Khan Asparuh and his Entourage March to the Danube

When Pavlovich painted this in 1868, there was no Bulgarian state, only an Ottoman province, and liberation was still ten years away. For people who had never seen their own past on a canvas, he reached back more than a thousand years, to the moment the Bulgars first came south. Khan Asparuh, credited with founding the first Bulgarian state in 681, rides at the head of his people. It is a migration, a column of riders and families on the move. He is turning them toward the Danube, the river that would become the northern edge of the country they went on to build.