The interpretations of the Byzantine empire in Bulgarian historiography after World War II are analysed in the context of the revisionist shifts that Bulgarian history-writing underwent under communist rule from the late 1940s until 1989. Shored up by Marxist teleological thinking, the nationalist turn that began in the late 1960s set the stage for the gradual re-evaluation of the Byzantine impact in Bulgarian history. This re-evaluation was epitomised by notions such as ‘Slavia Orthodoxa’, ‘Bulgarian-Byzantine reciprocity’ or ‘dialogue’ and, in the most forceful statement of an imperial version of the national narrative, ‘pax Symeonica’ and ‘Preslav civilisation’.