TL;DR down below
Happy Bulgaria Liberation Day everyone! To commemorate this joyous occasion I will be representing Bulgaria in this ArtWar to the death!
My first hunch was to find some references for medieval and Renaissance Bulgarian clothing, but the results weren't promising. The medieval recreation of armour/clothes went
one of two ways: it either looked extremely Mongolian (not surprising, considering the origin of the people, who founded Bulgaria) or Generic European Fantasy®.
I already knew what to expect from Bulgaria's Renaissance period, so I made myself a snack and I sat down to leaf through the other entries on the forum. I'm a Bulgarian boy, so naturally the Eastern European characters piqued my interest, which led me to yet another discovery, which is probably unsurprising for most, but it definitely wasn't for me.
The slav bros have the same dang shirts and pants as us! Yeah, the colours and patterns are different, the shapes are a bit off, but overall they felt really similar. I fell victim to
the cultural brownian motion, which has made us... kinda generic...
So I finally had to address the elephant in the room: how do you make a Bulgarian character, who is very obviously Bulgarian?
In order to solve this glaring issue I turned to history for help, so here's a quick and dirty history lesson:
(Small preface: In an attempt to be neutral/politically unbiased and inoffensive to all parties involved, this section will be kindergarten level and the vocabulary will reflect that.)
A small country called Bulgaria was founded in the 7th century AC, grew considerably over a few hundred years (which involved some memorable fights) and kinda disappeared for a while after that (~11th century), being overrun by the enemy and all. But then, you're not going to believe this, we popped right back up on the world map, ready to show those other countries who's boss! We had ourselves some more cool fights, we had regained our former glory! That, of course, seemed too good to be true, so it only lasted for a handful of centuries and then we took another well deserved break from the whole 'existing on the map' business. This break, however, was considerably longer and lasted almost until the end of the 19th century. Then the Bulgaria we all know and love emerged once again, it had a bit of a rocky start, but it finally took its final form on the world map (alongside a few minor tweaks, which came from the 20th century wars, not to be confused with ArtWar) and here we are today.
A bit of a clarification, those 'breaks' I mentioned, weren't all that pleasant, they were actually rather horrific, but that's a topic for another time. Naturally the people who lived through them had a thing or two to say on matter, which some did in the form of literature. Hope! Courage! Perseverance! Our spirits will not be crushed!
Others, on the other hand, had a very different and much more violent approach. Revolutionaries would hide in the wilderness and disrupt the plans of the guys in charge,
there were also attempts to coordinate а big sweeping uprising. People were scrambling left and right to arm themselves for the battle, so naturally the idea was given to
make wooden cannons. One or more (the sources I found are a bit fuzzy on the matter) cherry tree cannons were built and used in our legendary uprising attempt,
which was promptly shut down. Although a failure, it helped spread the word around and it actually helped the cause in the long run. The wooden cannon/s were a success!
Another fun Bulgarian symbol is the lion. While I personally haven't seen a lion outside of the zoo, someone definitely has (thankfully Wikipedia's got my back on
this one and there were actual lions roaming the Bulgarian wildlands in the past - the more you know). So naturally lions appear everywhere you can imagine: our currency -
the Bulgarian Lev is literally called a lion, the Bulgarian coat of arms has a bunch of lions and even our most prominent revolutionary - Levski - has the word lion rooted in his name.
One last tidbit of history/factology and we're done, I promise: Rosa damascena or more commonly known as the Damask rose is a flower. Yes, but it's not your run of the mill everyday flower, it's a nice smelling flower! You can make perfumes and apparently cook with them. "Why are you telling us all of this?" I hear you asking, well it grows in a part of Bulgaria dubbed "The Rose Valley" (and a few other countries according to Wikipedia, but we don't talk about them). It is a national symbol and we take great pride in it, we even have songs about it.
Remember those revolutionaries your girlfriend tells you not to worry about? Coincidentally most of them were born there. Neat.
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