179). The

cultural exchange between the two could not have been uni-directional. If Thrace

took from Greece, Greece had to have taken from Thrace, too.

But many scholars are not convinced Orpheus was a Thracian export.

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CHAPTER THREE

ORPHEUS UNKNOWN

In our first encounters with Orpheus in the sixth century, he is an

Argonaut or a teacher and musician. The earliest mention in Greek literature of

the story of Orpheus descending into Hades — the one Fol claims was inspired

by Thracians — occurs later, however, in a passing reference in Euripides' play

Alcestis in 438 (Graf 81). Of course, for ancient audiences to be familiar enough

with the myth to understand an allusion to it, the story was likely popular in

Greece years before that. But the date is the earliest we can be sure the story

about Orpheus' visit to Hades was in the air.

More important is the context 438 provides. It marks a crucial time in the

history of ancient Greece. Less than fifty years before Euripides mentions

Orpheus, the Greek city states and Persia had been at war. Ten years before the

Euripides play, Athens had begun rebuilding the damage Xerxes had wreaked on

their city. In the same year, Pericles dedicated the new statue of Athena erected

in the Parthenon. Just when we have the first mention of Orpheus' descent,

Greek culture was recovering from the shock of its first mass-scale encounter

with non-Greek culture, a recovery that was sparking Greece's golden age.

This cultural flowering entailed new attitudes towards barbarians, a term

referring to people who did not speak Greek. One might say Greece was

22

fascinated with barbarians in the wake of the Persian Wars. It was not the first

time the sea-faring Greeks had come in contact with foreigners, but the Persian

Wars were the first time another society seriously challenged mainland Greek

civilization, a challenge that forced Greeks to define themselves as a unified

whole in opposition to an outside force rather than in terms of how they related to

each other as citizens of different city states. The result was a paradigm shift in

how the Greeks viewed themselves and others:

…ethnic identity can rarely achieve a

salience in the absence of an 'outgroup'

against which an ethnic group can

define itself through a process of

intergroup comparison. This is precisely

what happened after the Persian Wars.

By establishing a stereotypical,

generalized image of the exotic, slavish

and unintelligible barbarian, Greek

identity could be defined 'from without,'

through opposition with this image of the

alterity. To find the language, culture or

rituals of the barbarian desperately alien

was immediately to find oneself as

Greek. (Hall 47)

23

Representations of Orpheus on Attic vases illustrate this shift. Before the

first half of the fifth century, vase painters depicted Orpheus in Greek dress.

After that time, however, the vases show him in Thracian costume. Scholars

differ on whether this change proves or disproves Orpheus' Thracian origins.

Zofia Archibald argues there was no connection between Orpheus and Thrace

before the mid-fifth century. With their newfound fascination with barbarians later

in the century, however, she claims, vase painters decided to make Orpheus a

barbarian because he incurred the wrath of the gods. He was a "man whose

behavior goes beyond the bounds of acceptability and must be punished"

(Archibald 208-209). In other words, the myth of Orpheus became a cautionary

tale with a barbarian as the scapegoat.

Fritz Graf is not so sure. The different costumes do not indicate the

imposition of a new nationality on Orpheus, as if the poet was suddenly

transformed into a Thracian, he claims. Rather, Graf argues Greek vase painters'

changed Orpheus' dress because their newfound self-awareness as Greeks was

mirrored in a more sophisticated artistic style. Previously their craft did not call for

representations to accurately depict different peoples in exacting detail, but, after

450, "They wished to differentiate them [barbarians] better from themselves"

(Graf 106, f79). It is impossible to say who is correct. The point is that Greek

culture was redefining itself and its neighbours in this period when the Orpheus

myth as a myth about a foreign neighbor was gaining currency in Greece.

This self-redefinition process impacts how one thinks about the origins of

24

Orpheus in other ways. Plato in the early fourth century famously labeled poetic

imagination as a form of madness dangerous enough for him to advocate the

expulsion of poets from his ideal republic. In Plato, poets are literally foreign to

the republic. Orpheus was a poet, so it follows that he would be viewed in a

similarly light. Thus the syllogism: Orpheus is a poet; poets are foreign; Orpheus

is foreign. Foreigners, of course, are barbarians. We cannot ask the ancient

Greeks if the y felt this way, but Plato's theories at least illustrate the intellectual

climate inclined to move Orpheus' origins outside Greece.

There are other characteristics of Greek culture at the time that naturally

lead to Orpheus being marketed, so to speak, as a barbarian. Following Plato

and Archibald's argument, one might conclude the Greeks framed Orpheus as a

barbarian who fails in his mission simply because it was in vogue to do so.

Losing Euridyce and then ripped to shreds, he certainly gets the short end of the

stick. But like many tragic characters, Orpheus is also sympathetic and admired

for his gifts, particularly as a musician. "Slavish and unintelligible" — two qualities

Hall cites in Greek perceptions of barbarians in the mid-fifth century — do not

come to mind in reference to Orpheus. The poet was a complex, human figure.

So why, if not for negative motives, was he labelled a Thracian? The answer lies

in the structure of Greek mythology, which was predisposed towards making

Orpheus an alien:

When a figure in Greek mythology was

given a foreign origin, this does not

25

necessarily mean that he was, at a

certain point of Greek history or rather

pre-history, introduced from outside into

the system of Greek mythology. In the

first place, it means this figure was felt

as foreign, strange to this system, at

least in archaic and classical times,

when most myths gained their definite

forms. (100)

Ares, the god of bloodlust and war, was from Thrace. Dionysus, the god of

wine, ecstasy and irrationality was from Thrace. But Thrace is not the only region

where gods or mythical figures emerge. Amazons were from Scythia on the

northern Black Sea. Egypt was the source of wondrous medicines. Gods

responsible for things Greeks could not or did not want to ascribe to themselves

were from outside Greece — contrast Ares with Athena, a decidedly Greek

goddess who also oversaw war, but the strategic, cerebral aspects of battle,

qualities Greeks were likely to see in themselves while sloughing off oversight of

the dirty business of killing people to a barbarian god.

Orpheus' character was in the same vein. As someone who journeyed into

the underworld and returned, he was ascribed powers beyond those of Greek

heroes like Odysseus and Hercules. Those powers put him on the borderline

between life and death, whereas the Greek polis was firmly situated on earth.

26

Throughout history, and in numerous world cultures, those who journey into the

afterlife to communicate with the dead or fetch souls are shamans, figures who

are part of the community while retaining a special, outsider status at the same

time (Graf 83). In Greek society, it would have been problematic, in other words,

for Orpheus to be Greek, even if he was firmly situated in Greek society.

The social, intellectual and religious trends that may have led the Greeks

to identify Orpheus with Thrace — regardless of whether or not his story

originated there — paved the way for another force to co-opt the poet: politics. In

the Peloponnesian War, which ran from 431 to 404, Athens and Sparta were

desperate for allies. The Thracian empire of the Odrysian tribe chose to join up

with Athens. This alliance may have been the impetus for Athenians to "discover"

Orpheus' Thracian background.

I.M. Linforth first proposes this thesis by citing an epigram ascribed to a

fourth-century sophist, Alcidamas. The epigram retells the Orpheus myth with a

twist. Instead of the Thracian women ripping him to shreds, the passage says the

Thracians buried Orpheus after Zeus killed him with a thunderbolt because of the

unheard-of doctrines he preached. It also credits Orpheus — who is not identified

as Thracian — with teaching Hercules and discovering the art of writing. That

implies Orpheus instructed the Thracians in writing. Thus, they "did not deserve

the reproach of illiteracy," an odd idea given that they did not have a written

language. The epigram has a "distinctly pro-Thracian tone" (8).

Linforth believes the epigram dates from around the first year of the

Peloponnesian War. During the onset of the war, Athens offered citizenship to

27

the son of the Odrysian Thracian king Sitalces as part of an agreement where

Odrysia became an ally of Athens. "When the Peloponnesian war broke out, and

both Sparta and Athens were doing their utmost to extend their alliances, the

friendship of Sitalces was a much coveted price," Linforth writes (9). The

epigram, he suggests, was crafted to appeal to Thracians as they weighed which

side to join:

...a probable inference from the

circumstances that have been adduced

[is] that the epigram was composed as a

bit of propaganda, about the year 431,

in Athens, or possible in Abdera [a

Greek city]. (10)

Eric Hobsbawm called this intellectual manoeuvre the invention of

tradition. What better way to illustrate a natural affinity between Athens and the

Odrysians than to produce evidence to show how the Athenians had for years

adored one of Thrace's native sons? Overcoming any lack of such evidence was

not a very hard move. After all, in the Greek myth of Dionysus, Zeus kills the

Titans with a thunderbolt, too. It is just a bit of grafting one story onto another.

The epigram does not delve into the doctrines that caused Zeus to strike

down Orpheus. Mentioning those doctrines would have put Alcidamas on

"dangerous ground," Linforth writes (11). That danger could spring from a

28

number of factors. First, the conflict in the Orpheus myth between Greece's

Apollo and Thrace's Dionysus might have been too delicate to raise in a piece of

pro-Thracian propaganda. Second, it is not clear the anc ients possessed fixed

ideas about the mysteries Orpheus supposedly preached. Modern scholars do

not either. This aspect of the Orpheus myth — the unclear provenance of

Orphism —is the final example of how many classicists disagree with Fol's

theories.

Greek Orphism

While Fol posits that ancient Thrace was the wellspring of Orphism, other

scholars speculate that the beliefs and rituals collectively known as Orphism

were in fact different practises that sometimes resembled one another whether or

not they directly influenced each other. Thus Orphism cannot be discussed

without reference to other ancient cultures besides Thrace or to phenomena

within the Hellenic world: Bacchic orgies, the cult of Pythagoras and the Eleusian

mysteries.

Classical historians have spent much time debating the existence of an

'Orphic church,' an organized religion or cult that followed tenets laid out in the

Orphic poems. These writings, according to Plato and Euripides, were used in

'revelling' and 'sacrifices and play' (Parker, Early Orphism 484). Whereas the

genealogy of gods or the exploits of heroes usually provided fare for classical

poetry, the rarer topic of the afterlife — an unknowable subject — inspired Orphic

29

poems. Hence, they were termed 'mysteries.' Familiarity with them indicated one

had been 'initiated' 486). Orpheus is described as the author of the original

poems, but not until the fifth-century do they derive explicitly from the Dionysus

myth (497).

Soon after the poems' appearance, however, their history was in dispute.

Herodotus, for example, in describing Egyptian culture in the mid-fifth century,

makes an analogy between Orphism and how the Egyptians did not wear wool in

shrines or place woollen garments in graves: "They [the Egyptians] agree in this

with the rites which are known as Orphic and Bacchic, but which in fact are

Egyptian and Pythagorean" (484). The father of history is positing different

origins for Orphism.

Until the mid-1980s, scholars agreed that Dionysus was from Asia. Now

the commonly held belief is that he was a Greek invention who was 'orientalized'

in the sixth century BC (Edith Hall 147). Yet it is still possible to speculate that

Egypt received a god like him from the east or that Dionysus or a figure who

inspired the wine god migrated from Egypt to Greece via Thrace . Burkert

maintains Dionysus' Greek origins, but he mentions, for example, how Orphic

poems often resemble The Egyptian Book of the Dead (295). The myth of the

Egyptian god Osiris has striking parallels to Dionysus and Orpheus: Osiris is

ripped to shreds, descends into the underworld but returns to sire Horus, a god

who resembled Apollo. Egyptian mythology is far older than Greek mythology,

however. The thousands of years between the flowering of the Egyptian and

Greek cultures indicate that Orphic-like beliefs could have travelled from the Nile

30

to Greece via Thrace, but that option, if true, would also totally blow out of the

water any thesis that postulates Orphism first originated in Thrace.

The 'bacchic' aspect of Orphism relates to the Dionysian revelries Fol

describes where villagers roam the countryside making a racket with flutes and

drums. As said above, these revelries are first seen on Corinthian vases around

600, decades earlier than when the Orphic poems are first found, the right period

if one assumes the poems would have discussed subjects that were already

commonplace. At around the same time, cultists performed 'mysteries' in the

name of Dionysus, often in caves, writes Burkert (Greek Religion 290). The

ancients linked these revelries with Orphism. How they were linked is unclear,

however. Bacchic revelries could be reenactments of the Titans eating Dionysus

in a frenzy. But remember that in the first Orphic poems we do not find direct

references to Dionysus. That only happens in the fifth century. A dilemma arises.

Possibly the myth was well-known for centuries before. But we do not know. It is

hard to say, therefore, if the bacchic revelries inspired the myth of Dionysus or if

the myth inspired the revelries

Herodotus also mentions Pythagorism. Born in the late sixth century, the

famous mathematician fathered a system of beliefs that mirrors many aspects of

Orphism. Pythagoras espoused vegetarianism, doctrines of transmigration and a

numerology that attempted to exp lain the physical world and spawned a cult

whose members believed they had access to mysteries. Fol claims Pythagoras'

ideas stemmed from his journeys in the East, where Orpheus' teachings had

spread, before settling in southern Italy (Fol, Ancient Thrace 197). No scholars

31

outside the Institute of Thracian Studies arrive at the same conclusion. Instead,

like the connection between bacchic rituals and Orphic poems, they plead

ignorance due to a lack of evidence: "Orphism is closely related to Pythagorism

without being reducible to it; as for the additional elements, it is best to admit that

we cannot determine their date or origin precisely" (Parker , Early Orphism 501).

Lastly, the Eleusian mysteries echo the Orpheus myth. The mysteries

were part of a festival that took place in Eleusis near Athens. They were based

on the legend of the goddess of the harvest, Demeter, searching for her daughter

Persephone in the underworld. The legend explains the change in the seasons,

the result of a bargain struck between Demeter and Hades, Persephone's

husband. For part of the year Persephone had to stay with her husband in the

afterlife. She could live aboveground for another part of the year. Her descent

and return, and her mother's grief at her absence and joy at her homecoming,

correspond to autumn and winter, on one hand, and spring and summer on the

other.

Clearly the Eleusian story contains family resembles to Orpheus myth.

Furthermore, the festival involved attendants being 'initiated' into the mysteries

that, like Orphic poems and Pythagorism, claimed to explain the nature of the

cycle of life. The Eleusian mysteries are first recorded in Euripides, where they

are given a Thracian origin via Eumolpus, their founder, not a Thracian himself

per se, but a descendent of a half-Thracian, half-Athenian princess. But Parker

notes that earlier traditions did not include the Thracian aspect of the story.

Euripides, Parker suggests, might have included that detail during the barbarian

32

craze of the fifth century (Myths of Early Athens 203).

Orphism. Egyptian mythology. Bacchic rituals. Pythagorism. Eleusian

mysteries. Burkert refers the nexus of these ideas as the Orphic field, "the use of

books and some insistence on individual perfection and afterlife" (Orphism and

Bacchic Mysteries 7). Trying to untie the interconnected strands of this field

would not be productive here. Archibald sums up the laudable goal of avoiding

that comprehensiveness:

The temptation to treat stories about

Orpheus as though they belonged to a

consistent tradition should be resisted. If

we accept that there might be rival, even

mutually inconsistent tales, then we are

not obliged to try to fit them all into a

single, coherent scheme (209).

The point is that plenty of evidence complicates theories of a direct relationship

between Orphism and Thrace.

Light at the End of the Tunnel

And yet. With other scholars waiting for additional archaeological evidence

to tell us more about Orpheus and Orphism, no one is directly refuting Fol's

33

claims. In fact, some scholars are now developing theses that, while not

addressing the work of ITS specifically, bolster some of Fol's assumptions. At

Cambridge University, for example, Sara Owen is producing new scholarship that

attempts to view Thrace and other barbarians from less of a Greek perspective,

specifically in cases where Greeks colonized barbarian lands. Much of classical

scholarship assumes Greeks brought civilization to the foreigners whose lands

they settled, Owen argues, as if those foreigners possessed no civilizations

before triremes and hoplites arrived on their shores: "The Greek colonization of

Thrace has long been studied with the analogy of modern imperialism in mind"

(Ancient Colonizations 18).

Owen shows, for example, how Greek colonists took possession of a cave

on the northern Aegean island of Thasos, dedicating it to the satyr -like god Pan

in the fourth century after it had already been used as a Thracian rock-cut tomb

for at least one hundred years (Thasos 140 ). It is possible, she claims, that the

Greek use of the tomb is a reinterpretation of a local practise, an extension of the

site as a sacred place (143). Scholars in the past have avoided reaching this

conclusion, Owen argues, because of their ideological blinders:

The Greek colonization of Thasos, and

indeed of Thrace, is currently written

from a wholly Hellecentric and text-

based perspective [that is, using Greek

myths and ancient scholars] behind

34

which lies an unspoken and pervasive

comparison with Western European

colonialism (Thasos 139).

Perhaps, then, when scholars wave off claims that Thrace, and not

Greece, generated Orpheus, they are saying more about their Western

ideologies than the subject they are researching. Based at Cambridge’s Greek

Colonization and the Archaeology of European Development project, Owen

represents new shift in classical history. We have yet to see the full scope of her

and her colleagues' inquiries.

35

CHAPTER FOUR

HISTORY AND ARCHAEOLOGY IN BULGARIA

If ideology has threatened to blind Western historians in their treatment of

ancient Thrace, can the same be said of Bulgarian historians? The answer

seems to be an emphatic yes. The practise of history and archaeology in

Bulgaria stands accused of reflecting a strong political bias stemming from its

roots as a nation-building exercise. The first Bulgarian historians were often

clergymen who concerned themselves with narratives arguing for the richness of

Bulgarian culture and bolstering the case for Bulgaria's independence: the history

of the Bulgarian church and language and the spread of Christianity to other

Slavic nations via Bulgaria (Todorova, Historiography 1105). Modern Bulgarian

historiography was born during the National Revival of the first half of the

nineteenth century, when the nation required cultural tools in its struggle for

independence from the Ottoman Empire. These goals were normal expressions

of the positivist, romantic spirit of the age. The problem, some argue, is that

historical studies and archaeology in Bulgaria never progressed beyond that

point.

During the era between independence in 1878 and the end of the First

World War, historians continued writing as nation-builders, with a focus on

documenting the culture of the newly formed state. Maria Todorova notes, for

36

example, that the Musicology Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences —

first called the Bulgarian Lite rary Society, founded in 1869 — recorded an

impressive 200,000 folk songs by the turn of the century. The goal of such work

was "shaping of national consciousness and self-esteem on the basis of

historical knowledge" (1106). The subject that received the most attention during

this era, however, was the Bulgaria's medieval predecessors, a series of empires

that locked horns with Byzantium before the Turks conquered the Balkans and

inaugurated 500 years of colonialism Bulgarians refer to as a time 'under the

yoke.' This strategy of glorifying the past during an uncertain present — a small

country standing on its own two feet for the first time after centuries — would be

replicated in future eras.

The interwar period saw historians tackling a wider spectrum of subjects,

with ancient and modern history, especially the National Revival period, receiving

attention (1107). But the debacle of Bulgaria's involvement in World War II and

the advent of communism quickly changed things. Initially, the government

imposed Marxism on scholars, forcing them to take up social and economic

critiques. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, a change occurred. There was a

thaw in Marxist rigour, but a reassertion of nationalism among historians. Rather

than a clandestine or dissident trend, the country's elites stoked this nationalism,

which culminated in the 1980s (1108). Perhaps the Bulgarian Communist Party

encouraged nationalism to shore up the eroding underpinnings of their system.

What is more important to note is that an objective, critical historical practise was

not similarly encouraged or even permitted.

37

During this period, scholars were often shifted from Sofia University to

various institutes in the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences (BAN is its Bulgarian

acronym), a reorganization that took its cue from the Soviet Union (1113).

Whereas in the USSR this restructuring was designed to break university

traditions that predated the party and thus might challenge government control, in

Bulgaria the offshoots were more explicitly designed as arms of the state for

research into specific topics, Bulgarian history especially. A hand-in-glove

relationship between intellectuals and Bulgaria's government was not new. BAN

has always served as a launching pad for regents, presidents and prime

ministers, who in turn have influenced its affairs (Welsh). What is notable about

these policies, however, was that while they reflected innovation in terms of the

history of communism in Eastern Europe, they were archaic compared to the

scientism, or quest for ostensible objectivity, that was then gaining traction

among Western social scientists.

Thracian history was a part of this intellectual movement. In 1968, the

Central Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party issued a decree calling for

the creation of a multi-volume History of Bulgaria, an epic work that would

establish the definitive history of the country. In the published account of the

decree, communist leader Todor Zhivkov hailed the project as a great enterprise

that would "manifest those virtues and qualities of our nation that preserved it in

the dark ages of slavery and today transformed it into a valorous engineer of a

socialist society" (BAN). The decree explicitly draws a link between contemporary

Bulgaria and ancient Thrace, ordering that "the rich substance of ancient

38

Thracian culture, whose legal heirs we are, be vividly manifested" (BAN).

The effects of this intellectual paternalism were glaring in the wake of the

fall of the Berlin Wall. Even after freedom of expression was allowed, historians,

especially those of older generations, rarely reflected on their own profession or

its methodology, often working within, instead of seeking to challenge, accepted

historical standards and subjects (Todorova , Historiography 1111). Archaeology

suffered the same dilemma. Writing in 1998, Douglass Bailey, who worked

extensively in Bulgaria, felt his colleagues there rarely questioned how their own

subjective interpretations might colour their findings. Many Bulgarian

archaeologists classified objects they discovered according to how those objects

fit into nationalist narratives that assume an area's present-day inhabitants are

the natural successors of those of the past:

Bulgarian archaeology itself is an active

socio-politics and ideology: It is not a

passive tool of socio-political,

nationalist, totalitarian, or other state-

level political structures…[it] occupies

an unrivalled position as justifier and

legitimator. (Bailey, Bulgarian

Archaeology 92)

Many older-generation Bulgarian archaeologists today often do not take

39

the time to perform their excavations according to the slow, meticulous

processes that allow diggers to chronicle each layer of a dig. Instead, they use

heavy machinery, including backhoes, to go directly for the stunning objects that

fit into the broad-brushstroke paradigms they seek to reinforce (Lozanov). These

archeologists often have close ties to museum curators and officials in the

Ministry of Culture who oversee digs and who benefit from the publicity

spectacular gold finds generate. Bailey was expelled from the country in 1995

during the course of a joint American-British-Bulgarian dig, possibly because his

techniques threatened the Bulgarian archaeological establishment (Bailey

Checkmate; Videnov).

Such was the legacy of state-sponsored historical research in Bulgaria in

the decades preceding the 1980s. Alexander Fol made his career during this

period.

Fol and Zhivkova

ITS was founded in 1972, smack in the middle of the nationalist upswing

in Bulgaria's intelligentsia. It is likely the Institute owes its existence to one

person: Ludmila 'Mila' Zhivkova, daughter of Todor Zhivkov, the dictator who

ruled Bulgaria from 1965 to 1989. From 1971 to her death at age 39 in 1981,

Zhivkova oversaw arts and cultural policy in Bulgaria. In that capacity, she

encouraged Bulgarian scholars to study their country's past, a goal that seemed

to lift a page from Paiisi Hilendarksi, the eighteenth century monk who wrote an

40

instrumental history of Bulgaria. Living when Greek patriarchs controlled the

Bulgarian church, Paiisi was "obsessed with the contrast between the present

low standing of Bulgarian culture and its glorious past" (Crampton 49). But

whereas Paiisi exhorted Bulgarians to take heart from the greatness of their

medieval empires, Zhivoka's obsession and source of pride was ancient Thrace.

To say Zhivkova was a curious figure is an understatement. Her lifestyle

was marked, famously, by what today would be called New Age thought, a wildly

exotic posture for anyone in communist Bulgaria, not least a politburo official.

Some of her beliefs even resembled those held by ancient Orphists. She

practised Agni yoga, which seeks to cultivate a 'fire' contained in each individual's

spirit, an idea that resonates with Orphism's notion of man's soul deriving from

the ashes of Dionysus and the Titans destroyed by Zeus' thunderbolt. She also

was a vegetarian and encouraged the growth of homegrown Bulgarian sects like

the Dunovists, who worshipped the rising sun on mountain tops while wearing

white cloaks (Siderov). Orphists were often said to wear white cloaks (Burkert

Greek Religion 301).

Zhivkova was controversial, of course. Todorova ruefully writes that

Bulgaria's nationalist policies in the communist era culminated in "the esoteric

and messianic patriotic frenzies of [Zhivkov's] irrational daughter in the early

1980's" (Improbable 157). Richard Crampton is more forgiving. He allows that

Zhivkova supported projects that were lavish and expensive, but notes that she

was "probably more mourned at her death than any public figure since King

Boris" (205). Yavor Siderov views Zhivkova as a paradox: on one hand, she was

41

a high-ranking communist official who threw her weight around as the dictator's

daughter. On the other, for a communist country where materialist criticism

should have been de rigueur, she was a progressive thinker who surrounded

herself, bohemian-like, with circle of a intellectuals — including Fol, who was her

teacher at Sofia University. Detractors referred to this group as "masons"

(Siderov).

Fol and his colleagues accrued political capital while they enjoyed

Zhivkova's patronage. Some were banished from public life after her death, a

sure sign of the ir erstwhile power and influence (Siderov). Fol managed to

survive and prosper. He was Minister of Education from 1980 to 1986. After

communism's collapse, however, he stuck to scholarship. ITS was dedicated to

him posthumously. Fol's colleague, Ivan Marazov, ran for president

unsuccessfully under the Bulgaria Socialist Party — heir to the communists — in

1996.

No matter how one characterizes Zhivkova's influence, history and

archaeology were central to her plans. The former director of the Archaeological

Institute and Museum, Velizar Velkov, admitted that, as early as ten years before

the 1300th anniversary of the founding of the Bulgarian state — a date Zhivkova

ordered be commemorated with a massive celebration that became one of her

signature undertakings — the government allocated funds and ordered

excavations at the country's medieval capital cities to coincide with the festivities.

Digging commenced "irrespective of the fact that, from the academic point of

view, there were other sites which had greater claims for excavations" (Velkov

42

127).

Thracian studies flourished under Zhivkova's watch. In the mid-1970s a

travelling exhibition of gold Thracian artifacts toured the major museums of

Europe and the United States, for the first time showcasing Bulgaria's remarkable

archaeological heritage. In a series of speeches delivered at exhibit openings,

Zhivkova praised Thracian civilization and drew direct links between classical

history and contemporary Bulgaria. She trumpeted Thrace as an equal or rival to

ancient Greece, including Orpheus and Orphism among its accomplishments.

The overall thrust of the speeches was that Thrace — and thus Bulgaria — made

unique but hitherto overlooked contributions to European culture in general.

In 1974 Zhivkova told a Paris audience that Thracian culture was

assumed for too long to be "peripheral" to the classical Greek world. Now, she

said, cutting-edge scholarship was discovering that the Greek city states did not

"shine in lonely splendour" (Zhivkova 60). Much of the scholarship she cited was

clearly Fol's. The Thracian contribution to antiquity, in her assessment, often

rested with its mystical worldview. "It was the Thracian Weltanschauung,

combined with Greek elements that gave birth to Orpheus and Orphism," she told

a London audience in 1976 (64).

The connection between Thrace and the present state of Bulgaria

occurred between the fourth and sixth centuries AD, Zhivkova argued. At that

time, Slavonic tribes migrated to the Balkan Peninsula, where Thracian culture

was still flourishing despite the Macedonian and Roman conquests. She

describes the moment as a historic meeting:

43

Thracian civilization became a

magnificent component part of the

culture of the medieval Bulgarian State,

which was founded in 681. Thracian

civilization is one of the richly flowing

well springs of Bulgarian culture (60).

Objections must be raised here. It is possible Slavs and Thracians, or

Thracians' descendents at least, encountered one another and mixed. But to say

contemporary Bulgaria — and the People's Republic of Bulgaria in particular —

had explicit links to Thrace is another matter. Many Bulgarian folk customs, from

the fire-walking nestinari to the kukari — mummers who dress in monster

costumes in events that resemble Bacchic revelries — might derive from

Thracian customs. But they may have other origins, too. Cultures throughout

world enjoy similar pastimes (Kraev). Moreover, folk customs' beginnings are

hard to pin down, since they agglomerate traditions, and thus meaning, over

time. The nestinari probably predate Christianity's arrival in Bulgaria, for example,

but fire walkers today consider it obligatory to carry an icon of Saints Constantine

and Elena while performing.

Zhivkova was also being selective in her interpretation of histo ry. While

she dwells on Thracian connections with the Slavs, she rarely devoted the same

amount of attention to the waves of other people who migrated through or lived in

44

what is now Bulgarian territory over the centuries. Celts made incursions into

southeast Europe. The proto-Bulgars put their stamp on the land. Crusaders

raped and pillaged their way across the Balkans. When the Ottoman sultan ruled

Bulgaria for 500 years, scores of Middle Eastern ethnic groups had access to

what is now Bulgaria. One could argue these people played more influential roles

in the Bulgarian psyche and gene pool, even though Bulgarians did not intermix

with these groups in large numbers. Why ignore some cultures that influenced

Bulgarian civilization while embracing others?

Marxism explains part of Zhivkova's reasoning. Marxist archaeology

viewed each stage of civilization as a part of a unified whole that lead to

socialism. It posited a cultural continuity between everyone residing in a location,

from prehistoric time all the way up to the Roman period, with an autochthonous

element remaining and incorporating each successive demographic change

(Kaiser 113). According to this perspective, if Thracian culture thrived on

Bulgarian land, Bulgaria must include Thracian culture. Zhivkova did not follow

Marxism blindly, however. It was only a part of her worldview. Zhivkova's theories

on Thrace were another instance of inventing tradition, creating a new spin on

the past to alter perceptions of the present. The goal was not simply to enunciate

Marxist doctrine, however. It was geared to create a novel view of Bulgaria vis-à-

vis Europe.

In her speeches at the exhibition openings, Zhivkova constantly refers to

the establishment of Bulgaria's medieval state in the seventh century, whose

anniversary she was so keen to celebrate. The exhibitions are a "triumph [for]

45

culture in Europe" (12). Bulgaria is "one of the oldest states in Europe" (64). The

"real place" of "fascinating" Thracian culture in European culture has yet to be

fully determined (62). The exhibition speeches were declarations of Bulgaria's

membership in the European family, a theme Bulgaria has long sounded, having

been under Ottoman 'yoke' for centuries. Important Bulgarian historians voice

this issue today. The director of the National Historical Museum in Sofia, Bojidar

Dimitrov, recently expressed a lukewarm reaction to his country's long

anticipated entry into the European Union, for example, on the basis that

Bulgaria was already more European than Europe. Indeed, as he explains in his

book Bulgarians: The First Europeans, Dimitrov is inclined to welcome Europe to

itself upon its acceptance of Bulgaria into the union (Brunwasser).

Zhivkova lived during the Cold War. She had different straw men. First,

her patriotism was directed against the Soviet Union. Politically speaking, when

Zhivkova penned these speeches, Bulgaria was in thrall to Russia and the Soviet

Union. Culturally, however, from the Cyrillic alphabet to the Orthodox Church,

which reached Russia through the Balkans, Moscow could be said to be in

Bulgaria's debt. By the 1970s, when Zhivkova delivered the exhibition speeches,

Bulgaria was enjoying the apex of its economic prosperity and stability under

communism and detente. Having reached its zenith, this system was headed for

decline, but at the time Zhivkova could voice a bit of independence, especially

since it was confined to cultural affairs.

Another, more local, rivalry is also important. In their writings, Fol, Zhivoka

and their colleagues often lamented how the study of ancient Greece

46

overshadowed attention paid to other classical civilizations in the Balkans.

Setting a place for Thrace at the table of antiquity was clearly a manifestation of

a Bulgarian-Greek rivalry that stemmed all the way back to the wars between

medieval Bulgaria and the Byzantine Empire. The rivalry appeared in the

Ottoman millet system, which sorted demographic groups according to their

religion. Greeks lead the Orthodox Christian millet despite repeated Bulgarian

calls for their own church — one of the factors in Paiisi’s discourse. Competition

continued in the communist period, with Greeks often trumpeting their

membership in the Western alliance as proof that they had sloughed off Balkan

backwardness, while Bulgaria remained facing East.

The Bulgarian-Greek rivalry was at play in Western representations of

Bulgaria, a subject explored in depth by Maria Todorova and others. These

depictions sting ordinary Bulgarians today. In the late nineteenth century, George

Barnard Shaw in Arms and the Man portrayed Bulgarians as credulous and

primitive. In the twentieth century, James Bond novels and films depicted

Bulgarians as dull-witted thugs in the employ of Moscow. Contrast those images

with the Philhellenism that gripped Lord Byron in the early nineteenth century and

which arguably influences Greek foreign relations, albeit significantly less, to this

day. Philhellenism unquestionably plays a role in the Greek tourism industry,

which in 2005 sought to entice visitors to Greek by coining the term "Land of

Mystical Orpheus" in its promotional ads. The ad sparked a minor diplomatic row

between Athens and Sofia.

Furthermore, if Fol and Zhivkova sought to steal some of Greece's thunder

47

in terms of its ownership of ancient history, they were reciprocating Greek

attempts at revising history at the expense of Bulgaria, a theme Paiisi sounded

when he wrote his majestic history of Bulgaria. Paul Stephenson, for example,

shows how Byzantine Emperor Basil II was not known as the 'Bulgar Slayer'

duri ng his reign in the early eleventh century, when he annexed Bulgarian lands,

for example. When those lands rebelled to form the Second Bulgaria Empire in

the late twelfth century, however, Byzantine historians took to appending the

epithet to his title. The legend that Basil blinded 15,000 Bulgarian warriors,

leaving one man out of every hundred with a single eye to guide his comrades

home, served well to recall the flagging empire's past glories during a period of

crisis. In the Ottoman period, Basil fell into obscurity. Then, during the Balkan

Wars in the early twentieth century when Bulgaria and Greece were enemies,

Greek politicians resuscitated the 'Bulgar Slayer.’ Novelists produced fiction

designed to teach children how Byzantium's victory over the Bulgarians

strengthened Greece's claims to Macedonian territory, a key prize in the fighting .

This Greek invention of history shows how the claims of Fol and Zhivkova are

part of a larger context of Balkan antagonisms.

It would be incorrect to say Fol and Zhivkova were chauvinists. We may

conclude, however, that they operated within, and helped generate, a climate of

resurgent nationalism — from political interference in the BAN to old Balkan

rivalries — among Bulgarian intellectuals. In an essay published in the Standart

daily newspaper a few days after his death, Fol described his scholarship in

relationship to his country in an honest, shrug-of-the-shoulders fashion, an

48

admission many historians would not have the courage or common sense to

make. Discussing how history is part of the humanities, and thus helps produce

culture while simultaneously reflecting the historian's cultural baggage and

personality, he writes:

When I defined 'culture' as historically

active and creative behavior, I did not

suppose that we would come to cultivate

patriotic feelings. I find that this is,

however, inevitable, provided that

patriotism is not watered in a flowerpot

at the expense of the water of others

(Fol, Gods).

49

CHAPTER FIVE

BULGARIA'S THRACIAN IDENTITY

The legend of Bulgaria's patron saint, John of Rila, is analogous to the

Orpheus myth. In the tenth century AD, according to the legend, Saint John

spent more than twenty years held up in a cave, living an ascetic lifestyle akin to ,

but not as extreme as, the contemporaneous tradition of the Bogomils, a

Bulgaria-based Gnostic sect that advocated retreating from society. For a period,

because pilgrims sought him out, he disappeared completely, whereupon he held

intimate conversations with God. When he reappeared, Saint John became a

teacher, abbot and miracle-worker. His remains are believed to work miracles

today in Bulgaria's largest and most important monastery, in Rila.

St. John shows how shades of Orphism persist in Bulgarian society

today. But the degree to which Thrace plays a role in Bulgarian identity — to the

extent anyone can define any 'national' identity — is seen most clearly in the way

the public reacts to Thracian archaeological discoveries and artifacts. Bulgarian

tourists queuing up at the painted tomb of Kazanlak prove that Thrace is popular.

Archaeologists like ITS-based Georgi Kitov, who recently excavated what many

believe is the tomb of the Thracian Odrysian King Seuthes III, and Rumen

Ovcharov, who claims to have unearthed Orpheus' burial place, are celebrities in

the Bulgarian media. National newspapers and broadcasters cover artifact

50

discoveries as breaking news and closely follow developments in tomb robbing,

legislation governing cultural heritage and the illegal trade in Thracian antiquities.

Bulgarians' fascination with Thrace is about more than buried treasure,

though. When the media covers stories involving Thrace or when regular folks

discuss the subject, they do so with an assumption that Thrace is theirs, that they

have a stake in it. One finds this possessiveness in Zhivkova’s links between

contemporary Bulgaria and ancient Thrace. But whereas her mixture of

nationalism and Marxism and Bulgaria's particular brand of historiography and

archaeology might help explain her policies as a high-ranking official, they do not

reach the heart of Thrace's role in Bulgaria's contemporary national identity. I

would argue one sees that role more clearly in light of three issues: Balkan

nationalism, the country's unique relationship vis-à-vis its own culture and the

debate in Bulgarian civil society over laws governing the ownership of antiquities.

To start, Fol's essay in the Standart newspaper encapsulates Bulgarians'

attitudes towards Thrace:

In the humanities, the scholar studies

himself — his is the subject and object

of study. The Greek episteme, meaning

"I stand above things so I contemplate

them," that is, I examine, befits his dual

position most. Episteme is a good

concept. Every historian finds himself in

51

this position in the end. And some prefer

the whole to the sum of its parts. And

the whole contains the examiner

himself. Therefore, let me say it — the

scientific contemplation of the Thracians

is an episteme of me.

In Fol’s place, substitute Bulgarians in general. When they talk about the

Thracians, Bulgarians in a sense are talking about themselves.

The first way Thrace connects to present-day Bulgarians is Balkan

nationalism, which equates the nation with a single ethnicity. Balkan countries

were formed in the wake of the Ottoman Empire’s collapse, with conflict against,

and/or colonization by, other powers, including the Hapsburgs and Byzantium,

often marking their previous periods of independence, if they experienced

independence at all. When Europe's Great Powers sanctioned their statehoods in

the nineteenth century, imposed upon the Balkans was a political map that

allocated each ethnic group its own state. The Great Powers acknowledged the

borders were not perfect. Each state obviously contained ethnic minorities. But

the gesture had been made: Bulgaria for Bulgarians, Albania for Albanians and

so on. The stage had been set for nationalism and ethnicity to go hand-in-hand:

"Throughout southeast Europe, nationalist ideology co-opted ethnic ideology to

the point where there remained few differences between the two," writes

archaeologist Tim Kaiser (109). Whether or not every ethnic group corresponded

52

to the new borders was another issue, a problem that, at its worst, spawned a

‘blood and soil’ ideology that fuelled violence all the way into the late twentieth

century.

In less stark terms, Balkan nationalism is a form of patriotism. Bulgarians

as a people see themselves as intimately tied to Bulgaria as a land. This bond

works in the reverse, too. The land affects how Bulgarians see themselves a

people. When an archeologist unearths Thracian artifacts or ruins on Bulgarian

territory, those ancient items are naturally imbued with the same aura that unifies

the ethnos and the land. Here ethnicity does not produce a nation on a particular

plot of property. The property offers up a new dimension of the people who live

on it.

Facilitating this bond is Bulgarians' unique relationship with their culture.

During the build-up to independence in the late nineteenth century, Bulgaria's

elites embarked on the task of nation-building after centuries of imperialist rule.

As part of their campaign, they needed to prove they were worthy enough to be

their own nation. Culture was an essential part of making that case. Nations need

national cultures, after all. Poet and revolutionary hero Ivan Vazov, writing to an

audience of Russians whose tsar was instrumental in ending Ottoman rule,

"mourned the shortage of Bulgarian literary classics by exclaiming: 'What have

we got which is ours, own, eternal? Tomorrow another benefactor will say 'The

Bulgarian people do not exist!'" (Kiossev 357). Bulgarian elites cons tructed a

literary history epitomizing Bulgaria's nationhood, providing a nascent state and

its people with so-called ‘classics,’ timeless, canonical expressions of national

53

culture. Vazov’s Under the Yoke is the greatest example of a classic anointed

during this period. In Bulgaria today, the novel attempts to serve the same

function Shakespeare plays in England or Cervantes symbolizes for Spain. It is a

monument that can be expected to live beyond its time to act as one of the

country's ‘greatest hits.’

Thracian culture — its gold treasures, the 60,000 burial mounds that dot

the countryside (Popova) — now fits into this canon of classic Bulgarian culture,

at least in the popular imagination, I would argue. Thrace is emerging to become

part of the public sphere the way the Golden Age of ancient Greece is a

constituent part of Greek identity. Kazanlak, for example, used to be the main city

in the Valley of the Roses. Now it is often said to be located in the Valley of the

Thracian Kings. The new, EU-funded highway spanning the country will be

named the Thracian Highway. An organization claiming to have more than

100,000 members, The Union of Thracian Societies in Bulgaria, succeeded in

persuading the Council of Ministers to declare March 26 Thrace Day. They are

working on it becoming a national holiday where citizens are exempt from work

(Karamitrev). March 26 is the anniversary of the Bulgarian army taking the

Ottoman city of Erdine in the 1912-13 Balkan War. Representatives of the union

discuss that victory and the ancient Odrysians who lived in the Erdine region in

the same breath. President Georgi Parvanov regularly delivers speeches that

mention Thrace, whether at exhibitions or events abroad, where he touts

Thracian history as a Bulgarian asset to be exploited. In Stara Zagora in 2006, he

said, "Studying and popularizing Thrace's cultural and historic heritage is a

54

priceless resource for sustainable cultural, economic and social development"

(Bulgarian president's website).

Bulgarians expropriate Thrace this way because, for more than a century,

I would argue, their perceptions of their history have been revised many times

over, making their history especially malleable in the first place and, at the same

time, often alienating the public-at-large from that history. In describing Bulgarian

archaeology, Bailey writes: "Bulgarian archaeology perceives (and actively

conceives) its object of study (i.e. the past) as an exotic: a rich, at times

technically and aesthetically brilliant, element of a national past" (Bulgarian

Archaeology 89). In Bulgaria, more so than many other countries, Bailey argues,

the past is a foreign territory to be romanticized and politicized.

This argument might seem patronizing. But it stems from the many

ruptures in Bulgaria’s political development. From the era when elites were

crafting a canon of authors like Vazov, to when communists imposed a new

totalitarian system that claimed to reveal the inequities of the old, to the recent

era when communism fell, different forces have seriously manipulated Bulgarian

history, often to the exclusion of contrary viewpoints, especially political

dissidents and, as the name changing campaign against Bulgarian-Turks in the

late twentieth century shows, ethnic minorities. Even today, Bulgarians, at a

slower pace than most East Europeans, are still debating how to release State

Security files, which, if and when opened, will likely reveal yet another new

version of the past. History is not history until it is written, and Bulgaria has

suffered many erasures and re-compositions of its history books.

55

The grip of Thracian gold in the Bulgarian popular imagination is

understandable, given this history. Writing about Greece, anthropologist Charles

Stewart finds that "[In] a country with an illustrious ancient past and a less

glorious present, history represents a vital national resource and enduring topic

of social concern, not to say anxiety" (481). The same applies to Bulgaria.

Thracian gold is a newfound national treasure during troubled times. Stewart

further notes that history and treasures that represent history became more

controversial and take up more of a spotlight in national discourse during times of

rupture, when a society's direction is unclear. Fifteen years after ending

communism and having just achieved EU membership, Bulgaria fits that

description to a tee.

The explosion in tomb robbing during this period is another sign of the

timeliness of Thracian gold. It is true that tomb robbers have always been active

in Bulgaria. Dig sites regularly yield up signs of plundering, from Persian pilferers

millennia ago to Coca Cola cans left by thieves in the 1960s (Hristov). But there

is little evidence of tomb robbing during the Ottoman, inter-war or communist

periods on the scale of the last 15 years (Bailey, Looting). Since the definition of

treasure is a product of its time — different cultures at different times value

ancient items in different ways — we need to look at what is special about the

current era that might shape how Bulgarians view Thracian gold at present

(Stewart 487). I would argue the present treasure craze is simply a phenomenon

of capitalism. Treasure is more easily convertible now. One can sell it.

56

A study of the trade in Bulgarian antiquities could fill a whole book. Our

interest focuses on how that trade impacts a consideration of Bulgarian identity.

Stewart argues that national laws on antiquities ownership cast light on national

perspectives on history and archaeological treasure. In Greece, where history is

considered a national resource, the state owns all antiquities. In Britain, colour

need give the Crown only certain coins and jewellery they find (Alberge). In the

United States, the government lays claim only to Native American artifacts, which

belong to their respective tribes. The different laws range from the extreme to the

moderate to the liberal, signalling ancient, old and new world sensibilities (486).

Bulgaria’s laws signify ambivalence. In Bulgaria, in theory, the state owns

all antiquities. But loopholes in the 1962 Law that still gove rns cultural

monuments allow for private collections, so long as collectors register their

holdings with a museum (Bailey, Looting). Collections registered at present

belong to three of the richest men in Bulgaria: businessman Vassil Bozhkov,

Dimitar Ivanov, a former State Security chief in the communist era and Boyan

Radev, a former Olympic-medal winning wrestler, whose sport has long been

perceived as connected to former communists who absconded with public wealth

during Bulgaria’s transition from communism in the early 1990s (Lazov; Kaplan

68-77).

Many Bulgarian colour, historians, museum curators and not-for-profit

organizations are lobbying the National Assembly to reform the 1962 law to help

experts acquire antiquities before smugglers moved them to private collections or

sell them at auction houses in London, Munich and Vienna. Despite numerous

57

parliamentary panels accepting these groups’ suggestions and the draft bills they

produce, successive governments have failed or refused to take action over the

past 15 years.

The debate over who owns Thracian artifacts is a debate Bulgarians are

holding with themselves. At stake are the roles of the state and history in

Bulgarian civil society. That debate is equivalent to a national identity crisis.

Tourists in Kazanlak, academics at ITS, journalists reporting on new finds,

Thracian exhibitions touring the world and presidential speeches represent the

public’s sense of ownership of Thrace. These examples may or may not be

flawed intellectually, but they are honest attempts of Bulgarians working through

Thrace as their patrimony, “treasure that involves a divinatory look into the future

to discover a past that will enrich the present” (Stewart). Rampant tomb robbing,

the concentration of privately-owned artifacts in the hands of a few wealthy

individuals and the government’s inability to impose reform illustrate opposite

pressures away from the public sphere. Which side will prevail remains to be

seen.

58

CHAPTER SIX

CONCLUSION

In 2006, Stephen Guide published The Thracian Script Decoded in

Bulgaria. The book's release caused a sensation. A Bulgarian citizen based in

the United States, Guide claims he deciphered stone tablets dating from the fifth

millennium BC that prove Thracian civilization was the oldest in Europe, far older

than most scholars ever imagined. Using "transcendent analysis," historical study

that mixes everything from quantum physics to psychiatry, he argued his so-

called Thracian script was a forerunner of what were to become Egyptian

hieroglyphics (Guide 96). From there he extrapolates that Western civilization's

origins can be traced back to Thrace.

Guide's work is nonsense. But his book is sold in the gift shop of

Kazanlak's Iskra Museum, a serious institution that oversees the painted tomb

World Heritage site and its tourist replica. What is more, Guide attracted enough

readers for ITS to convene a special panel to refute his findings. The panel

included the late Fol's wife, Valeria, and his former student, ITS Director Kiril

Lordanov. Noting that Thracian culture appeared in the middle of the second

millennium and never produced a script, Valeria Fol and Lordanov said Guide's

gobbledygook was spreading unchecked among the Bulgarian public because

the country lacked a "unified cultural heritage information system," a means of

59

disseminating history to laymen through legitimate scholars and respected public

or private agencies (Vetova).

The panel also debated how Bulgarian scientists should deal with the

media in general. Without scientists on hand to consult, newspapers, radio

stations and television channels eagerly and uncritically fed Guide's theses to

their audiences. Archaeologist Georgi Kitov called for a law barring scholars from

searching for a Thracian script — hardly a move that would aid scientific inquiry.

Others said scientists simply needed to become more media-savvy, a lament

heard often enough from specialists around the world.

Guide is just the latest episode of Bulgarians debating larger social issues

via the looking glass of their Thracian heritage. Fol and Zhivkova laid the

groundwork for that heritage to become a fixture in the popular Bulgarian

imagination. Themselves products of a historiographical tradition that took nation-

building as its goal, the mystic-historian and the dictator's daughter forged a

narrative that questioned a version of history — held among most Western

historians — that privileges the glory of ancient Greece at the expense of its

barbarian neighbours. Western scholars today are beginning to explore similar

paths in their research, but the jury is far from out on Fol and Zhivkova's

ambitious claims. Fol's belief that the Greek myth of Orpheus was rooted in

Thrace is an example of how widely he and other historians disagree.

Whereas Fol argues that rituals conducted in rock-cut sanctuaries on

present-day Bulgarian territory inspired Greek tales of a great poet descending

into Hades, the consensus among Western scholars is that the structure of

60

Greek mythology impelled ancient writers to label Orpheus as Thracian.

Otherworldly characters like Orpheus came from somewhere out of this world —

'this world' was Greece and Thrace was beyond it. The claim that Orphism was a

Thracian invention also runs into trouble when one compares it to other ancient

cults with similar beliefs. Orphism is a hopelessly complicated bundle of

traditions. It is hard to swallow that it emerged primarily from Thrace, even when

Bulgarian folk customs lend credence to the idea.

The controversy over Guide exemplifies how ordinary Bulgarians hunger

for answers about Thrace. Their leaders have told them they are heirs to a great

civilization that thrived before their country's long-running struggles for

independence from Byzantium, the Ottoman Empire and the Soviet Union. That

great civilization is especially attractive now that Bulgaria has joined mainstream

Europe as a member of the EU. Yet, with Bulgarian scholars' assertions not

receiving widespread acceptance outside their country and Thracian

archaeological sites plundered regularly, the patrimony that earns kudos when it

travels around the world in museum exhibitions is also a source of anxiety. It is a

hot, undecided subject.

Whether or not other scholars will vindicate Fol and his research is

unknown. Surely, however, Thrace will continue to be an important subject in

Bulgaria's evolution as a democracy that encourages public discussion of its

past. For centuries, Thrace was literally and figuratively buried. Now, like

Orpheus, it is has come up for air.

61

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