The crowded departure lounge at Gatwick airport on a busy summer Sunday morning may not seem the obvious place to encounter the effects of recent changes in Eastern Europe, but to see young British couples with their children queuing not to go on holiday but to go and work near the Black Sea coast assembling British cars for sale in the Balkans is something which would have been unthinkable ten years ago; it would have been even more of a fantasy in 1967 when I first went to Bulgaria. Bulgaria has opened itself to European and American culture and business.

This being so it is reasonable to assume that there is a growing need in the west for a concise history of a country which for the last fifty or so years has seldom attracted much attention. It is hoped the present volume will go some way to showing to western readers that Bulgaria has at least as much to offer in terms of historic interest as it does in financial reward.

All too often in the west we tend to blur the distinction between the nation and the state; when the Portuguese delegate suggested to the first meeting of the League of Nations that the organisation would be better called the League of States he was told that the difference was too insignificant to bother about. No-one who had any connection with the Balkans would make that mistake.