Kuber

Kuber (also Kouber or Kuver) was a Bulgar leader who, according to the Miracles of Saint Demetrius, liberated a mixed Bulgar and Byzantine Christian population in the 670s, whose ancestors had been transferred from the Eastern Roman Empire to the Syrmia region in Pannonia by the Avars 60 years earlier. According to a scholarly theory, he was a son of Kubrat, brother of Khan Asparukh and member of the Dulo clan.

== Origins == According to the Byzantine scholar, Theophanes the Confessor, Kubrat's (unnamed) fourth son, who left the Pontic steppes after his father's death around 642, became "the subject of the of the Avars in Avar Pannonia and remained there with his army". According to a scholarly theory, first proposed by the Bulgarian historian Vasil Zlatarski, Kuber was the fourth son of Kubrat, the Christian ruler of the Onogur Bulgars in the steppes north of the Black Sea. Kuber's story is continued in the second book of the Miracles of Saint Demetrius. The book is a hagiographic work, written in Thessaloniki in the 680s or 690s. Denis Sinor wrote "The Avar Kaghan entrusted Kuber and his suite with the governing of the descendants of the Christian Byzantine prisoners of war, carried off sixty years ago, who were living mixed with Avars and Bulgars north of the Danube, not far from the former province of Pannonia Sirmiensis." Nevertheless, Kuber's people soon liberated the POWs and led them south to the region of modern North Macedonia. The American historian John Van Antwerp Fine, Jr. writes that, if Zlatarski's theory is correct, Kuber was named for his father, because Kuber and Kubrat are most probably two Greek versions of the same Bulgar name. However, others suggest Kuber is but a reference to Asparukh's own Kubiar branch of Kubrat's Dulo clan where "Kubi-ar" may mean "fair haired". Finally, Croatian researchers have proposed that Kubrat of Onoguria's five sons correspond to the five brothers from White Croatia who took Avaria in 677, whereby Kuber would be Chrobatos (Χρωβάτος).