excuse my double post, but I am not adding:
"These relations to a large extent determined the political situation in the Balkans. What we have in mind here are not the relations between two Balkan nations. Byzantium was an agglomeration of various ethnic communities - within her borders lived various Hellenized peoples, apart from the Greeks. In the multi-national empire, which stretched across three continents - Europe, Asia and Africa, the dominant language was Greek, which in the seventh century was made the official state and religious language. In this sense we can only conditionally differentiate between the Greek and Byzantine identity. The Greeks themselves, the Thracians, and the other Balkan peoples, were conquered by Rome. The Greeks called themselves Hellenes, and their country Hellas. The Romans were the first to call them Greeks - after the Grecoes, a small tribe in Epirus who were the most familiar to the Romans. This name was later adopted by the Slavs.
The relations between Bulgaria and Byzantium from the foundation of the Bulgarian state in 681 to the end of the fourteenth century when Bulgaria was conquered by the Ottomans, had two major features. The Bulgarian rulers, on the one hand, aspired to conquer Constantinople and inherit the empire. On the other hand, the Byzantines regarded the Bulgarian state as temporarily holding imperial territory and tried by various means - wars, political dealing and manoeuvering, religion and culture, to subjugate it. Byzantium eventually succeeded in conquering the Bulgarian state and kept it for more tFian a century and a half - from 1018 to 1187. For this reason the history of Mediaeval Bulgaria is divided into three periods: the First Bulgarian Kingdom, Byzantine domination and the Second Bulgarian Kingdom."
yeah, we always loved eachother
spy
"Despite repeated demonstrations of her military might in the wars against Byzantium, Bulgaria suffered defeat with fatal consequences at a time when it had reached the peak of its territorial expansion and political power. Researchers point out many reasons for this, one of which was the conquering strategy itself of the Bulgarian rulers: they tried to conquer Constantinople by land only. This is characteristic both of Khan Kroum (803-814) and Tsar Simeon (b.864; 893-927). Simeon was the first to title himself 'Tsar of all Bulgarians and Byzantines'. The Bulgarian royal title 'Tsar' derived from the Gothic 'kaisar', which, having passed through the Latin 'Caesar', had been transcribed into tsar in accordance with the specifics of the Bulgarian speech. This title makes no secret of the desires of the Bulgarian rulers to occupy the throne of the Eastern half of the former Roman empire."
and people in the west think 'Tsar' is a Russian thing .... as well as they think WE speak/use language derived from Russian
.. here shows MY Balkan PRIDE! ... and at the same time ... we, the barberian bulgars ..... complte and TRUE Balkaniers ha ha
On the Christianity and Slavic Language:
"Bulgarian-Byzantine relations also had a number of objective consequences, as a result of which the Bulgarian people became an alloy which weathered all vicissitudes of history. Of tremendous importance was the adoption of Christianity in 865. An oecumenical council in the second Bulgarian capital of Preslav voted in 893 to introduce a script, valid both for state and church, based on the spoken vernacular of the majority of the country's population - the language of the Bulgarian Slavs. Both acts were the doing of Prince Boris (852-889; d. in 907). At great expense of effort and bloodshed, not even sparing the first-born son, Prince Boris overcame the internal rejection of contemporary Bulgarian society and imposed Christianity as the official state religion. The adoption of Christianity was above all an important political act, aimed at bringing Bulgaria up to the level of the advanced states of the time. Having joined Bulgaria to the Eastern Orthodox Church, Prince Boris made the next decisive move. With his support and aid, after 886 religious activities began to be carried out in the Slavonic language, using the script and the works of the Slav apostles Constantine-Cyril and Methodius. The mission of the two brothers as official emissaries of Byzantium to Great Moravia encountered hardships and ordeals to eventually mature into a great cause which radically affected the better part of the Slavs. Persecuted and tortured by the German clergy, the disciples of Cyril and Methodius were heartily welcomed in Bulgaria, which thus became the cradle of the Slav alphabet and culture. The daring rejection of the trilingual dogma (according to which Christianity could only be preached in Latin, Greek and Hebrew) quickly found practical application. Ten years after the cause of Cyril and Methodius became Bulgarian state policy, Greek was banished from the religious service. Even in the remotest settlements, the western areas included, where Kliment of Ohrid, the disciple and associate of Cyril and Methodius, worked (840-916), the service was read in Slav-Bulgarian, or as it has been named for the sake of accuracy - in Old Bulgarian.
The Old Bulgarian literary language helped the independent development of the Bulgarians. This took place at a time when the greater part of Mediaeval Europe had no national literary languages and made use of Latin and Greek. The Bulgarian script spread on the basis of a rich folklore heritage."