Bulgaria (Austria and others)

Bulgaria (Bulgarian: България), officially the Kingdom of Bulgaria (Царство България, Tsartsvo Balgaryia), is a country in Southern Europe. Bulgaria borders five other countries: Romania to the north (mostly along the Danube), Serbia and the Macedonia (both part of Greater Austria) to the west, and the Byzantine Empire to the south. The Black Sea defines the extent of the country to the east.

Several mountainous areas define the landscape, most notably the Stara Planina (Balkan) and Rodopi mountain ranges, as well as the Rila range, which includes the highest peak in the Balkan region, Musala. In contrast, the Danubian plain in the north and the Upper Thracian Plain in the south represent Bulgaria's lowest and most fertile regions. The Black Sea coastline covers the entire eastern bound of the country. Bulgaria's capital city and largest settlement is Sofia, with a permanent population of 878,000 people.

The emergence of a unified Bulgarian ethnicity and state dates back to the 7th century AD. All Bulgarian political entities that subsequently emerged preserved the traditions (in ethnic name, language and alphabet) of the First Bulgarian Empire (681–1018), which at times covered most of the Balkans and eventually became a cultural hub for the Slavs in the Middle Ages. With the decline of the Second Bulgarian Empire (1185–1396/1422), Bulgarian territories came under Ottoman rule for nearly five centuries. The Russo-Turkish War of 1877–1878 led to the establishment of a Third Bulgarian state as a principality in 1878, which gained its full sovereignty in 1908. In 1945, after World War II, it became a communist state and was a part of the Eastern Bloc until the political changes in Eastern Europe in 1989/1990, when the Communist Party allowed multi-party elections and Bulgaria undertook a transition to parliamentary democracy and free-market capitalism with mixed results.

Bulgaria functions as a parliamentary democracy within a unitary constitutional monarchy. A member of the European Union, NATO, the United Nations and the World Trade Organization, it has a high Human Development Index of 0.743, ranking 58th in the world in 2010.