Black Irish and White Bulgarians

Okay, maybe my imagination is just getting carried away. But have a look at those ancient Thracian faces again, put up a few posts ago.

Besides looking a lot like modern Bulgarians, don’t they also look a bit… Black Irish?

I grew up among the Irish of Canada, and it seems to me I see familiar features on the streets of Sofia: the inverted smile, broad faces, dark Firbolg looks like those of my Black Irish cousins, receding chins like Tommy Makem’s.

There are two possible reasons, other than chance or personal delusion. First, we know there were Celts to the north of Greece in early Classical times. Classical Greek authors speak of them; Pythagoras claimed they taught him all he knew. It might have been a branch of these same Bulgarian Celts who later crossed the Irish Channel, in their general move westward through Europe.

Second, there is the amber route. Ancient Thrace was madly rich with silver deposits. Amber was a major trade good, and it was mostly found on beaches along the North Sea. There is a natural river trade route, up the Danube and down the Rhine, that starts in Bulgaria and ends near the English Channel. From there, the Celts dominated the sea trade in amber, at least from the 4th to the 1st centuries BC.

The Celts or the Bulgarians might easily have migrated along this route, in either direction, just as the French Metis migrated along the fur trade routes in early Canada. It would have made strategic sense for them to have tried to control both ends of the trade, the point of production and the point of retail distribution: a vertical monopoly.

It would follow that the designation of the Irish as “Celts” and the Bulgarians as “Slavs” is not really accurate; but these were always linguistic terms, and language is easier to change than blood.

It’s one way to explain the strange Black Irish.