Thrace is a historical area that starched from the Balkan Mountains to the north, the Aegean Sea to the south and the Black Sea to the east. The name Thrace, comes from the Thracians, ancient people with Indo-European origins. The earliest traces of man in Thrace go back to the Paleolithic time, forty thousand years ago. In around 6000 BC Thrace was settled by an agricultural population. Two thousand years latter they discovered minerals and turned to mining and metal work. In todays central Bulgaria, archeologists have excavated numerous copper tools, weapons, and ornaments, all dating from this remote period. By 3000 B.C. Thrace’s smiths were working in gold, probably panned from rivers, and were crafting rings, bracelets, plaques, and other adornments that were among the earliest gold objects to come out of Europe. The actual first mention of the Thracians is in Homers Iliad, as allies of Troy. In around 700 BC, Greek’s started colonizing Thrace, and in 600 BC as line of cities have been established, which had led to active trade between the Greeks and the “barbarians” as Greeks called everyone that was not part of their culture. They lived in a tribal organizations, usually as farmers, hunters or fisherman.
DESCRIPTIONS OF THRACE IN THE ANCIENT GREEK HISTORIOGRAPHY
Around 450 BC Herodotus visited Thrace and wrote about the customs and looks of the people there. He wrote that the Thracians believed in immortality and their curious sexual and marital customs. The man had several wives, and upon the death of their husband they competed as to who had been his favorite. The winner gained the privilege of being killed and placed at the side of the corpse in the grave, which was in a tomb covered by a prominent mound. Archeological excavations have confirmed this, a burial mounds (tumuli) have been found all over Thrace containing chambers that were carefully build, decorated and field with precious objects to serve the deceased in the afterlife. In some cases, two wives have been buried with their husband, which is found in some of the burial mounds. According to Herodotus, Thracians had a fox-skin caps, tunics, long cloaks over the tunics and skin boots. They carried javelins, light shields and short dagger. The shield was crescent-shaped and made of wicker covered with hide it was called a pelta, and the men who carried it were peltasts. Their troops were very mobile and excellent for guerrillas combat. The Greek slow moving hoplites were weak against this hit-and-run peltasts. The Greeks played this smart, so hired peltasts as mercenaries under their command.
Herodotus mentions that the Thracians had a habit of selling their children into slavery. Any males taken as prisoners in war generally ended up sold as slaves. As a result of this a lot of Thracians could be seen in the service of Greek households. The plays of Aristophanes and Menander and other writers of Greek comedy often have slaves named Thratta or Geta in the cast of characters, which means Thracian girl, or Geta as one of the most important Thracian tribe.
Around 430 BC a king named Sitalkes managed to conquer land from the Danube River to the north to the Abdera to the south and from the Black Sea to the east to the River Strimon (Struma) to the west, except the Greek cities. This put him in a position to play an important role in international politics. In the time of Sitalk’s successor Athens even payed a gift of 800 talents, and Thracians started hiring Greek mercenaries. One of those mercenaries was Xenophon, who in 400 BC arrived in Thrace with 10 000 soldiers that (according to him but not very likely) he led to safety across Asia’s hostile tribes. Thracian king named Seuthes hired all of them.
At this time, Thrace was highly influenced by Greece culture. The archeological excavations of Thracian tombs show that from the 5th century BC there were a lot of object buried with the dead that were either imported from Greece or made by resident Greek craftsman. Xenophon writes that many Thracians spoke Greek. At court banquets at least one of the wine servers was able to talk directly to the Greek guests. But the Greek culture didn’t have that big of an impact to change the Thracians. They were still “barbaric” to the Greeks. At the court banquets Seuthes served his guests by throwing chunks of bread and meat, wine was drank from horns.
MACEDONIAN AND ROMAN RULE
In The 4th century BC Thrace was conquered by Philip II, king of Macedonia. After his death Thrace was part of the great kingdom of Alexander the Great. After his death in 323 BC Thrace was part of his successors mostly on the coasts but there were some internal tribes that were independent and fought with each other. In 279 BC Celts advanced in to Macedonia, southern Greece and Thrace. The were soon forced out of Macedonia and Greece but they stayed in Thrace. During the Macedonian wars, Rome came in contact with Thrace. After the battle of Pydna in 168 the governing of Thrace passed to Rome, and Thrace became a client state, until 46 AD when it officially became a Roman province.
The historical boundaries of Thrace have varied. To the ancient Greeks it was that part of the Balkans between the Danube River to the north and the Aegean Sea to the south, being bounded on the east by the Black Sea and the Sea of Marmara and on the west by the mountains east of the Vardar(Modern Greek: Axiós or Vardárais) River. The Roman province of Thrace was somewhat smaller, having the same eastern maritime limits and being bounded on the north by the Balkan Mountains; the Roman province extended west only to the Néstos River. Since Roman times, Greek Macedonia to the west has been separated from Greek Thrace by the Néstos. The portion of Thrace that is now part of Greece is bounded by the Néstos River to the west, the Rhodope (Rodópi) Mountains to the north, and the Maritsa (also called Évros) River to the east. The southern part of Bulgaria and European Turkey, including the Gallipoli Peninsula, constitute the remainder of the geographical region of Thrace. About one-fourth of Thrace lies in Turkey, about one-tenth in Greece, and the remainder in Bulgaria.
Topographically, Thrace alternates between mountain-enclosed basins of varying size and deeply cut river valleys. A wide plateau extends southward from the Rhodope Mountains and separates the lowlands along the Maritsa River from the plains of western Thrace. A Mediterranean climate prevails in southern Thrace and is modified by continental influences in the Rhodope Mountains. The range of temperatures is greater in Thrace than in the southern Greek mainland; average temperatures in Alexandroúpoli (also spelled Alexandroúpolis) range from the low 40s F (about 6 °C) in January to the low 80s F (about 27 °C) in July. Rivers are reduced to trickles during the summer months, and they drain toward the Aegean.
Ancient Greek and Roman historians agreed that the ancient Thracians, who were of Indo-Europeanstock and language, were superior fighters; only their constant political fragmentation prevented them from overrunning the lands around the northeastern Mediterranean. Although these historians characterized the Thracians as primitive partly because they lived in simple, open villages, the Thracians in fact had a fairly advanced culture that was especially noted for its poetry and music. Their soldiers were valued as mercenaries, particularly by the Macedonians and Romans.
The Greeks founded several colonies on the Thracian coasts, the most notable being Byzantium. Others were on the Bosporus, Propontis, and Thracian Chersonese peninsula. On the Aegean were Abdera near the Néstos delta and Aenus near Alexandroúpoli. Farther north on the Black Sea’s Gulf of Burgas, the Milesians founded Apollonia (7th century BCE), and the Chalcedonians founded Mesembria (end of the 6th century BCE).
Most Thracians became subject to Persia about 516–510 BCE. Members of the Odrysae tribe briefly unified their fellow Thracians into an empire that in 360 BCE split three ways and was quite easily assimilated (356–342) by Philip II of Macedon. The Thracians provided Philip’s son, Alexander the Great, with valuable light-armed troops during his conquests. In 197, Rome assigned much of Thrace to the kingdom of Pergamum, though the coastal area west of the Maritsa was annexed to the Roman province of Macedonia. In the 1st century BCE, Rome became more directly involved in the affairs of the whole region, and dynastic quarrels among the local Thracian rulers, who had by then become client kings of Rome, prompted the emperor Claudius I to annex the entire Thracian kingdom in 46 CE. Thrace was subsequently made into a Roman province. The emperor Trajan and his successor, Hadrian, founded cities in Thrace, notably Sardica (modern Sofia) and Hadrianopolis (modern Edirne). About 300 CE, Diocletian reorganized the area between the Lower Danube and the Aegean into the diocese of Thrace.
From the 3rd to the 7th century the population of Thrace was altered greatly by repeated Gothic, Visigothic, and Slavic invasions and immigrations. In the 7th century the Bulgarian state was founded, and Byzantium consequently lost all Thrace north of the Balkan Mountains to the Bulgarians. Racked by Byzantine civil wars in the 14th century, Thrace fell piece by piece, up to 1453, to the Ottoman Turks, who ruled it for four centuries thereafter. Russian encroachments in the eastern Balkans culminated in the Russo-Turkish Wars (1828–29 and 1877–78), but Russia failed to create a “Greater Bulgaria” that would include the northern portions of Thrace at the expense of Turkey. The whole of Thrace therefore remained under Turkish domination. During the Balkan Wars (1912–13) Thrace suffered terribly. After World War I the boundaries of Greece, Bulgaria, and Turkey in Thrace were established by the treaties of Neuilly (1919), Sèvres (1920), and Lausanne (1923), and after World War II they remained unchanged.
As a result of wars and both forced and voluntary population exchanges, the ethnic character of Thrace became more homogeneous during the 20th century, although there are still large Turkish minorities in both Greek and Bulgarian Thrace. The Turks in Greek (Western) Thrace were excluded from the Greek-Turkish population exchange of 1923, while many of the resettled Greeks from Bulgaria and Turkey were settled in Western Thrace. A relatively small number of Turks from Bulgaria were resettled in Turkish (Eastern) Thrace. The Muslim population was exempted from repatriation to Turkey by the Treaty of Lausanne in 1923, but many emigrated after the appropriation of their land in 1924 and subsequently continued to emigrate because of deteriorating relations between Greece and Turkey. The Greek population of Western Thrace has grown rapidly since 1923 and is now the dominant population group, generally enjoying a higher standard of living than the Turkish minority. Greek is gradually supplanting Turkish as the language of instruction even in Muslim schools. Tensions between Greeks and the remaining Muslims have led to occasional outbursts of intercommunal violence. Most Thracian Muslims are of Turkish ancestry and speak Turkish. The Pomaks, who are Muslims and speak a Bulgarian dialect, are concentrated along the border with Bulgaria. There is also a small group of sedentary Roma (Gypsies) who speak Romany and Turkish.
High-quality Turkish tobacco, cultivated primarily by Muslims, is the chief cash crop of the region. Corn (maize) and rice are grown on the lowlands of the Evros River and the plains of western Thrace. Vineyards are found around Alexandroúpoli, where wine is produced. Oyster farming around Keramotí and eel fishing at Komotiní provide exports to central Europe. The manufacturing industries of Thrace consist chiefly of the processing of agricultural crops, tobacco curing, and wine production.
Archaeological sites, including Abdera, home of Democritus, the 5th-century philosopher who developed an atomic particle theory, and of Protagoras, a counselor of Alexander the Great, and the course of the Roman highway called the Via Egnatia attract tourists. Komotiní has a large museum with objects from throughout Thrace. Komotiní also is the site of Democritus University (1973) and of a Muslim secondary college.
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