The text below is an interesting take on the Celts or Gaels as they called themselves originally. The word "Celt" is a Greek word for a group of tribes and therefore it was not the name they called themselves as a group of people.
Celts in the Balkans??
Yes. They were here too. Obviously, they were roaming people who liked to move around. According to this
Celts in the Balkans?? They were born near there! But first ‘they’ aren’t that simple. The Celts were a diverse, hard-to-define lot who began outside of recorded history.
Back in prehistoric (when nobody knew how to write history) times in central Europe, a culture developed that left distinctive artifacts so archaeologists could dig them up and write about them. Archaeologists duly dug up the stuff, studied it, and called it the Hallstatt culture, 1200 BC to 500 BC. According to Wikipedia “It is commonly associated with Proto-Celtic and Celtic populations in the Western Hallstatt zone and with (pre-)Illyrians in the eastern Hallstatt zone and followed in much of its area by the La Tène culture. It is named for its type site, Hallstatt, a lakeside village in the Austrian Salzkammergut southeast of Salzburg, where there was a rich salt mine, and some 1,300 burials are known, many with fine artifacts.”
“The culture was based on farming, but metal-working was considerably advanced, and by the end of the period long-range trade within the area and with Mediterranean cultures was economically significant. Social distinctions became increasingly important, with emerging elite classes of chieftains and warriors, and perhaps those with other skills. Society was organized on a tribal basis, though very little is known about this. Only a few of the largest settlements, like Heuneburg in the south of Germany, were towns rather than villages by modern standards.”
The first Celts written about were a tribe called the Boii, seemingly from what is now the Czech Republic. The Boii gave their name to the area – Bohemia. Wikipedia says “From all the different names of the same Celtic people in literature and inscriptions it is possible to abstract a Continental Celtic segment, boio-.[3] There are two major derivations of this segment, both presupposing that it belongs to the family of Indo-European languages: from ‘cow’ and from ‘warrior.’ The Boii would thus be either “the herding people” or “the warrior people….” Their memory also survives in the modern regional names of Bohemia (Boiohaemum), a mixed-language form from boio- and Proto-Germanic *haimaz, “home”: “home of the Boii,” and ‘Bayern’, Bavaria, which is derived from the Germanic Baiovarii tribe (Germ. *baja-warjaz: the first component is most plausibly explained as a Germanic version of Boii; the second part is a common formational morpheme of Germanic tribal names, meaning ‘dwellers’, as in Old English-ware);[note 1] this combination “Boii-dwellers” may have meant “those who dwell where the Boii formerly dwelt”.
“The Boii first appear in history in connection with the Gallic invasion of north Italy, 390 BC, when they made the Etruscan city of Felsina their new capital, Bononia (Bologna)…. According to the ancient authors, the Boii arrived in northern Italy by crossing the Alps. While of the other tribes who had come to Italy along with the Boii, the Senones, Lingones and Cenomani are also attested in Gaul at the time of the Roman conquest. It remains therefore unclear where exactly the Central European origins of the Boii lay, if somewhere in Gaul, Southern Germany or in Bohemia.”
Boii on the Danube
Celtic expansion through Centuries, the yellow part represents Hallstatt and La Tene cultures, the places of origin of Celts
“From the 4th century BC, Celtic groups pushed into the Carpathian region and the Danube basin, coinciding with their movement into Italy. The Boii and Volcae were two large Celtic confederacies who generally cooperated in their campaigns. Splinter groups moved south via two major routes: one following the Danube River, another eastward from Italy. According to legend, 300,000 Celts moved into Italy and Illyria.[1] By the 3rd century, the native inhabitants of Pannonia were almost completely Celticized.[2] La Tène remains are found widely in Pannonia, but finds westward beyond the Tisza river and south beyond the Sava are rather sparse.[2]
These finds are deemed to have been locally produced Norican-Pannonian variation of Celtic culture. Nevertheless, features are encountered that suggest ongoing contacts with distant provinces such as Iberia. The fertile lands around the Pannonian rivers enabled the Celts to establish themselves easily, developing their agriculture and pottery, and at the same time exploiting the rich mines of modern Poland. Thus, it appears that the Celts had created a new homeland for themselves in the southern part of Central Europe; in a region stretching from Poland to the river Danube.“
We’re now in the year 280 BC, when a coalition of Celtic tribes attempted to invade Greece. Like the Celtic invasion of Italy, the Greek expedition was unsuccessful, at great cost to the Celts. However, a sideshow of that invasion was a push to cross the Bosporus into Anatolia (now Turkey). In 277 BC they succeeded by forming an alliance with a local ruler. Once in Anatolia they had to fight more powerful opponents, eventually being pushed into a relatively barren highlands, where they were able to establish themselves as a ruling class.
Asia Minor/Anatolia in the Greco-Roman period. The classical regions and their main settlements, including Galatia.
So how did these Celts end up in a place supposedly named after them – Galatia? Two reasons: 1. They actually came from Gaul – the name the Romans gave to the area in what is now France that was then inhabited by Celtic tribes. 2. By the time these Celtic tribes – the Volcae and Tectosages – arrived in Anatolia, the Roman Empire was expanding. The Romans were by then calling all Celts by the name they invented when they first encountered them back west – Gauls. So Galatia was the land of the Gauls.
Migration of Volcae and Tectosages tribes
Galatia
Back to Wikipedia: “The territory of Celtic Galatia included the cities of Ancyra (present-day Ankara), Pessinus, Tavium, and Gordion.[12]….
“Upon the death of Deiotarus, the Kingdom of Galatia was given to Amyntas, an auxiliary commander in the Roman army of Brutus and Cassius who gained the favor of Mark Antony.[13] After his death in 25 BC, Galatia was incorporated by Augustus into the Roman Empire, becoming a Roman province. Near his capital Ancyra (modern Ankara), Pylamenes, the king’s heir, rebuilt a temple of the Phrygian god Men to venerate Augustus (the Monumentum Ancyranum), as a sign of fidelity. It was on the walls of this temple in Galatia that the major source for the Res Gestae of Augustus were preserved for modernity. Few of the provinces proved more enthusiastically loyal to Rome. Josephus related the Biblical figure Gomer to Galatia (or perhaps to Gaul in general): “For Gomer founded those whom the Greeks now call Galatians, [Galls], but were then called Gomerites.”[14] Others have related Gomer to Cimmerians. Paul the Apostle visited Galatia in his missionary journeys,[15] and wrote to the Christians there in the Epistle to the Galatians. Although originally possessing a strong cultural identity, by the 2nd century AD, the Galatians had become assimilated (Hellenization) into the Hellenistic civilization of Anatolia.[16] The Galatians were still speaking the Galatian language in the time of St. Jerome (347–420 AD), who wrote that the Galatians of Ancyra and the Treveri of Trier (in what is now the Rhineland) spoke the same language (Comentarii in Epistolam ad Galatos, 2.3, composed c. 387). In an administrative reorganisation (c. 386–395), two new provinces succeeded it, Galatia Prima and Galatia Secunda or Salutaris, which included part of Phrygia. The fate of the Galatian people is a subject of some uncertainty, but they seem ultimately to have been absorbed into the Greek-speaking populations of Anatolia.
https://folkdancefootnotes.org/culture/ethnicity-history-geography/galatians-celts-in-anatolia/
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