Slavs and Bulgars
The Slavs who migrated into the Balkan peninsula from the late fifth century onwards were one of the indigenous races of Europe, the distant forebears of the Russians, Poles, Czechs, Slovaks, Slovenes, Croats and Serbs - and, of course, the Bulgarians. Many of them came in the wake of the Avars, a warlike Central Asian people who briefly forged a Central European empire in the sixth century and press-ganged the Slavs into their all-conquering armies. However they got here, the Slavs who settled south of the Danube soon began to outnumber any remaining Thracians in the area and established a linguistic and cultural hegemony over the region. The Slavs were later to fuse with a new wave of migrants, the warlike Bulgars . These mounted nomads, possibly originating deep in Central Asia, swept down towards the Balkans after being driven out of "Old Great Bulgaria" - a swath of territories over which they briefly ruled lying between the Caspian and the Black seas. They were a Turkic people, ethno-linguistically akin to the Huns, Avars and Khazars. Under pressure from the latter, the Bulgars began a great migration into southeastern Europe, where the largest group (some 250,000 strong) led by Khan Asparuh reached the Danube delta around 680 and shortly afterwards entered what would soon become Bulgaria.
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