A Concise History of Bulgaria Read online

  Plate 4.3 National revival buildings: a clock tower in Zlatitsa. Wealth accumulated by merchants was frequently expended on buildings such as these; a clock tower bore national significance in that it relayed time according to the Christian rather than the Muslim system.

  Without the educational movement the Bulgarian national revival would have been impossible. The cell schools which had appeared in monasteries and then spread to some villages had not entirely disappeared but by the 1820s they were widely recognised as inadequate for a nineteenth-century community. Consciousness of the need to expand and reshape education came from a variety of sources. A number of Bulgarians had already received education abroad, most of them in Russia, but a few had graduated from Prague and other Slavic centres in central Europe. The French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars had also brought the concept of secular education into the Balkans. Some revolutionary literature had spread to Wallachia, Moldavia and elsewhere, and for a while the French had even occupied parts of Dalmatia and the Ionian islands; and the latter after 1815 were to remain under British trusteeship until 1864. Some adventurous Bulgarians had taken part in the Greek war of independence and here again they had come into contact with new, western ideas, all of which depended on popular education if they were to be spread amongst the Balkan peoples. After the Greeks achieved independence a number of Bulgarian students went to schools or universities in Greece; such experiences only underlined the need for more education for the Bulgarians.

  In 1824, Neofit Bozveli, a monk and a former pupil of Sofronii Vrachanski, had introduced some Slav liturgical training into the seminary at Svishtov but for many younger Bulgarians the desire was now that education in their own language should be secular as well as religious. However, it was not until a decade later, in 1834 in Gabrovo, that the first lay school teaching in Bulgarian was established. The Gabrovo school had been set up by Vasil Aprilov and taught on the Bell-Lancaster system in which older children taught the younger ones. Thereafter the number of schools increased gradually until 1840, when thirteen had been established, but after 1840 the pace of growth accelerated and by 1850 most Bulgarian communities of any size had a school teaching in the vernacular. In 1840 in Pleven the first school for girls was opened and others followed rapidly. Although most schools could provide no more than primary education there were also a number of specialist schools for older pupils, including a commercial school at Svishtov, pedagogic schools in Prilep and Shtip, and theological schools in Samokov and at the Petropavlovsk monastery near Lyaskovets. By the liberation in 1878 there were an estimated two thousand schools in Bulgaria. Almost all of them were financed either by local guilds or by the village council or its urban equivalent.

  Plate 4.4 National revival buildings: the school in Karlovo first built in 1848 with funds provided by the local community. The photograph shows the building after restoration.

  This pedagogic achievement is all the more remarkable in view of the low level from which the educational movement began. In the 1820s there were no teaching materials. In 1824 in Brasov Petûr Beron had published his Riben Bukvar (Fish ABC), so-called because of the motif on its back cover. Like the Greek books on which it was modelled the Riben Bukvar was a compendium of grammatical instruction and general information and it was not ideally suited to classroom use. Others followed, again most of them based on Greek models, but the production of standard teaching manuals was almost impossible when there was no standard orthography or grammar. The early monastic writers had not been consistent even within the confines of a single text, and when the nature of ‘correct’ Bulgarian grammar was first discussed there were widespread disagreements over such issues as whether the written language should retain the case endings which were disappearing as a feature of spoken Bulgarian, and whether the post-substantive definite article, universally used in the spoken form, should be a feature of the literary language. Venelin argued that the post-substantive article should be jettisoned to make Bulgarian more akin to other Slavonic languages, especially Russian. His arguments were fiercely rejected by later educational activists such as Ivan Bogorov who was ever vigilant against Russian gaining too much influence over his native tongue. In 1844 a grammar published by Bogorov did find widespread acceptance. When, in the 1870s, agreement was finally reached on a standard literary form, one which was based on the Gabrovo dialect with a few west-Bulgarian additions, it was a victory for the Bogorov tendency rather than the small Venelin school. By then elementary literacy was widespread amongst the younger generation of Bulgarians.

  In addition to schools the spread of literacy and education was aided by the chitalishta. The English translation of this word is usually ‘Reading Rooms’ but it is inadequate. The German ‘Kulturheime’ and the cumbersome English ‘Community Centres’ come nearer to capturing the essence of this particularly Balkan institution. The chitalishta provided books and newspapers as well as places in which to read them, but they were also used to stage plays, to conduct meetings, and to present lectures. In many of them adults were taught the rudiments of reading and writing and in later years they were convenient venues for secret, conspiratorial gatherings. The first chitalishta had been established in Serbia and the first to appear in the Bulgarian lands was that in Svishtov in 1856. They spread rapidly and by 1878 there were 186 of them. Ivan Vazov, Bulgaria’s leading nineteenth-century literary figure, described the chitalishta as ‘Bulgaria’s ministry of national education’.

  By the time the Svishtov chitalishte was established the publication of books, newspapers and journals was expanding rapidly. But such expansion had initially been slow and spasmodic. The first book published in Bulgarian is now generally agreed to be Sofronii Vrachanski’s collection of sermons, Nedelnik (from the word for Sunday) which appeared in Bucharest in 1806. Between that year and 1834 an average of less than one book per year was published with the largest number in any single year being three. Again, however, the pace of growth intensified with the economic recovery of the 1820s and thereafter, with 9 books being published between 1821 and 1830, 42 between 1831 and 1840, 143 between 1841 and 1850, 291 between 1851 and 1860, and 709 between 1861 and 1870.

  Many of these books, particularly in the earlier years, were published outside the Ottoman empire and were mainly teaching manuals and textbooks, but other literature became more common as printing facilities multiplied. The first Bulgarian printing press in the Ottoman empire did not appear until 1840 and then it was in Smyrna (Izmir) in Asia Minor; it was owned by a Greek who had imported Slav type from the United States at the request of the British and Foreign Bible Society. In the same year a Bulgarian press was established in European Turkey; located in Salonika it was again primarily religious in function, mass producing for the first time vernacular Bulgarian bibles and other religious items. The Smyrna press was also used for secular purposes. In 1844 Konstantin Fotinov used it when he began printing Liuboslovie (Love of Words). This was the first Bulgarian periodical, though it was to last no more than two years, failing partly because it was written in an archaic form of Bulgarian. The first periodical in Bulgarian to have anything more than an ephemeral existence was Tsarigradski Vestnik (Constantinople Gazette) which was edited by Ivan Bogorov and produced in the imperial capital on printing presses acquired by the city’s Bulgarian community. It first appeared in 1848 and ran until 1861. Such longevity was exceptional and before the liberation few periodicals or newspapers had anything more than a short existence. Of the ninety such items which appeared between 1844 and 1878 thirty-three lasted for less than a year and only ten survived for over five years. Of those ninety items, fifty-six were newspapers and thirty-four periodicals; thirty-four of the ninety were published in the Ottoman empire and fifty-six by Bulgarian communities in other countries. Of the latter forty-three (77 per cent) were published in Romania, twenty-one of them in Bucharest and thirteen in Braila.

  A significant role in the sponsoring of education and the cultural revival which followed it was played by a num
ber of learned societies. As early as 1823, in Brasov, Vasil Nenovich had founded the Philological Society to promote the use of Bulgarian as a literary medium and to stimulate the publication of books in Bulgarian, but clearly with no agreement on a standard literary form and with no available presses he was destined to disappointment. A much better timed and more successful venture was the Society for Bulgarian Literature founded in Constantinople in 1856; between 1857 and 1862 it published the bi-weekly journal Bûlgarski Knizhitsi (Bulgarian Papers), which at the height of its popularity had as many as 600 subscribers. The most important and successful of such societies, however, was the Bulgarian Literary Society founded in Braila in 1869 from which was to emerge the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.

  The spread of education and literacy meant the creation of a new element in Bulgarian society: the intelligentsia. Composed of priests and professional groups, above all teachers, the intelligentsia maintained strong links with the peasantry from which it mostly came. The sturdy alliance of intelligentsia and peasantry was the basis of the successes which the Bulgarian nation was to achieve in the second half of the nineteenth century.

  The cultural revival went further than education and the spread of literacy. In the 1840s there was the first attempt to produce a modern Bulgarian literature, especially in poetry, where the early efforts of Dobri Chintulov pointed to the glories that were to follow in subsequent years. By the 1870s Hristo Botev, soon to lose his life in the political struggle, was also writing poetry of real worth. In the 1840s Bulgarian art began to break away from the formalism which had characterised most of it in the last century or more; new colours and previously neglected folk motifs enlivened even religious art, whilst secular painting at last found a figure of real stature in Zahari Zograf. Folk motifs also enhanced the output of the typically Bulgarian craft of wood-carving. In church music an identifiable Bulgarian form had emerged by the end of the eighteenth century and by the 1840s the first musical ensembles had been formed.

  In the Bulgarian lands almost all forms of cultural and artistic activity were transformed in the years 1840 to 1860, but it was in the endeavour to establish a national church that these various forms of educational and cultural activity combined to precipitate the formation of the modern Bulgarian nation.

  The Struggle for a Separate Bulgarian Church

  In the early eighteenth century most branches of civil administration in the Ottoman empire were dominated by the Phanariot Greeks. Nowhere was this more true than in the Orthodox church. The growing power and influence of the Greeks which had distressed and enraged Paiisi continued throughout the century. In 1766 the Serbian patriarchate at Pec was dissolved and in the following year the same fate befell the Bulgarian patriarchate in Ohrid. Church appointments at the higher levels had long been a virtual Greek monopoly but in the later eighteenth century there were numerous cases of Greek-speaking priests being nominated even for Bulgarian parishes.

  It was not that the presence of Greek clerics or prelates necessarily provoked resentment or tension, and relations between Greek and Bulgarian were not always hostile. Greek bishops mediated successfully between disputing Bulgarian guilds, and if the Greek ecclesiastical authorities were suspicious of teaching in Bulgarian they were equally set against teaching in demotic Greek. Aprilov himself believed that Bulgarian should be taught not in place of but in addition to liturgical Greek, and both he and the first teacher at the Gabrovo school, Neofit Rilski, remained faithful members of the Greek patriarchate.

  It is undoubtedly the case that in the first half of the nineteenth century, Paiisi’s latent message notwithstanding, many Bulgarians who regarded themselves as cultured or educated preferred to speak Greek, believing this to be the mark of the enlightened person; and given the philhellenic hysteria in western Europe and the United States this was hardly surprising. But Greek also had its advantages in the Balkans as a widespread medium of commerce, and many guilds and trading concerns continued to use it and even keep their records in it into the second half of the nineteenth century. It was not until the 1850s that mounting disagreements over educational and religious issues forced the powerful Plovdiv guild of aba makers to split into separate Greek and Bulgarian sections.

  The main area of friction between Greek and Bulgarian was the church. Originally this was because the Greek-dominated church was also widely corrupt. The practice of selling office and the percolation down of corruption which this had engendered were still very much in evidence at the end of the kûrdjaliistvo. In the 1820s many Bulgarian villages were paying to the church twice that which they were required to hand over in state taxes. As early as 1784 a Serb, Gerasim Zeli, had argued the need for Slav rather than Greek clerics, but it was not until the 1820s that action was taken in this regard. In 1820 the inhabitants of Vratsa refused to hand over their church taxes on the grounds that the local bishop, Metodi, was incorrigibly corrupt. There were few who would have disputed this contention but neither the Porte nor the patriarchate could tolerate such insubordination and the leaders of the Vratsa protest, most of them local merchants, were sentenced to long terms in exile by the Ottoman authorities. In 1825 a similar protest against the Greek bishop of Skopje was equally unsuccessful.

  In the 1830s the nature of this incipient conflict began to change. A growing number of Bulgarian priests were being educated in Russia and their Slav consciousness was greater than those who had remained in the hellenist world of the Orthodox seminaries in the Balkans. When the see of Tûrnovo fell vacant in 1835 there was a concerted move to secure the nomination of a Bulgarian-speaking bishop. The move failed. Although it was supported by the Porte, it was opposed by the patriarchate. In 1839 the former issued the Hatt-i-Sherif, a declaration of intent which promised religious equality between Muslims and Christians; many Bulgarians chose to interpret it as also promising equality between themselves and the Greeks. In the 1840s the Bulgarians’ protest became quite clearly one not against corrupt Greek bishops because they were corrupt; it was against Greek bishops because they were Greek. In 1841 there was an outburst of social unrest focused on Nish in the north-west of the Bulgarian lands; the demands produced by the rebels included one for ‘bishops who at least can understand our language’. By the end of that decade there had been protests against Greek bishops in Rusé, Ohrid, Seres, Lovech, Sofia, Samokov, Vidin, Tûrnovo, Lyaskovets, Svishtov, Vratsa, Tryavna and Plovdiv.

  The patriarchate refused to heed any of these demands, and it was increasing frustration at the obduracy of the church’s rulers that forced Bulgarian communities into demanding the right to administer their own churches and appoint their own clergy. The movement was led by Neofit Bozveli and Ilarion Makariopolski, first in Tûrnovo and then in Constantinople. Initially they made little progress and both leaders were incarcerated, Neofit eventually dying in prison, but in 1849 came the first real breakthrough when the Porte agreed that the Bulgarians should be allowed to build a church in the Ottoman capital on land donated by Stefan Bogoridi, a wealthy local Bulgarian who had risen high in the Ottoman civil service and was a nephew of Sofronii Vrachanski. The church, St Stephen’s, was dedicated the following year and was to become the focal point of Bulgarian cultural and political activity for the next two and half decades. The original church was replaced in 1890 by a building which is still to be seen in the Balat district of Istanbul, and which remains the cause of intermittent wrangles between the patriarchate and Bulgarian ecclesiastics.

  The church established in 1848 was to be subject to the patriarchate in matters of dogma and ecclesiastical jurisdiction, and it was still to be a part of the Orthodox millet whose head, the patriarch, still represented the Orthodox community in its relations with the Ottoman authorities. The church, however, was to be the property of the Bulgarian people, was to conduct its services in Bulgarian, and was be to administered by a twenty-strong governing council which could appoint priests for the church. This governing council was the first new and specifically Bulgarian organisation to rece
ive official recognition in the Ottoman empire since 1393.

  There were few nationally conscious Bulgarians who did not now believe that the next step should be towards a fully separate Bulgarian church, an idea which was reinforced in 1850 when the Protestants, thanks to strong diplomatic support from Great Britain, had been granted their own millet. Much more importantly, in 1850 the patriarchate had finally been forced to recognise the Orthodox church in the Greek kingdom as an autocephalous institution. In 1851 the Bulgarian colony in Bucharest reflected a widespread feeling when it ended a circular letter to other Bulgarian communities with the phrase, ‘Without a national church there is no salvation’.

  The creation of the Protestant millet and the recognition of the church in Greece had shown that hopes for change were not unrealistic, and these hopes were further encouraged by the widespread restructuring of Ottoman social and political institutions which had come about as a result of the dissolution of the spahi system. As part of its reforming programme the Porte expected the patriarchate to initiate changes, in particular to increase the influence of the laity within the Orthodox church. In predominantly Bulgarian areas an increase in lay influence could only mean an increase in Bulgarian influence. The patriarchate, however, was not disposed to give way to reformist pressures and would never contemplate a split in the Orthodox community, even more so after its defeat over the church in Greece controversy.

  If they were to make any progress towards ecclesiastical independence it seemed the Bulgarians would need foreign sponsorship similar to that which the British had given to the Protestants. For many Bulgarians, especially those educated in Russia, the tsar seemed the obvious source of such backing, not least because Russia had consistently supported the call for the appointment of Bulgarian bishops to Bulgarian sees. But Russia, like the patriarch, did not want divisions in Orthodoxy, the purported right to protect whose adherents had since 1774 provided the justification for Russian diplomatic intervention in the Ottoman empire. Many Bulgarians were puzzled by the Russian position. To some degree their conundrum about Russia was eased by the latter’s defeat in the Crimean war of 1854–6.