Entertainment

Medieval Bulgarians encountered games and music in settings ranging from a scratched stone board to a richly painted chapel. Playing pieces and diagrams reveal the material side of recreation, while images and notated books show how people imagined or organised performance. These traces belong to different centuries and activities within the First and Second Bulgarian Empires.

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Boards and playing pieces

Game diagrams have been identified on masonry at Pliska and Preslav, while excavations at Tarnovo and other towns have produced counters and fragments of boards. A surface could be incised into an existing slab, brick or tile. Small discs cut from broken pottery offered a ready supply of pieces, allowing a damaged vessel to acquire a new use.

Such equipment made a contest visible to both players. The marked lines defined where a piece could stand or move, while contrasting sets let opponents distinguish ownership. A player’s action changed the position on the board, giving the next player a problem to solve. The board thus supplied a common framework within which planning, capture and obstruction could matter.

How the games worked

Some Bulgarian diagrams have been assigned to the Morris family, also known as Dama, and to alquerque. In Morris-type games players place and move counters along marked lines and try to form rows. In a familiar three-square version, completing a row of three permits the removal of an opposing piece. The arrangement of an individual board matters because the name covers related forms of play.

Alquerque is explained in the Book of Games commissioned by Alfonso X of Castile in 1283. Its two players each use twelve pieces on a grid of twenty-five points. They move along the connecting lines and capture by jumping over an opposing piece to an empty point beyond it. Removing or immobilising the opponent’s pieces brings victory. This contemporary Iberian account explains the game family represented by comparable diagrams, rather than recording a particular Bulgarian match.

The appeal depended on decisions as well as equipment. A player could open a route, protect a piece or offer an apparent opportunity that exposed the opponent to a later capture. A scratched board and a handful of counters were sufficient for such a contest, with no elaborate furniture required.

Instruments and sound

Archaeological and art-historical studies identify several kinds of instrument. An eighth- or ninth-century figurine represents a player with a three-stringed lute, while a bone pipe with six holes has been dated to the twelfth century near Panagyurishte. Fourteenth-century paintings at Ivanovo and in Hrelja’s Tower at Rila include musicians.

A lute produces sound when strings stretched over a body are plucked. Stopping a string with a finger changes its vibrating length and therefore its pitch. A pipe works differently: air set in motion inside the tube produces sound, and opening or closing finger holes changes the effective length of that air column. A drum supplies rhythm through a stretched membrane struck by a hand or implement.

These instruments required practical skills from both maker and player. A stringed instrument needed a body, strings and a means of keeping them under tension; a pipe needed a usable bore and carefully positioned holes. Playing then involved coordination, breath or repeated hand movements rather than simply possessing the object.

Singing and learned performance

Church music relied especially on the voice. Singers delivered prayers and hymns whose words were connected with particular services and feast days. Some melodies were transmitted by practice and memory, while notation supplied further guidance to trained performers.

The Dragan Menaion, generally dated to the late thirteenth century, contains services for saints and preserves musical signs. A menaion arranges texts for the fixed feasts of the church year. Signs written above words could guide a singer through a melody or remind them of a familiar passage. In ornamented singing, several notes might be sung on one syllable, requiring a different pacing from ordinary speech.

Dance and shared occasions

Paintings in the fourteenth-century chapel of Hrelja’s Tower include musicians and linked dancers. The figures bring bodily movement and musical accompaniment into the same scene. Dance required participants to coordinate steps and timing, giving performance a social dimension alongside the skill of an individual musician.

A painted religious scene also had an artistic and devotional purpose. Its instruments and gestures show the forms through which medieval painters represented celebration. Together with physical instruments, game boards and singing books, these images reveal several ways people made sound, movement and competitive play part of their cultural world.