ABSTRACT
The necessarily small sample of national myths and delusions from Bulgaria and across the Balkans presented in the penultimate chapter illustrates the unexpectedly simplistic method in which internal and external conflicts are generated with the use of such legends and pet hypotheses. It invariably involves claiming a larger piece of the by nature limited and thus ‘unstretchable’ territory 1 (or land mass) with the employment of ‘objective’ arguments, be they ‘historic,’ ‘ethnic,’ ‘religious’ or ‘linguistic.’ A way out of this quagmire of contradictory myths and delusions is to accept that nations, states and languages are all imagined into being by humans alone, and that traditions underpinning them are invented, too: that nations, states, and languages are nothing else but artifacts of culture, designed, built, and maintained by people and their groups, that these artifacts of human imagination are not products of nature, or sent by gods down to earth from the heavens (cf. Anderson 1983; Hobsbawm and Ranger 1983; Kamusella 2015).
