Why didn't the southern medieval empires, Byzantine, Bulgaria...

Why didn't the southern medieval empires, Byzantine, Bulgaria, Serbia build castle keeps like the say the English and French did?

To busy being pathetic cucks smdhtbqhfam

They did ya dingus.

But the difference is that most of them are ruins because they were actually fought in periodically, not sitting most of the time as museum material like in the West.

The nature of warfare was completely different thus the "castle" (which by the way is fucking moronic term which means pretty much everything with a wall) is non-existend. They call them fortresses there, which are more like heavily fortified courtyards. with buildings build along the inner side of the walls.

>actually fought over
Peasants burning a few shacks cannot compare to a war lasting 100 years between two of the biggest western empires you inbred arabcuck.

>i dont know anything about history

stay mad anglo scum

>a war lasting 100 years between two of the biggest empires

You mean like the constant wars between Bulgaria, Serbia, Hungary, Rus and Byzantion, from the 7th century all they way to the 14th century, or the countless ones involving the Western crusaders and the wars of Ottoman conquest?
Or the constant wars between the Russian, Ottomans and Habsburgs empires from the mid 17th all the way to the 19th century?

At the battle of Achelous 917 A.D an approximate of 110 000 soldiers took part ya stupid fuck. close to 60 000 on each side. The Byzantines alone across the empire had an army of 100 000 people, which is probably more than the entire population of your country at that time.
You have to understand one thing, people on the Balkans might hate each other something fierce but more than each other they hate illiterate retards who diminish their collective history.

I've always wondered that.
In Bulgaria there are a few tho.

Brat, you are contradicting yourself. The picture you posted is from Bukelon fortress. It's a byzantine fortress, captured and extensively repaired and expanded by the Bulgarian tsar Michael Shisman. The remaining structure is a three story donjon, which is more or less what the English consider a "keep". So yeah they did build them, but as an user put it a few posts up, not much survives because those fortresses were fought over until literally WWI

The picture is the main room of the said keep, first and second floors are clearly visible with the third being supported by wooden beams which have long since dissipated.

wew lad.

>shacks
sure bud.

>cannot compare to a war lasting 100 years
compared to what? 1000 years of constant wars in the East AGAINST arab/turkcucks and ?

Any more pics friend?

>Hurr I've never read up on Byzantium, muh history is cooler cause it's in da movies cucks durr

Let me grab my phone, I have a few from my visit to the place

How are the Turks cucks when they dismantled the longest lived government entity on earth?

...

The monogram of Tsar Michael Shishman over the entrance

From behind. The fortress itself is right on the border with Turkey, the hills you see in the background are actually in said Turkey

Inside towards the entrance.

A collapsed section of the roof. The remaining structure is 18 meters high, the original was at least 25 meters tall. That means a small floor and a roof with battlements suitable for defending the keep.

Interesting, are there remnants of a larger peice around it or is this the entire thing?
I ask because it would be interesting to note the presence of smaller scale buildings note intended for prolonged siege like in the west, but as outposts instead (given the totally different byz situation).

Inside towards the rounded section, most probably the main stairway was located inside, probably wooden.

There were, the structure you see was part of the wall which ran around the whole hill, there are remains of a rectangular structure which most probably housed the living quarters, there's a small christian chapel as well as a rock hewn church at the base of the hill, the is evidence of extensive dungeons beneath the fortress. All that remains today as seen is the main dojnon or keep if you'd like, it has minimal repairs done in 2006 in order to preserve the structure from collapsing.The majority of what remains has remained since 1396 (when Bulgarian Empire fell to the Ottomans). You can clearly see the recent conservation works by the lighter shade of the stone used (near the lower arrow slits and the doorway)

Sort of like this, though what you see on this picture is a reconstruction of a much earlier fortress like 1000 years earlier.

Thanks, you are a god amongst men.
Its probably worth noting to OP that castles in the West (or at least the ones youre thinking of) are different in that they're meant to house and protect families and nobles. They are not really a place for militaries to congregate and sally from, but a place of refuge.

LMAOING @ THAT MIDDLE HORSE

"ISHYGDDT"

Man I'm a fucking sucker for ruined and totally abandoned castles.

maybe I'm and idiot, but how the fuck is grass growing on the top?

There's an actual road going through the fort.

Have you seen Game of Thrones?
King's landing is Dubrovnik with some CGI
It was built by the Byzantines.

>build castle keeps like the say the English and French did?

Northern Europeans didn't build stone fortifications until after the 1st Crusade, when they got to see stone fortifications in the Near East.

A lot of them in Bulgaria man mostly abandoned in the 15th century and untouched since, a lot of rubble some some have really nice features still preserved and reclaimed by nature

Bullshit the first keeps in England were build by the Normans.

They built fortified towns instead.
The Italian for castle (southern italian before the 11th century = Byzantine, same practises as the rest of the empire) meant fortified village.

Because the Balkans were heavily bombed and pillaged in the last 300 years.

No, they were motte and bailey "castles" and hillforts.

Actual stone castles didn't happen until after the 1st Crusade, when there was a tech transfer from the Near East into Northern Europe (along with stuff like strawberries).

French castle were to prevent the Germans and the Moors from invading us, while Serbia and Bulgaria didn't need castle since there was not Turks back then

Baldiwn I, the Latin emperor from the fourth crusade was defeated by the bulgarian tsar Kaloyan and supposedly spent his entire life imprisoned in the so-called tower of Baldwin, part of the huge castle in Tarnovo - Tsarevets.
The castle was finally captured in 1393 by the ottomans after a siege that lasted for three months.
It's the biggest bulgarian fort/castle to have ever existed.

Baldwin's tower.

But did you know that the battle in which Baldwin was captured was near the this fortress and Kaloyan's troops were stationed at it. Also Turnovo is clearly a fortified city and not a castle.

Tsarevets is in Tarnovo, but the fort itself did not house the population of the city, you could say that it is not a castle since the factual castle that the King resided in was inside the fortifications.

It did however house a significant part of the nobility, which is still not a small chunk of the population.

I like how the church is the center of the fort.

I want to visit Bulgaria, do you have a list of forts or something like that?

>The first record of the name Belograd appeared on April, 16th, 878, in a Papal letter[36] to Bulgarian ruler Boris I. Later, this name appeared in several variants: Alba Graeca (Greek city), Griechisch Wiessenburg (Greek white castle), Nandor Alba (City of the Bulgarians), Nandor Fejervar (The white castle of the Bulgarians), Castelbianco (White Castle), Alba Bulgarica (Bulgarian City). For about four centuries, the city remained a battleground between the Byzantine Empire, the Kingdom of Hungary and the Bulgarian Empire.[37] Basil II (976–1025) installed a garrison in Belgrade.[38] The city hosted the armies of the First and the Second Crusade;[39] while passing through during the Third Crusade, Frederick Barbarossa and his 190,000 crusaders saw Belgrade in ruins.[40]

>King Stefan Dragutin (r. 1276–1282) received Belgrade from his father-in-law, Stephen V of Hungary in 1284; it served as the capital of the Kingdom of Syrmia, and Dragutin is regarded as the first Serbian king to rule over Belgrade as a vassal to the Kingdom of Hungary.[41]

Bulgarians built Belgrade, modern day capital of Serbia, the name of the city contains the Bulgarian name. This is the story of how the Serbs got to have it.

It was made by the Celts.

There are fuckloads of them, most ruined with about a meter of the walls remaining some are restored and some (the obscure ones in deep forests) preserved

Belgrade was around during Roman times, it just wasn't called Belgrade.

If you visit Serbia and go south of Leskovac using highway you will see old Ottoman guard towers near the road still standing. There are half-a-dozen of them, at least.

Belgrade was completely destroyed 44 times, razed to the ground.

Yep that's what I am preaching, it's the wrong perspective to say "WE WUZ BEOGRAD WE WUZ PLOVDIV WE WUZ OHRID". Balkan history is so unlike everything else, the history of the said cities for example is common Balkan history, we should be damn proud of it.

BUTTHURT SERVS DETECTED
YOUR CAPITAL IS LITERALLY CALLED BULG GRAD

LITERALLY cannot be this cucked, nobody can be this cucked

Bruh, I'm Bulgarian but shut the fuck up. It's people like you that make this board hate us.

This is not the board for you.

balkan banter aside, why is it unfair to say the thing about the name of the settlement?

Because aside from a few settlements in the very heart of the counties everything else has changed hands every 100 years, so somebody will eventually get butthurt down the line. And mostly because the origin of the name is a theory and cannot be proven or disproven, everything else is just shit posting and baiting

>balkan banter aside, why is it unfair to say the thing about the name of the settlement?

Because

1. although the Bulgarian empire ruled the city/fortress for some decades - it was a battleground of various empires - Hungarian Byzantine and Bulgarian - for centuries.

So calling it "bulgarian" is very misleading.

2. the name "Belgrade" is just as Serbian as it is "Bulgarian", in fact Serbs have more of a claim towards "Slavdom" than do Bulgars.

3. Belgrade wasn't a relevant Serbian city until the late 13th century. Serbs have much older cities and older capitals.

It's not the ethological theory, it's the attitude.
Pretty much. Same thing could be applied to Skadar/Shkoder. Most of the time it was held by Serbian nobility, and the legend regarding how it was built. A fairy demanding a human sacrifice so one youngest of the nobles walls in his wife and leaves a hole so she can nurse their child.

What are you on about nigger. Tiny Macedonia has a whole bunch, the Skopje Kale, Prosek, Samuils fortess and literally dozens more, just google it you stupid fuck there's a list. Most are just ruined.

There is something really, really beautiful about this, to me.

The cliff, the tunnel, the layers of towers and the blue Danube.

They were generally more urbanized. The western European style of castle worked better for the lower population densities where everyone could be evacuated to the castle walls. Fortresses and city walls worked better for more urbanized regions

Praise the fucking sun

pretty sure they get a 1.25 multiplyer bonus vs ships

>in fact Serbs have more of a claim towards "Slavdom" than do Bulgars.
so why are the serbs using a bulgarian alphabet and not a slavic one?

why didn't they make their own alphabet but decided to use the bulgarian one

>Macedonia
KEK

Why don't Slovaks use Cyrillic or Glagolitic?
They're the ones who ordered it.

That would be like saying that Belgrade is a muslim city because the oldest building (not counting the ramparts and such) in the city is a mosque, but that would ignore the fact that when the turks came they pillaged and destroyed everything they found. City was founded by the Celts who possibly just settled over some other settlement of some sort

Pro-tip: That's just a 20th century reconstruction. It's not even known if the actual tower was there.

Most fortifications which were not used on the Ottoman borders were either abandoned (and the people around them used the materials for houses) or demolished by the authorities and the materials used for other projects. For example the marble and stones form the two 7th-10th century Bulgarian capitals were used for building a big mosque in Shumen and other projects.

tl;dr after the Ottoman conquest the fortresses were not needed

>slovaks ordered cyrillic

The question was not why aren't there many left, but why are they so different in style than their western counterparts.