Aleksandur Stamboliiski: Bulgaria

I

The Life and the Land

1

The Emergence of Modern Bulgaria

The Bulgarians were an amalgamation of the Turkic Bulgars who crossed southwards over the Danube in the 7th century and the resident Slavs whom they subjugated. The Bulgars were pagan and the Slavs Christian and the amalgamation did not begin until after the Bulgar ruler had enforced Christianity upon all his subjects in the late 9th century. The new religion also brought literacy and literature. A critical question was whether the Bulgarian Church should align with Rome and the West or with Constantinople (modern Istanbul) and the East. Bulgaria’s ruler decided that the Church should adhere to the east and thus the Bulgarian Church acquired the doctrine, the liturgy and the customs, political as well as religious, of the Orthodox Church.

Though Bulgaria shared its religion with its mighty neighbour, the Byzantine Empire based in Constantinople, there was frequent political tension between the two states. The Bulgarian ruler, Simeon the Great (r. 893–927), twice brought his armies to the walls of the imperial capital. His prowess was such that he became the only ruler, apart from the Emperor himself and the Holy Roman Emperor, whom the Byzantines recognised as a ‘Basileus’ or King. More importantly, he secured the independence of the Bulgarian Church which was given its own Patriarch and which no longer needed to consult Constantinople on major ecclesiastical appointments.

Bulgaria’s power waned, however, and at the beginning of the 12th century the country was conquered by the Byzantine emperor, Basil ‘the Bulgar-slayer’. Legend has it that after the battle of Belassitsa the victorious emperor ordered that 99 in every 100 Bulgarian prisoners be blinded and the remainder be left with one eye to guide their colleagues home. The story is almost certainly a myth¹ but Byzantine power was real and was to last in Bulgaria for almost two centuries until a second Bulgarian empire was established in 1185. It produced some wonderful works of arts, most notably the incomparable frescoes in the church at Boyana near Sofia and the Tsar Alexander Gospels now in the British Museum. Yet the second Bulgarian empire, like the first, was weakened by social divisions and by the spread of bogomilism which preached that the material world was a manifestation of evil, a belief which did not encourage commitment to the defence of the state. And the state needed defending. Byzantium had weakened but in the 14th century a new force had appeared: the Ottoman Turks. In 1393 they captured the mediaeval Bulgarian capital, Tŭrnovo. Bulgaria was to remain a part of the Ottoman Empire for 500 years.

The Bulgarian state was dissolved, the nobility destroyed or dispersed, and the towns colonised by Turks, Greeks and Armenians, their original Bulgarian inhabitants taking refuge in the villages, especially in the mountains. The one Bulgarian institution which did survive was the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. It was the Church which kept alive the written language and Bulgarian folk traditions, many of which were interwoven with Christian festivals; even Bulgarian names survived primarily because Church christenings continued.

There were few signs of a Bulgarian national revival until the second quarter of the 19th century, and when the revival movement did appear – the Bulgarians call it the vŭzrazhdane or ‘renaissance’ – it was primarily cultural rather than social or political. It expressed itself initially through the Church. The Bulgarian Patriarchate which had survived the conquest of 1393 was suppressed in 1767 and placed under the control of the Oecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople, an organisation dominated entirely by Greeks. Bulgarian bishops were rapidly replaced by Greek ones. In addition to being Greek the Oecumenical Patriarchate was also corrupt with clerical office being sold to the highest bidder. By the late 18th century Bulgarians began to complain because their bishops were corrupt; by the 1820s they there were complaining because their bishops were corrupt and Greek; by the 1840s they were complaining because their bishops were Greek.

Education was controlled by the Church and therefore also fell under Greek cultural domination. In the 1830s and 1840s the Bulgarians launched a drive to increase education. In the circumstances the educational reformers wanted education which was more secular and less dominated by Greek language and culture. By the second half of the 19th century the drive to educate Bulgarians, in Bulgarian, had made remarkable progress.

In addition to establishing a network of schools the Bulgarians also had to provide the books for use in teaching, the presses on which to print them, and, not least, a standard language in which they were to be written. That these were found was another testimony to the energy of the national renaissance.

EDUCATION IN BULGARIA

The first secular school in Bulgaria was opened in Gabrovo in 1835. It was funded partly by Bulgarians in Russia and used the mutual method of instruction because there were too few qualified teachers. In 1840 it was reorganised into classes. Greek was still taught in many Bulgarian schools but in most the majority of subjects were taught in Bulgarian. Some of the early schools were co-educational but in 1841 the first girls’ school was founded in Sliven. By 1878 over 2,000 schools had been established, 150 of which were for girls. The funding for the schools came in part from Bulgarian communities abroad, especially in Russia and Romania, but also from the guilds which flourished with the growth of manufacturing and trading in Bulgaria. The guilds also funded a large number of Bulgarian students who went abroad for the higher education their homeland could not offer. The majority of Bulgarians educated abroad went to Constantinople or to central and western Europe, many of them funded by scholarships; in 1867 the city of Plovdiv alone was financing five students in Paris, four in Vienna, seven in Russia, two in Britain, and 40 in Constantinople. The scholarships were necessary as most students were from poor backgrounds. The education movement was one of the most important elements in the alliance between the peasants, the guilds and the intelligentsia, an alliance which was the bedrock of the national revival. So important was education to the Bulgarians of the Tulcha diocese in the Dobrudja that the local Bulgarian council decided that villages should be allowed to have only one tavern, the revenue from which was to be used to finance local schools. After 1878 the Bulgarian state provided free and compulsory primary education. Secondary schools were fewer in number but many of them, especially in Macedonia, were of a high standard.

The pupils who attended these schools, or who were sent on scholarships in institutions of higher learning outside the Bulgarian lands, were not drawn from a social or a political elite. Since the destruction of the Bulgarian nobility Bulgaria had been largely an egalitarian society and those who graduated from the new schools were overwhelmingly the children of ordinary peasants or townsfolk. The newly emerging educated cadres, or intelligentsia, were therefore drawn directly from and initially at least remained close to the peasant mass of the nation.

There was little social differentiation in the rural communities but divisions were beginning to appear in the towns. In the second and third quarters of the 19th century a new wealthy Bulgarian mercantile and manufacturing element emerged, much of it based on selling uniforms to the Ottoman army. Given this economic nexus this new element may not have wanted political disturbances but it was fully behind the cultural revival, and it provided much of the money which funded the schools, and the many scholarships provided to study in them or abroad.

Most of the manufacturers and merchants were organised into guilds which financed the schools and also the rebuilding of many churches and monasteries. It was the Church, rather than the educational movement, which lay at the heart of the Bulgarian national revival, whose chief demand was for an independent Bulgarian Church, separate from the Constantinople Patriarchate. Success was eventually achieved in 1870 when the Ottoman government accepted that a separate Bulgarian Church, headed by an Exarch, a rank inferior to that of Patriarch, should be established. The Patriarchate, however, refused to recognise the new institution which it declared schismatic in 1872. No matter what pressure the Bulgarians exercised the Greek Patriarchate remained immovable on this point. The schism did not end until