Content and the Famous Appeal

The argument of the History and its celebrated cry. Paisiy retells the Bulgarian past — the origins of the Slavs and Bulgarians, the conversion under Boris, the tsars and patriarchs of the medieval empires, the disciples of Cyril and Methodius, and the Bulgarian saints — in order to make one urgent appeal: that a Hellenizing people should know their own nation and their own language, and be ashamed not of the Bulgarian name but of the abandonment of it. This file gives the substance of the narrative and quotes the famous passages accurately.

Tradition: Bulgarian Orthodox

The Shape of the Narrative

The body of the History is a compressed retelling of the Bulgarian past, drawn from the Athonite manuscripts and from Orbini and Baronius (see The Search for the Sources). Its movement is from the general to the particular and from the political to the holy. Paisiy begins with the Slavs and their antiquity and dispersion — asserting, after Orbini, the great age and reach of the Slavic peoples — and locates the Bulgarians within them (Paisiy, Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska, 1762; Daskalov, The Making of a Nation in the Balkans, CEU Press, 2004, ch. 1). He recounts the coming of the Bulgarians, their conversion to Christianity under Prince Boris (Boris-Mihail) in the ninth century, and the reception of the Slavonic letters and liturgy through the disciples of Ss. Cyril and Methodius — Clement, Naum, and the others — who made Bulgaria a center of Slavonic Christian culture (Paisiy, Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska, 1762; see Ss. Cyril and Methodius). He narrates the tsars of the First Bulgarian Empire — above all Simeon the Great, under whom, Paisiy insists, the Bulgarians had a mighty kingdom and their rulers bore the title of tsar and their church a patriarch — and the Second Empire of Tŭrnovo down to the Ottoman conquest (Paisiy, Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska, 1762; Crampton, A Concise History of Bulgaria, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2005, ch. 1–2, on the medieval reality behind the account).

The narrative culminates, characteristically for a monk, in the Bulgarian saints. Paisiy gathers the holy men and women of the Bulgarian past — foremost among them St. John of Rila, the great hermit of the Rila mountains and patron of the Bulgarian people, whose life he retells at length — together with others venerated in the Bulgarian and Slavonic tradition (Paisiy, Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska, 1762; MacDermott, A History of Bulgaria 1393–1885, Allen & Unwin, 1962, ch. 2). That the history ends in sanctity, not in politics, is essential to its meaning: the greatness Paisiy claims for the Bulgarians is finally a holiness, and the nation he calls his readers to recover is an Orthodox nation.

The Purpose Behind the Story

The whole of this narrative is bent to a purpose Paisiy states without disguise: to give the Bulgarians back the knowledge of their own past, and thereby to shame and to strengthen them against the Hellenizing tide. The argument is, in effect, a syllogism of national dignity. The Bulgarians once had a kingdom, tsars, a patriarch, letters, and saints — as great as, Paisiy insists, or greater than, those of the Greeks who now look down on them. Therefore the Bulgarian who is ashamed of his nation and language, who wishes to pass for a Greek, is not rising but falling — abandoning a noble inheritance for a false shame (Paisiy, Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska, 1762, preface and appeal; Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1). The history exists to serve the appeal.

The Famous Appeal

The appeal is delivered most memorably in the prefatory sections addressed to the Bulgarian reader — the passages that generations of Bulgarians have known by heart and that stand at the head of the national awakening. They must be quoted accurately, and they are given here in the modern Bulgarian orthography of the critical editions, with English translation; the reader should note that Paisiy’s own eighteenth-century spelling differs and that renderings vary slightly among editions.

He addresses the Bulgarian reader directly and, at the sharpest point, rebukes the one who is ashamed of his people:

“О, неразумни и юроде! Поради что се срамуваш да се наречеш болгарин…?”

“O unwise and foolish one! Why are you ashamed to call yourself a Bulgarian…?”

(Paisiy, Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska, 1762, preface/appeal; text and translation after the critical editions and Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1.) He presses the question with the historical argument — have the Bulgarians not had their own kingdom and rule? — and turns it against those who prefer the Greek tongue and Greek learning and disdain their own:

“Или не са имали болгарите царство и господарство?… Ти, болгарино, не се мами, знай своя род и език и се учи на своя език!”

“Or have the Bulgarians not had a kingdom and dominion?… You, Bulgarian, do not deceive yourself; know your own nation and language, and learn in your own tongue!”

(Paisiy, Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska, 1762, preface/appeal; after the critical editions.) The imperative знай своя род и език — “know your own nation and language” — is the phrase that has become, more than any other, the motto of Paisiy and of the whole Revival (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1; Crampton, Concise History, 2005, ch. 3).

He is hardest on the Grecizers — the Bulgarians who chase after Greek culture and are ashamed to be known as Bulgarians. In the much-quoted rebuke he calls them to their senses, reminding them that the Greeks themselves are a people among peoples and that the Bulgarian has no cause for shame but every cause for honor in his own nation and faith:

“Тия, които не обичат за своя род и език, окаяни и безумни са…”

“Those who do not love their own nation and language are wretched and foolish…”

(Paisiy, Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska, 1762, preface/appeal; after the critical editions.) The force of the passage lies in its reversal of the prevailing hierarchy: in a world where to be Greek was to be cultured and to be Bulgarian was to be a peasant, Paisiy declares the shame to lie not in the Bulgarian name but in the fleeing of it.

What the Appeal Does and Does Not Say

It is worth being precise about the appeal, because it has been read, in later centuries, through the lens of a nationalism that did not yet exist. Paisiy’s cry is for the recovery of memory, language, and self-respect within the Orthodox and Ottoman order he knew; it is a call to Bulgarians to honor their nation, tongue, and saints, and to resist assimilation to the Greeks. It is not, in its own terms, a program of political revolt, nor a theory of the nation-state, nor an ecclesiology (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1 and 6, on reading Paisiy without anachronism). The later uses to which the appeal was put — the church struggle, the national liberation movement, the secular national cult — grew from it but are not identical with it, and the collection treats those developments, and the sober questions they raise about nationalism and the Church, separately (see The Question of Nationalism; National Saint and Symbol). What Paisiy himself set down was an appeal to a forgetful people: know your own nation and language, and be not ashamed. It was enough to begin an awakening.

See Also

References

  • Paisiy Hilendarski. Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska. Zograph Monastery, Mount Athos, 1762. (The narrative of the Slavs and Bulgarians, the conversion under Boris, the tsars and patriarchs, the disciples of Cyril and Methodius, and the Bulgarian saints; the prefaces and the famous appeal — “know your own nation and language” and the rebuke of the Grecizers.) Quotations given in modern Bulgarian orthography after the critical editions (e.g. ed. Petar Dinekov); renderings vary slightly among editions.
  • Daskalov, Roumen. The Making of a Nation in the Balkans: Historiography of the Bulgarian Revival. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004. (The content and argument of the History; the famous appeal and its motto знай своя род и език; the caution against reading Paisiy through a later nationalism.)
  • Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. (The medieval Bulgarian reality behind the narrative; the appeal at the head of the Revival.)
  • MacDermott, Mercia. A History of Bulgaria 1393–1885. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962. (The saints and the substance of the narrative.)