Second Video.
My observations on most of the supporters of the East Iranic theory , it seems no one has mentioned the Iranic theory is actually split in two camps - Eastern/Bactrian and Western/Sarmatian), as well as the non-academic autochtonic (i.e. Thracian) theories, also makes me think that their motivations for supporting these theories mostly lie on non-objective reasons. However, - I'd say the main drive is to distance ourselves from the idea of the Bulgars being Turkic as a nation as a hole. Now, the reasons for that are several. The most obvious one is that due to the five centuries of Ottoman yoke, in Bulgaria we generally don't have a particularly positive image of the Turks, which most of us see as our "more recent archenemy" (the older, medieval and now outdated one being, of course, Byzantium). Although I'd say that the view on the Bulgarian Turks and Pomaks (Bulgarian Muslims) in particular is at least mixed at worst (not counting nationalist extremists), as I personally also have an image of the Bulgarian Turks as relatively poor (i.e. on our own level), somewhat conservative and extremely hard-working, honest people. Then again, maybe it's just me...
Anyway, back to the point - besides the general anti-Turkicness most of us have grown up in Bulgaria with, another factor for distancing ourselves from the old Turkic theory is that the latter was artificially enforced as an actual dogma in our historiography during the communist regime. And now when that regime is gone, the dam is broken and all the pent-up "liberty" and ideas are pouring out, as far away from the old postulates as possible. Before an argument for that, I would first have to explain that, at least according to the common view, including of some of our historians, the reason why our communist authorities wanted to stress so much on the supposed Turkic origin of the Bulgars was itself "racist", as someone from the modern West would say. Namely, the idea was to portray the Bulgars as relatively primitive, but highly warlike "bow-legged Mongoloid savages", who conquered, but were then quickly assimilated by the more sophisticated and superior sea of Slavic tribes, thus underlining our Slavic nature and our natural brotherhood with "Mother Russia"*. Respectively, often the same more-nationalist circles which tend to go for those non-Turkic theories, at least according to my observations, have also started to deny the Slavic nature of modern Bulgarians** or even the existence of Slavs as a whole. So I think this comes to show that an even bigger factor for this tendency is simply the liberation from and revulsion of the old communist propaganda. Of course, that's certainly not the only factor in the psychological picture of this drive, just a big one.
[*If you haven't seen it, I recommend watching our 1981 movie trilogy "Khan Asparuh", available with English subs on YouTube (apparently, currently as private videos, so you're left with the much worse short dubbed version of Warner Bros) or torrents (seeder available, even if it shows otherwise), which is both interesting and epic on one hand (50 000 real people from the Bulgarian People's Army "playing" the Byzantine army in the third movie) and is often nowadays blamed for being full of the aforementioned communist historical propaganda (though, to be fair, the Slavs, while mentioned as numerous, weren't really portrayed as all that more advanced or special)]
[**This reminds me, btw, of one extraordinarily ironic "scientific" expedition to Afghanistan from several years ago, called the "Tangra expedition" (i.e. irony №1 - Iranic-theory-expedition under the name of the supposed Bulgar version of the Turkic Sky-God Bir Tengri), and a newspaper's title about it, which went like this: "DNA proved we're not Slavs, we come from Pamir, claims Dr. Slavyan Stoilov" - it makes me chuckle even today.]
Now, as for my personal opinion on the origin of the Bulgars - as I was very recently discussing the same issue with other people in Total war center , my opinion is that we can relatively certainly trace the Bulgar thread as far back as their time and place in the 4th c. Caucasian-Pontic region. Before that, if there were any people who brought their Bulgar name from somewhere else (i.e. if that name wasn't adopted in the Caucasian region in the first place), their traces are too uncertain at this point. As far as I've been reading on this subject, definitely the absolutely messiest and most fiercely debated one in the whole Bulgarian history, I can safely say that every single person, professional historian or not, who's done some research on the matter, has his specific opinion about it, different from all the rest. Respectively, the proposed origins and homelands vary as wildly as the human imagination can allow - from them being Thracian colonists returning home from the East all the way to them being Koreans (ok, that isn't even serious, except for a few people, maybe), and everything in-between. Respectively, this is true not only among the laymen, like me, but also among the historians - some use sources A and claim they're from the Hindu Kush, others use sources B and claim they're from the Dinglins north of China, thirds go on about Oghurs and Huns, fourths about Balkharans, fifths about Tocharians, sixths about Sarmatians and so on and so forth. Too many Bulgars. It's really tiresome.
http://www.kroraina.com/bulgar/rashev.html
Rasho Rashev, arguably our best and most qualified archaeologist on the early Bulgar subject. Rashev actually doesn't support the East Iranic/Bactrian theory, but the West Iranic/Sarmatian one. I myself, very much agree with Rashev's opinion, which is very basically this - the Bulgars in their Caucasian period (Kubrat's Old Great Bulgaria in particular) were a tribal confederation of various tribes of different ethnic stock, most notably led by a Turkic/Hunnic aristocracy, while the majority of the other tribes were of a Sarmatian stock and possibly a few were Ugric. The arguments in favour of a Sarmatian origin of the majority of the Bulgars at this stage (and of the Danubian Bulgars later on) are indeed many, in my opinion, but I'll just mention that it was incorrect in listing Asparukh(the Father of Khan Tervel who leads the Danube Bulgaria in the Second siege of Contantinopol in 717-8) as a clearly Turkic name, when even in the times of the aforementioned communist Turkic dogma, Ivan Beshevliev (naturally a supporter of the Turkic theory
http://www.kroraina.com/fadlan/besh.html ) in his 1967 study "Iranic elements in the Proto-Bulgarians" (sorry, available in Bulgarian only) clearly demonstrates that it, along with the majority of the names of the other Bulgarian rulers, are Iranic in origin, with a part of the rest being clearly Turkic, a few potentially Ugric and a part - uncertain, either Iranic or Turkic (in the same article he also argues, btw, that the Bulgar runes are "indivisible" from the Sarmatian ones).
And if you're interested, in this site:
http://www.kroraina.com/index.php?a=sr&fr=ct&id=2011
you can find a few studies in English on the matter, showing several of the many theories for the origin of the Bulgars. A quick short guide - Petar Dobrev is the founder and leader of the East Iranic/Bactrian theory (although others have admittedly improved upon him, as Dobrev's arguments are mainly "linguistic", which is not really his specialty, i.e. economic history), while Gancho Cenov (alternatively, Gantscho Tzenoff, as he was known in Germany) was an early 20th century historian, founder and, thankfully, at least no longer leader of the autochtonist movement, whose claims and argumentation are exceptionally weak even by autochtonist standards (which says quite a bit; also, he whines a lot about how our more serious historians, like Zlatarski, have shunned him away).
Ethnological traits of the ancient Iranian culture in modern-day Bulgarian culture
http://samoistina.com/2/similarities.htm
Scholars Claim Bulgarians Descended from Iran
http://www.novinite.com/articles/117...nded+from+Iran
On the origin of the Proto-Bulgarians
http://www.kroraina.com/bulgar/rashev.html
The Origins of Bulgaria: Myths and Facts
https://blazingbulgaria.wordpress.co...s_of_bulgaria/
Where did the Bulgarians came from, explains Bulgarian scientist's expedition to the lands of Bactria
http://samoistina.com/2/wheredidwecamefrom.htm
Bulgarian Expedition Travels to Iran in Search of Roots
http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=117192
The Origins of the Bulgars
https://www.csc.kth.se/~dilian/bulgars.pdf
Bulgarians Are Purely Indo-European, Not Turkic - Gene Study
http://www.novinite.com/view_news.php?id=131894
Y-Chromosome Diversity in Modern Bulgarians: New Clues about Their Ancestry
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/art...l.pone.0056779
Inscriptions and Alphabet of the Proto-Bulgarians, by Peter Dobrev
http://groznijat.tripod.com/pb_lang/
Another site for more info
http://protobulgarians.com/English%2...%20version.htm