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Thrace is a historical and geographic area in southeast Europe spread over southern Bulgaria, northeastern Greece, and European Turkey. Thrace borders on three seas: the Black Sea, the Aegean Sea and the Sea of Marmara.
Classical Thrace and environs, from Alexander G. Findlay's Classical Atlas to Illustrate Ancient Geography, New York, 1849
History
The indigenous population of Thrace was an Indo-European people called Thracians. Divided into separate tribes, the Thracians did not manage to form a lasting political organization until the Odrysian state was founded in the 4th century BC.
The Thracians fell early under the cultural influence of the ancient Greeks, preserving till a much later time, however, their language and culture. It also appears from mythological accounts that the Thracians influenced Greek culture from a very early period, with some Thracians even appearing as culture-bearers in some myths. But as non-Greek speakers, they were viewed by the Greeks as barbarians. The first Greek colonies in Thrace were founded in the 6th century BC.
Thrace south of the Danube (except for the land of the Bessi) was ruled for nearly half a century by the Persians under Darius the Great who conducted an expedition into the region from 513 BC to 512 BC.
The region was conquered by Alexander the Great in the 4th century BC and was ruled by the kingdom of Macedon for a century and a half. Following the Third Macedonian War, Thracia came to acknowledge Roman authority. The client state of Thracia was comprised of several different tribes.
In 279 BC, Celts advanced into Macedonia, Greece and Thrace. They were soon forced out of Macedonia and Greece, but they remained in Thrace until the end of the century. From Thrace, three Celtic tribes advanced into Anatolia and formed a new kingdom called Galatia. [1]
After Roimitalkes III of the Thracian Kingdom of Sapes was murdered in AD 46, the Roman client state was abolished and direct Roman rule began; however, Romanization was not attempted in the Roman province of Thracia. It is considered that most of the Thracians were Hellenized in these times.
The successor of the Roman Empire on the Balkans, the Byzantine Empire, retained control over Thrace until the beginning of the 9th century when most of the region was incorporated into Bulgaria. Byzantium regained Thrace in 972 only to lose it again to the Bulgarians at the end of the 12th century. Throughout the 13th century and the first half of the 14th century, the region oscillated between Bulgaria and the Byzantine Empire. In 1352, the Ottoman Turks conducted their first incursion into the region subduing it completely within a matter of two decades and ruling over it for five centuries.
In 1878, most of Thrace was incorporated into the semi-autonomous Ottoman province of Eastern Rumelia, which united with Bulgaria in 1886. The rest of Thrace was divided between Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey at the beginning of the 20th century, following the Balkan Wars and World War I.
Cities of Thrace
Bulgarian
Greek
Turkish
Famous Thracians
Some of these individuals were ethnically Thracian, while others only geographically Thracian.
See also
Sources
- Hoddinott, R.F., The Thracians, 1981.
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