Slavic tribes who are the ancestors of the modern Serbs. Following
these, came a large tribe which did not belong to the Indo-European
family, but was distantly related to the Finns and the Turks. These
people were called the Volgars, for they came from the country around
the River Volga. Before long, we find them called the Bulgars. (The
letters B and V are often interchanged in the languages of
south-eastern Europe. The people of western Europe used to call the
country of the Serbs Servia, but the Serbs objected, saying that the
word servio, in Latin, means "to be a slave," and that as they were
not slaves, they wanted their country to be called by its true name,
Serbia. The Greeks, on the other hand, pronounce the letter B as
though it were V.)

A strange thing happened to the Volgars or Bulgars. They completely
gave up their Asiatic language and adopted a new one, which became in
time the purest of the Slavic tongues. They intermarried with the
Slavs around them and adopted Slavic names. They founded a flourishing
nation which lay between the kingdom of Serbia and the Greek Empire of
Constantinople.

North of the Bulgars lay the country of the Roumani (ro͞o
mä'nï). These people claimed to be descended from the Roman
Emperor's colonists, as was previously told, but the reason their
language is so much like the Italian is that a large number of people
from the north of Italy moved into the country nearly a thousand years
after the first Roman colonists settled there. From 900 to 1300 A.D.,
south-eastern Europe was inhabited by Serbians, Bulgarians,
Roumanians, and Greeks.

[Illustration: A Typical Bulgarian Family]