Are Bulgarians Europeans?

[Paulos Melas]

I think as we are discussing the issue of the true origins of skopians and as we beyond any doubt have established the apparent fact that they are Bulgarians, and thus Bulgars there are further questions about their origins and as such their position within EU.
Bulgars arrived in Balkans in two groups the Asparukh group which colonised the areas of modern Bulgaria and the Kuber group who colonised current FYROM.
Those people are the descedents of modern Bulgarians and skopians.
Initially they were speaking a turkish language and their leaders used the title of Khan like the rest of the mongols.
They went through a process of a linguistical slavisition that crated modern bulgarian written in the traditional cyrillic script in Bulgaria and in serbian alphabet in FYROM.
Nonetheless their origins, their blood is mongol blood.
They have the same admixture of mongol blood like the turks wth the exception that they ex-slavised their language.
Nonetheless they do not have pure european origin but they are mongols.
Would this explain the proximity of Skopia with their Mongol brothers the turk and their decision to side them during the current commemoration of the Crime of Cyprus?
I mean they cannot prove as per the one drop rule their european origins.
They are mongols.
So whats their position in Europe anyway?

[Tsontos]

Yes they are.

initially they were speaking a turkish language

No they were speaking a Finno-Ugric language like the Finns and Hungarians. That does NOT equate to the Turkish language spoken by the Seljuks and Ghazis. Are Magyars and Finns not Europeans? Bulgarians have been merged with and completely assimilated linguistically by Slavs for 1500 years anyway.

[Paulos Melas]

No their language was never related to finno ungric family.
It is considered a turkic language (old bulgarian)

[Paulos Melas]

I mean wiki (Turkic languages - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia) incl old bulgarian (bolgar) in the turkic family.

[BG2007]

Why don't you come to Bulgaria and see?

What's wrong with this forum? This used to be a nice place with lots of useful information I enjoyed reading but now it has attracted all kind of psychos from all kind of nationalities and they pollute the place with their racism and insanity.

[akritas]

They are Europeans as we are as all they are. I dont like either to read quotes that Bulgarians are Mongolians. Bulgarians ethnically they were an amalgam of various elements like any other Balkan nation. Melas I dont like to read such kind of arguments and I suggest to read the book of R Crampton with the title Bulgaria, published from Oxford University Press and explain a lot as about the history of this people.Below a quote....

When the Proto-Bulgars arrived in the Balkans the area was already far from ethnically homogeneous. To the south of the Balkan mountains the Thracians mixed with Roman settlers whilst there were Greek settlements throughout the region, but particularly on the coast where they remained until the twentieth century. Cultural mixing continued in succeeding centuries as a result of incursions by a series of tribes, including Avars, Huns, Tatars, Pechenegs, and Magyars; in the Serbo-Bulgarian war of 1885 troops from southern Bulgaria were colloquially known as ‘Pechenegs’ whilst the Magyar legacy lingered in a number of topographic names, a gazetteer published in 1987 listing seven settlements in Bulgaria whose name began with ‘Madj’ and a further seven which had names beginning with ‘Mag’.

[Paulos Melas]

"...combined with the Proto-Bulgars, a group of Turkic origin..." from
A Concise History of Bulgaria
Cambridge University Press
by R. J. Crampton.
University of Oxford

[Draco]

Originally Posted by Paulos Melas

Nonetheless their origins, their blood is mongol blood.

Why do they look like all other Europeans then?

Originally Posted by Paulos Melas

They have the same admixture of mongol blood like the turks wth the exception that they ex-slavised their language.

Do the Turks look like they have "Mongol blood"? They look like Europeans to me; compare them with the Asian-looking Turkic-speaking peoples East of the Caspian (Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Turkmens, Uyghurs etc). They look like Europeans because the Asian element, when it arrives dispersed in the sea of Caucasians already in Asia Minor (Greeks, Armenians). The Asian element is minimal in modern Turks; it's ridiculous to claim they have "Mongol blood". This doesn't make them Europeans though; their culture is Islamic and closer to what one finds in the Middle East than in Europe.

Originally Posted by Paulos Melas

Nonetheless they do not have pure european origin but they are mongols.

Who does have "pure European origin"? You? Some Asian ancestry can probably be found amongst all European peoples (whether its from Turks, Avars, Huns...).

Originally Posted by Paulos Melas

Would this explain the proximity of Skopia with their Mongol brothers the turk and their decision to side them during the current commemoration of the Crime of Cyprus?

I think the political maxim "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" explains that.

Originally Posted by Paulos Melas

I mean they cannot prove as per the one drop rule their european origins. They are mongols.

Who can? No one! The only thing that's relevant in determining who is or is not European is culture (which is closely, although not exclusively, intertwined with religion). Take the Maltese for example, they speak a Semitic language (and probably have significant Arab ancestry) but they are members of the EU and no one disputes them.

As I have been yelling all over the forum: genes/ancestry/blood (or whatever else you want to call it) is NOT related to ethnicity.

[Bagatur]

Besides it's wrong to think the Turkic people shared a common phenotype. Even some proper Turkish tribes were European in phenotype as well as a lot of people living in Asia. The Indo-Europeans even reached China and settled there (various European mummies were found there). So nobody knows how the Bulgars looked like, they could have looked like Mongols or like Scandinavians who knows. Besides I doubt they had any siginificant impact anyway, the later Asian invasions were probably more significant. Also don't forget the Byzantines used to settle people from all over the empire around the Balkans: for example they settled Syrians in eastern Thrace and Armenians in western. They settled Turkic christians around the lower Vardar. And not to mention the different nomad tribes from Asia that settled all around Eastern Europe from Peloppones to the Baltic.

[Hellas7]

Yes Bulgarians are Europeans.