The mountains that gave the peninsula its name

The Balkans are not only the peninsula south of the Danube. They are first a mountain range, and that range runs through Bulgaria. The country carries the name the continent then used for a whole region.

Bulgaria lies in south-eastern Europe. It borders Romania, Serbia, North Macedonia, Greece and Turkey. To the east is the Black Sea, to the north, for a long stretch, the Danube. The area is 110,879 square kilometres, the population 6,433,302. The capital is Sofia, in the west of the country. Since 1 January 2026 the currency has been the euro. The mountains in the middle are older than that coin.

Stara Planina, the Balkan inside the country

The Stara Planina, the Balkan Mountains, crosses Bulgaria from west to east. North of it lies the Danubian plain, south of it the basins and valleys that open toward Greece and Turkey. Sofia sits in the west in a basin, not on the ridge. The range is therefore not scenery at the edge. It divides the country into a northern and a southern side and gives the peninsula the name by which it is known in Europe.

Use the word Balkans for nothing but trouble in the south-east, and a mountain range is being used as a mood. In Bulgaria it is terrain. Passes link the Danube side with the south, and the capital lies on the side from which those passes can be reached, close to Serbia and North Macedonia. The country is not the whole peninsula. It is the state in which the namesake is still a chain of mountains and not only a political word.

Danube, Black Sea, five neighbours

The Danube forms a long stretch of the border with Romania. It is not the whole northern border, because a land border remains in the north-east, but it is the hard line on which two states share a river. Ruse is the city on that river. In the east the Black Sea opens, with Varna and Burgas as ports. Bulgaria is therefore not a landlocked state. It has a river border and a seacoast, and the mountains between them.

To the south lie Greece and Turkey, to the west Serbia and North Macedonia. Five land neighbours, plus the sea. Turkey is the neighbour that continues into Asia, Greece the neighbour of another shore of the same maritime space. Sofia stays in the west, deliberately neither on the Danube nor on the beach. The capital of a country between a river and a sea does not have to sit on either. It sits by the mountains that gave the whole its name.

Here the Balkans are not a word for the neighbourhood. They are the mountains in the country.

— TerraTally · Countries desk

Cyrillic and the euro

The official language is Bulgarian, written in Cyrillic. Inside the European Union that is a fact of its own: an official language whose letters are not the Latin alphabet. It does not change the treaties. It changes how signs in Sofia can be read beside those in Bucharest or Athens. Romania writes in Latin letters, Greece in Greek, Bulgaria in Cyrillic. Three neighbours, three scripts, a mountain range shared as a namesake with only one story of the peninsula.

On 1 January 2026 the euro became legal tender in Bulgaria. The Bulgarian National Bank has since belonged to the Eurosystem. The lev, the old currency, ceased to be legal tender on 1 February 2026. The mountains noticed none of this. The tills in Sofia did. Bulgaria remains the country of the Stara Planina, the Danube and the Black Sea, and it now pays in the coin that also holds in other states of the Union. The name of the peninsula was here first. The coin came later.

Bulgaria is the country in which the Balkans are still a mountain range. The Danube and the Black Sea bound it, Sofia governs it from the west, Cyrillic letters write it, and since the start of 2026 the euro has been in the till. The peninsula took its name from here. The state is smaller than the name.