Thrace

Thrace is the historical region of southeastern Europe divided today among Bulgaria, Greece and the small European portion of Turkey, occupying the lands south of the Balkan Mountains and north of the Aegean Sea and Sea of Marmara. Home in antiquity to the Thracians, a distinct Indo-European people frequently mentioned by Greek and Roman writers, the region's strategic position on the land route between the Balkans and Anatolia made it a repeated crossing point and battleground for empires from ancient Persia and Rome through the Ottomans to the twentieth-century Balkan Wars.