Historical Evidence of Bulgarian Presence in Italy and Their Impact on the Self-confidence of Modern Bulgarian Emigrants

Authors:

Pages: 147-163
DOI: https://doi.org/10.54664/HOGN1437

Abstract:

This article examines the emigration and immigration of Bulgarians from the lands of Bulgaria to those of Italy in the period from the 5th to the 20th century and tries to answer questions such as: What makes people move from one place to another? Whether like some nomadic tribes the reason for this is the change of seasons and the need to provide more favourable living conditions? Or does the reason lie in the philosophy of the proto-Bulgarians: “you shouldn’t see the sunset at the same place you have seen the dawn”? Or is it something in the characteristic of medieval migration that people join the leader they have chosen to search together for new lands where they can live peacefully according to their ideas and understandings? Meeting different people, attending various cultural events, and seeing historical monuments contributed to building the opinion that long ago, in the early Middle Ages, Bulgarians chose Italy as a place to continue their lives and the reasons for all of them were different. Italy and Bulgaria have been connected for a long time, and perhaps this connection between the two countries is fundamental for many Bulgarians today to choose to continue their lives there. There are quite a few discovered places, and probably many more still undiscovered ones, testifying to the fact that if not the same people, then at least with extremely close and almost identical way of living, culture, writing and even pagan rituals existed at the same time in different ends of the continent, which in itself testifies to the migration of people and how some of them choose to go to precisely defined places close to those from which they themselves originate. Such testimonies caused the need to describe the relationship between the two countries over the centuries and to tell about more or less famous Bulgarians from our history who chose Italy as their second homeland in the past centuries.

Keywords:

migration, Middle Ages, modern history, Bulgaria, Italy, culture, history.

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