I know it's a silly question. My apologies :)
Also, I know it's not easy/possible to apply definitions of nation and people to groups that lived 2, 5 or 12 centuries ago.
However, I recently watched a TV show in which a guy said that a "famous British historian" wrote that "Bulgarians, Danes, Serbs and the Portuguese" are the "4 oldest nations of Europe". There are many ways to dispute this claim, but are there actually any historians that support it? Did any serious historian ever say such a thing? This is probably related to the Bulgarian and Serbian states (sort of) that developed (7th century?) during the Byzantine Dark Ages, and that continued to exist, in one way or the other, until the Ottomans arrived, and afterward established themselves as nation-states in the 19th century? And probably related to the famous never-changing borders of Portugal and the well-known Denmark of the High Middle Ages?
Thanks for your reply!
Most, if not all, nations in Europe are younger than the American nation of the USA, for example. Nationalism and nations came into play later than the revolution there, which created theirs.
However Bulgarian or Danish subjects, as members of a Bulgarian or Danish state, are probably some of the oldest. Serbia and Serbians are basically the Slavs on the Balkans that were not ruled by the Bulgarian aristocracy, so they were defined as an organization of men shortly after during Bulgarian expansion. I am not familiar with Portuguese, but looking at the geographical terrain there, I'd imagine they would be an old people for the same reason as the Danes - the land makes is to people living on that parcel are together and "other" to people living just outside it.
The Greeks are an interesting possibility. They were a people since Alexander united them more or less, even if they spoke different languages and had different governments. There was a sense of Us, of Greekness. But then it sort of went under during Roman/Byzantine and later Ottoman rule, and their identity was that of Orthodox Christendom rather than Greekness. Of course today they are the Greeks again. So do they count? If they count, they'd be the oldest.
Anyways, you have to define nation to ask that question, but these four are probably what you are looking for.