К вопросу о роли Великой Булгарии в этнополитической истории Восточной Европы
Оn the role of the Great Bulgaria in the ethnopolitical history of Eastern Europe

Summary/Abstract: The role of the Great Bulgaria is supposed to be very important for the ethnic identity formation of the tribes that were part of this confederation. Some of them kept their own identity, but others, most likely, after the disintegration of the polity, accepted the ethnonym of the Bulgars that was the name of its ruling elite (thereby the disappearance from the ethnic map of such tribal alliances as the Kutrigurs, Utigurs, Saragurs, and Antes is very indicative). Though there was a mechanism of the acceptance of a foreign ethnonym with the system of fictive kinship, after the disintegration of nomadic polities some tribes tried to avoid this procedure, using their membership in a tribal alliance as an occasion for adopting a name of former famous conquerors. Such a situation developed after the disintegration of the Great Bulgaria into independent groups. The similar situation arose after the death of the Bulgar ruler khan Kubrat and further disintegration of the Great Bulgaria. A common culture was just beginning to emerge in this polyethnic confederation that included ethnoses of Turkic, Scytho-Sarmatian and Slavic origin. A cultural exchange was organized between the nomadic and sedentary population, but it wasn’t a cultural symbiosis yet. The successors of the Great Bulgaria migrated to the different parts of Europe (the First Bulgarian Empire, the Volga Bulgars, the “Inner Bulgars” of the Pontic-Caspian steppe) demonstrate substantial difference in the material culture. Thus, the immigrants to the Danube mostly belonged to Slavic and Scytho-Sarmatian (“Sarmatian-Alanic”) tribes; the Turkic people were in minority there. From this follows that both «Sarmatian-Alanic» tribes and the Slavs belonging to this migratory wave accepted the ethnonym «Bulgars» as their self-name.

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