Celebrated and Forgotten: Historical memory and commemoration of Bulgarian khans in the Second Bulgarian Empire
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to examine common knowledge about the Bulgarian pagan khans during the era of the Second Bulgarian Empire. The Bulgarian pagan history was present in the ideology of the Second Bulgarian Tsardom, however the extent of this knowledge remains unclear.
We recognize some elements in inscriptions of Bulgarian khans and also in Slavonic translations of the Byzantines chronicles. The purpose of this paper is to describe these elements and show that, during the era of the Second Bulgarian Empire, the knowledge of pagan history was very fragmented and incomplete.
This paper raises the question, how important was the factual knowledge of pagan history for the Bulgarian Second Empire elites and how this limitation influenced the basis of their historical narrative.