Grappling Above Their Weight Class.

Bulgaria ruffled Yugoslavia's feathers for including Macedonia as part of its historic territory, and Greece's and Turkey's for laying claim to Thrace. Such nations, she persuasively demonstrates, were not just puppets of their affiliate superpowers; they established and carried out cultural (and, she implies, economic and even military) policy separate from and sometimes even in conflict with the dominant nation. But for a girl growing up in Bulgaria in the 1970s, the only anniversary of real importance was "1300 Years Bulgaria", the expansive commemoration of the 681 CE founding of the medieval Bulgarian state. [Extracted from the article]