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DISCOURCE: The Bulgarian Calendar
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The Bulgarian Calendar
Humanity has always calculated time in a variety of ways – prehistoric calendars with lines and knots, Egyptian, Babylonian, ancient Greek, Chinese, Byzantine, Jewish, Roman, Julian, Gregorian, etc. All this huge number of ways has invariably encountered one major difficulty – the tropical year dos not consist of an integer number of days. Its length is 365 days, 5 hours, 48 minutes and 46 seconds, while the usual human time cycle is based on the alternation of day and night, light and darkness, work and rest. These additional hours and minutes accumulate over time a huge error. The Julian calendar, for example, lags behind by one day for 128 years, while the Gregorian calendar, which we use now, is ahead by one day for 3280 years. And with the new Julian calendar, developed by the Serbian astronomer Milutin Milankovic, in order to avoid the adoption of the Catholic Gregorian calendar in Orthodox countries, an error of one day accumulates for as many as 43,500 years. Currently, the Gregorian calendar is in force in our country, but when the Bulgarian state was founded in 681, the Proto-Bulgarian calendar was adopted. However, it turns out that the ancient Bulgarian calendar is amazingly good – definitely more accurate than the Gregorian and differs from the astronomical one by only a few seconds. That is why in 1976 it was recognized by UNESCO as the most perfect in the world. The United Nations Organization for Cultural and Historical Heritage gathered mathematicians, astronomers, physicists and other scientists who were amazed by the ingenious solution to the mathematical problem with the number 365. Therefore, the ancient Bulgarian calendar was proposed to be adopted as a world calendar. But for political and religious reasons, Italy and Pakistan voted against it.
However, what is the Bulgarian calendar in practice? It is solar. Its starting date is December 21, 5506 BC. The year begins precisely on December 21, because this is the shortest day – the winter solstice. It was an independent calendar unit – zero day, Eni-Alem. Now it is called Eninden or Idinazhden, which means Young Year, Young Day, Loner. Like many other holidays of the ancient Bulgarians, it is identified with a major Christian holiday, in the case of Ignazhden. This day did not participate in any month, it was not included in any week. It was a day for celebrating the new year. The day of Surva. According to Assoc. Prof. Dr. Yavor Shopov from the Institute of Ancient Civilizations of the Laboratory of Archaeo-geophysics of Sofia University, Surva is the Sun god, who is born on the shortest day of the year. “Surva Boga was born, mother, young Boga,” is sung in the Survakar songs. From this day on, the day begins to grow. Surva is the god with two appearances, with two essences – dark and light, which correspond to the two main stages of the year. Nowadays, there are 14 cities around the world with a name similar to “Sur”, which can be concluded about the spread of the culture of the ancient Bulgarians. An analogy can be made with modern emigrants who name newly discovered cities after those from which they originate. For example, we have several cities with the name Paris, Moscow, etc. in the USA.
But let’s return to the essence of the calendar. After the zero day for the new year – the day of Surva, the remaining 364 days of the ordinary non-leap year were distributed into 4 equal quarters or seasons of 91 days each, or 13 weeks, corresponding to the astronomical seasons of winter, spring, summer and autumn. This allowed the year, as well as each season, to always begin on Sunday – the first day of the week of the ancient Bulgarians. And as we know, in many religions, this is the day of God. According to the calendar, the first month of each season has 31 days, the other two – 30 days each. Every fourth year is a leap year – of 366 days. It differs from the ordinary only in that after the sixth month there is a second zero day Eni-Jitem, “Sunday”, which is on the longest day of the year – the summer solstice. “Sunday” also did not participate in any month, and it was not included in any week. Now he is associated with Midsummer.
The old Bulgarian calendar is also divided into periods. Each year in the 12-year cycle, which is connected with the period of Jupiter’s orbit around the Sun. Each period is named after an animal – pig, mouse, ox, tiger, rabbit, dragon, snake, horse, monkey, ram, rooster and dog, and they were divided into male and female periods according to the sex of the animal. It is extremely similar to the Chinese calendar. Unlike it, however, the first year is not Mouse, but Pig. In addition, according to the Bulgarian calendar, we are currently 7530 years old, and according to the Chinese calendar, only 4724 years old – nearly 3000 years apart.
But why is it that according to our calendar we are in this year, when in Israel it is 5786, in Thailand it is 2568, the Islamic calendar – 1447, according to the Persian calendar we are 1404. What happened that these years were prime numbers? In Thailand, for example, day 1 is considered the day Buddha achieved nirvana. China began counting time from the time Emperor Huangdi came to power. What exactly happened to the ancient Bulgarians to start measuring time starting from 5506 BC? No one can say for sure yet.
One of the hypotheses is that of the Bulgarian oceanologist Dr. Petko Dimitrov. In his dissertation, he develops the thesis that after radiocarbon dating of bottom sediments from the Bulgarian Black Sea shelf, the level of the Black Sea rose by about 90 m., nearly 160,000 sq. km were flooded, which happened in less than 40 years, in the era about 7500 years ago. It has been proven that the Black Sea was a freshwater lake and after a series of cataclysms it connected to the Mediterranean. Probes of the Institute of Oceanography in Varna discovered ancient remains of shellfish that live only in freshwater basins. They found a huge amount of wood on the seabed, which could not be at this depth, unless there was a settlement there before. The oldest processed gold was also discovered from this era, and numerous bones were found, on which facial reconstruction and analysis were performed. The results show that these people were well-fed and had access to drinking water. But suddenly they disappear. In one of his books – “Origin of the Bulgarian people and the formation of the first Bulgarian state on the Balkan Peninsula”, Academician Nikolay Derzhavin, former president of the Russian Academy of Sciences, writes: “The Bulgarians of Khan Asparuh are Bulgarians, not Turks, not Tatars, not Huns, not Finns, not Chuvash, not Slavs. By their origin, they belong to the most ancient “pre-Indo-European” peoples.” With this statement, the Bulgarians are attributed to the “pre-Indo-European” period, i.e. about 9800 years ago.
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