Do you consider Bulgarians Slavic?

[Annihilus]

Still, even if I was not as Turkic as I would like to be, my Turan identity won't change

Welcome forum
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[Sarmale]

How often do threads like this come up on these forums jeez?

Why can't the answer be partly, or in such and such a way? It's not all or nothing! Nationalities are a complex and intricate pattern woven from many different fibers.

[Nurzat]

Many people in southern Moldova have Bulgarian ancestry
(Gagauz and Bessarabian Bulgarian), maybe that's why they are different from rest of Moldova?

that's what it looks like - southern Rep. Moldova Moldovans seem to at least partly be mixed with or descended from Bulgarian and Gagauz-like people, see the plot below, they are heavily outlying compared to the rest of Moldovans.

note this isn't a PCA but a tSNE (t-distributed Stochastic Neighbor Embedding) out of Eurogenes K13 scores (not Global 25 - and I find actual scores from K13 run on GedMATCH ran this way with tSNE better than PCA's PC1 vs PC2 plotting) which I think is better as it doesn't lose anything from sight (while PCA will only plot two principal components out of all the ones computed, tSNE will reduce dimensionality by computing all relationships between the samples; for this I used perplexity=30 and iterations=2000).

yellow - Bulgarians
blue - southern Romanians
purple - Serbs
magenta - people in Moldova region in Romania
green - people in Rep. Moldova

Serbs cluster with central Moldovans.

southernmost Moldovans in Romania (Galati and Vrancea counties) are a bit outlying compared to the other Moldovans in Romania and closer to Romanians in Wallachia (=Muntenia) and Oltenia, while still being more Moldovan-leaning (more Northern) than their immediate Wallachian neighbours.

Bulgarians cluster with Wallachians, slightly more southwardly.

Moldovans both sides of river Prut show the same gradient south to north and form a robust cline and cluster showing more diversity and range than proper Romanians in Wallachia, which cluster close together and show less variation and range, pointing to the richer, more mixed and more varying genetic origin of Moldovans, where a random person in Botosani or Suceava will cluster markedly far from a random person in Vrancea or Galati, compared to how southern Romanians (Romania proper) cluster between themselves, which I think is because of the ethnically diverse landscape of Medieval Moldova: Ruthenians (East Slavs) + Vlachs + Hungarians (Csango ans Szekely) + Germans

[Tommie]

So we could say that those original Bulgars, apart from the name, left little in Bulgaria, something similar with the Romans in Romania or the "Huns" in Hungary, except that in the last two cases, they also left their language?

Romans didn't leave little in Romania and genetically Romanians are closer to other Latin Europeans than Bulgarians are to any Turkic populations or Hungarians to Finns or Estonians.

I bet if Romanians were Catholic instead of Orthodox, no one would've contested their "Latinity"

[Straightman]

Romans didn't leave "little" in Romania and genetically Romanians are closer to other Latin Europeans than Bulgarians are to any Turkic populations or Hungarians to Finns or Estonians.

I bet if Romanians were Catholic instead of Orthodox, no one would've contested their "Latinity"

Maybe, but Romanians are a lot closer genetically and I would say in looks as well to Bulgarians. Romanians have indeed little or very little Italic ancestry, but do have significant Slavic ancestry. Catholicism would have made Romanians closer culturally to other Latin Europeans.

[Tommie]

Maybe, but Romanians are a lot closer genetically and I would say in looks as well to Bulgarians. Romanians have indeed little or very little Italic ancestry, but do have significant Slavic ancestry. Catholicism would have made Romanians closer culturally to other Latin Europeans.

Romanians genetically are closer to Italians than to most Slavs though, Bulgarians and North Macedonians by ancestry are heavily non Slavic, in addition they absorbed some Vlach ancestry (Aromanians/Vlachs in Bulgaria are not a recognized minority).

[Straightman]

Romanians genetically are closer to Italians than to most Slavs though, Bulgarians and North Macedonians by ancestry are heavily non Slavic, in addition they absorbed some Vlach ancestry (Aromanians/Vlachs in Bulgaria are not a recognized minority).

That is not true. I don't know a lot about population genetics but even I know Romanians are closer to Serbs than to Italians. I think maybe to some of the other South Slavs as well. Don't buy that fable about 'Romanians are descended from Romans and Dacians'. That is kindergarten crap. Probably vast majority of Roman legionnaires and settlers were Romanized people from provinces bordering Dacia. And yes all South Slavs have heavy Vlach or at least PaleoBalkan ancestry. The Slavs assimilated the Latin speaking native Balkaners in most of SE Europe, while in Romania or what is now Romania Slavs were assimilated by Latin speakers or Proto-Romanians.

[Straightman]

Here look how Romanians are closer to Serbs, Bulgarians and Kosovar Albanians than to Italians.

[Lemurian]

I believe it was mostly the native elements that prevailed in general in most Romance speaking areas outside Italy, and there was language shift of the locals to the imperial speech. The colonists that were sent in were sent from all over the empire, including south Europe and the Med region, but probably mostly from the southern Balkans.

That said I have seen several Romanians score little bits of Italian on some genetic tests here and there; it's not that uncommon. Don't know if that means more recent ancestry though. Also, sure, they may be somewhat closer to Italians than like Russians, Poles, and many Ukrainians on pca plots, but that might also represent some deeper population patterns, so don't infer too much into that. Of course they are much closer to Bulgarians, Serbs, Macedonians, etc.

Spoiler!

Anyway, as to the topic, Bulgarians are free to identify as whatever they wish on an individual level. I see them more as a culturally Slavic Thracian people but a blend of things.

[Tommie]

That is not true. I don't know a lot about population genetics but even I know Romanians are closer to Serbs than to Italians. I think maybe to some of the other South Slavs as well. Don't buy that fable about 'Romanians are descended from Romans and Dacians'. That is kindergarten crap. Probably vast majority of Roman legionnaires and settlers were Romanized people from provinces bordering Dacia. And yes all South Slavs have heavy Vlach or at least PaleoBalkan ancestry. The Slavs assimilated the Latin speaking native Balkaners in most of SE Europe, while in Romania or what is now Romania Slavs were assimilated by Latin speakers or Proto-Romanians.

I was speaking about Poles, Russians, Ukrainians, the most numerous Slavs. It's true that Romanians are not just Romans and Dacians, however genetic studies show we're closest to the Romanized local populations. We're closer even to Spaniards than to Poles or Russians.

European Journal of Human Genetics, vol 16 (pages 1413-1429)

Romanian data is included. Excerpt:

"A striking feature of the samples used for this study is how well the geographic origin of the samples appears to correlate with the genetic origin, so that separating the samples by country of origin or on the basis of genetic measures gives similar results. The only major deviation from this pattern is with the Romanian samples that appear to be closer to the Spanish samples (further "west") than their geographic position would indicate. This could be because of the historical close ties between Romania and Italy."

The mitochondrial DNA makeup of Romanians

"The pattern of mtDNA variation observed in this study indicates that the mitochondrial pool is geographically homogeneous across Romania, and that it is characterized by an overall high frequency of western Eurasian lineages. ... So according to the scientific evidence, the Romanians are the direct descendants of the Stone Age population who lived on the same territory since 41,000 years ago. Since the Dacians lived on the territory of Romania in between the Stone Age and today, that makes the Romanians the direct descendants of the paleo-Balkan populations."

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/27414754/

Molecular biology, human development and art history - Reflections about the "Human genome" monograph

Final conclusions - "The analysis of the results from this monographic study of paleogenetics, reveal a small genetic variability (both at nuclear-DNA, and at mt-DNA level) in the ancient populations from the Bronze Age and Iron Age, in the populations from the present Romanian territory, in comparison with the neighboring ancient or current populations.”

https://www.researchgate.net/publica...ANDER_RODEWALD

Roman colonization in Romania was extensive and Roman legionnaires and settlers in Dacia were from all over the Empire, not just from bordering provinces. Dacia Felix was invested with Ius Italicum, being considered (through a legal fiction) as part of Italy itself.

Breviarium of Eutropius (VIII, 6, 2)

"... Traianus victa Dacia ex toto orbe Romano infinitas eo copias hominum transtulerat ad agros et urbes colendas."

https://google.cat/books?id=ChfrOV80...page&q&f=false

all South Slavs have heavy Vlach or at least PaleoBalkan ancestry.

Some South Slavic populations have virtually no Vlach ancestry, Slovenes and Croats are genetically closer to Czechs. Bosniaks are also overwhelmingly Slavic.