Writing the Istoriya, 1762

The composition of the Slavo-Bulgarian History. Its full title announces its whole purpose — a history “of the Bulgarian people, and of the tsars, and of the Bulgarian saints.” Paisiy wrote it at the Zograph Monastery on Mount Athos and completed it in 1762, dating and signing it in a concluding note that also gives us the age from which his birth year is reckoned. This file treats the title, the place and date of composition, the language, and the form of the work.

Tradition: Bulgarian Orthodox

The Title and Its Program

The book is known by the short title Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska — the Slavo-Bulgarian History — but Paisiy’s own longer title states the program in full. In the customary modern rendering it runs: История славянобългарска за народа, и за царете, и за светиите български, и за всичките деяния и събития български — “Slavo-Bulgarian History of the people, and of the tsars, and of the Bulgarian saints, and of all the Bulgarian deeds and events” (Paisiy, Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska, 1762, title; text as given in the critical editions, e.g. ed. Dinekov; Daskalov, The Making of a Nation in the Balkans, CEU Press, 2004, ch. 1). Three things are announced at once. The history is Slavo-Bulgarian — the Bulgarians are set within the wider Slavic family whose antiquity Paisiy, following Orbini, means to assert. It is a history of the people, the tsars, and the saints together — a national, political, and ecclesiastical history in one, refusing to separate the Bulgarian nation from its Orthodox faith. And it is offered, as the preface makes clear, not as antiquarian record but for the present benefit of a people who have forgotten these things.

The Place and Date: Zograph, 1762

Paisiy wrote the History on Mount Athos, and the tradition — supported by the association of the work with the Bulgarian house and by Paisiy’s own indications — is that it was completed at the Zograph Monastery in 1762 (Paisiy, Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska, 1762, author’s concluding note; MacDermott, A History of Bulgaria 1393–1885, Allen & Unwin, 1962, ch. 2; Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 3rd ed., Rowman & Littlefield, 2015, “Paisiy of Hilendar”). The date 1762 is the firmest fact in the whole story: Paisiy states it himself in the note with which he closes the book, and from the same note — in which he gives his age as forty — his birth year of 1722 is derived (see Paisiy of Bansko). The completion followed close on his research journey to Sremski Karlovci in 1761 (see The Search for the Sources), so that the writing belongs to the years around 1760–1762.

The two Slavonic houses of Athos are both bound up with the book’s making: Paisiy was a monk of Hilandar, where his brother was abbot, but the History is most closely tied to Zograph, the Bulgarian monastery, and it is at Zograph that the surviving autograph draft was later found (see below). The bilingual, pan-Slavonic monastic world of the two houses is the immediate setting of the composition (see Monk of Hilandar and Zograph).

The Zograph Autograph

For a century and a half after it was written, the original manuscript in Paisiy’s own hand was lost to scholarship, known only through the many copies. The autograph draft — the so-called Zograph draft (Zografska chernova) — was rediscovered at the Zograph Monastery in 1906 by the Bulgarian scholar Yordan Ivanov, who identified it as the original from which the tradition of copies descends and published his findings (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1; Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 2015). The recovery of the autograph put the text on a firm scholarly footing and made possible the modern critical editions. The manuscript was subsequently the object of national interest as a founding document; its later transfer from Athos to Bulgaria and its custody are noted in the section on veneration (see Paisiy in Bulgarian Culture).

The Language and the Form

The History is a short book — a few dozen leaves in the original — not a great chronicle but a compact, urgent tract (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1; MacDermott, History of Bulgaria, 1962, ch. 2). Its language is a significant matter in itself. Paisiy did not write in the high Church Slavonic of the liturgical books alone, nor in Greek, the prestige language of the church and of learning; he wrote in a Slavonic close to the living Bulgarian speech of his day, a “simple” Bulgarian mixed with Church Slavonic and colored by his native dialect (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1; Crampton, A Concise History of Bulgaria, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2005, ch. 3). This choice is itself part of the message: a book that calls Bulgarians to honor their own tongue is written, deliberately, in something like that tongue rather than in Greek or in an archaizing Slavonic remote from the people. The language of the History is rough and uneven by literary standards — Paisiy was a monk and a compiler, not a trained rhetorician — but its very plainness and passion gave it force, and it is often taken as a starting point in the history of the modern Bulgarian literary language (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1).

The form is that of a continuous narrative history preceded by prefaces and framed by exhortation. It opens with dedicatory and hortatory prefaces addressed to the Bulgarian reader; proceeds through the history of the Slavs and the Bulgarians — their origins, their conversion, their tsars and empires, their patriarchs; gathers the Bulgarian saints; and closes with the author’s note (Paisiy, Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska, 1762; Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1). The argument and the famous appeal that run through it are treated in the companion file (see Content and the Famous Appeal).

The Zeal of the Author

Paisiy tells the reader something of the cost of the work. In the preface and the concluding note he describes the labor of gathering and composing, the difficulty of the undertaking, and — in a much-cited passage — his enduring it through illness and infirmity for the love of his people, that they might have this knowledge of themselves (Paisiy, Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska, 1762, preface and author’s note). Whatever the precise circumstances, the tone is unmistakable: the History is written not as a scholarly exercise but as an act of love and indignation, an offering to a people the author believed to be perishing in forgetfulness of itself. He asks the reader not for admiration of his learning — of which he is modestly aware — but for the use of the book and the reader’s prayers (Paisiy, Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska, 1762, author’s note). It is this fusion of monastic humility, historical purpose, and national passion that gives the History its enduring character, and that its readers, then and since, have felt. The book completed at Zograph in 1762 is small; what it began is not.

References

Paisiy Hilendarski. Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska. Zograph Monastery, Mount Athos, 1762. (The full title and its program; the author’s concluding note giving the date 1762 and his age; the language and form; the prefaces; the account of the labor and zeal of composition.) Cited as consulted in the modern critical Bulgarian editions (e.g. ed. Petar Dinekov).
Daskalov, Roumen. The Making of a Nation in the Balkans: Historiography of the Bulgarian Revival. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004. (The title and program; composition at Zograph in 1762; the “simple” Bulgarian language; the compact tract-like form; the 1906 rediscovery of the Zograph autograph by Yordan Ivanov; the History and the modern literary language.)
MacDermott, Mercia. A History of Bulgaria 1393–1885. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962. (Composition at Zograph; the short compass of the book.)
Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. (The vernacular language of the History and its place in Bulgarian letters.)
Detrez, Raymond. Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria. 3rd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. (The 1762 completion; the Zograph autograph and its rediscovery.)