Father of the Bulgarian Revival

Paisiy’s enduring title. He is universally reckoned the initiator — the “father” or “first awakener” — of the Bulgarian National Revival, the Vazrazhdane: the long nineteenth-century movement of cultural, educational, ecclesiastical, and finally political self-recovery through which the Bulgarians re-emerged as a nation. This file explains what the Revival was, why Paisiy is placed at its head, and how far that placement is the judgment of the movement looking back on its own origins.

Tradition: Bulgarian Orthodox

What the Vazrazhdane Was

The Vazrazhdane (Възраждане, “rebirth” or “revival”) is the name Bulgarian historiography gives to the period of national awakening that runs, conventionally, from the mid-eighteenth century — from Paisiy’s History of 1762 — to the establishment of an autonomous Bulgarian state after 1878 (Crampton, A Concise History of Bulgaria, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, 2005, ch. 3; Daskalov, The Making of a Nation in the Balkans, CEU Press, 2004, introduction). It was not in the first place a political revolution but a broad process of self-recovery with several strands: the revival of Bulgarian letters and the literary language; the founding of Bulgarian schools; the printing of Bulgarian books; the recovery of national memory and history; the long struggle for an independent Bulgarian Church free of the Greek-speaking Phanariot hierarchy; and, in its last phase, the movement for political liberation from Ottoman rule (Crampton, Concise History, 2005, ch. 3; MacDermott, A History of Bulgaria 1393–1885, Allen & Unwin, 1962, chs. 2–10). The cultural and ecclesiastical strands came first and ran deepest; the political and revolutionary strand — the committees, the uprisings, the April Rising of 1876, and the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–78 — came at the end (Crampton, Concise History, 2005, ch. 3–4). The Revival is thus best understood as a nation reconstituting itself from below over more than a century, of which armed rebellion was only the final act.

Why Paisiy Is Placed at Its Head

Bulgarian tradition and scholarship alike place Paisiy at the very beginning of this process, and the reasons are substantial even when the later mythologizing is discounted (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1 and 6).

First, the History was the first work to articulate, in something like a programmatic form, the central themes the Revival would develop: pride in the Bulgarian past, insistence on the worth of the Bulgarian language, resistance to Hellenization, and the fusion of nation and Orthodox faith (Paisiy, Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska, 1762, preface and appeal; Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1). The appeal to “know your own nation and language” is, in retrospect, the Revival’s manifesto avant la lettre (see Content and the Famous Appeal).

Second, the History stood, chronologically, at the head of the chain: it was written in 1762, before the other founding acts of the Revival (Sofroniy Vrachanski’s first printed book of 1806, the first Bulgarian schools of the 1820s–1830s, the church struggle of the mid-century), and it directly influenced some of them — beginning with Sofroniy Vrachanski himself, who copied it in 1765 and became a founder in his own right (see The Manuscript and Its Copies) (Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 3rd ed., Rowman & Littlefield, 2015; MacDermott, History of Bulgaria, 1962, ch. 2).

Third — and this is the point the source-critical section develops — Paisiy fits the role the Revival needed for its origin story: a single, dateable, heroic act of individual awakening that could stand as the movement’s birth (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 6). A nation constructing its self-image looks for a founder, and Paisiy, the lone monk who defied forgetfulness to give his people back their past, is an almost perfect one.

The Judgment of the Movement Looking Back

It is important, in keeping with this collection’s method, to be clear that Paisiy’s status as “father of the Revival” is partly a retrospective construction — the judgment of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century movement about its own origins, not a title conferred in his lifetime (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 6). Paisiy died around 1773 in obscurity; his name was not widely known even when his book was first printed in 1844; his elevation to founder came as the maturing Revival, and later the independent Bulgarian state, searched for and celebrated their beginnings (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1 and 6). This does not make the title false — the History genuinely stands at the chronological and thematic head of the movement — but it means the grandeur of the role was assigned to Paisiy by those who came after, and grew with the nation’s need for a founder.

Roumen Daskalov’s study traces exactly this process: how Paisiy was discovered, interpreted, and progressively magnified by successive generations, each reading its own concerns into him — the churchman, the patriot, the democrat, the revolutionary, the socialist forerunner — until he became less a historical monk than a national icon onto which each era projected itself (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 6). The collection treats that history of appropriation, and its tensions, in the sections on veneration and nationalism (see National Saint and Symbol; The Question of Nationalism).

The Man and the Movement

None of this diminishes what Paisiy actually did. Whatever the later magnification, the plain fact remains: an eighteenth-century Athonite monk, moved by the sight of his people’s forgetfulness and shame, gathered what sources he could and wrote — in the people’s own tongue — a book that called them to remember who they were, and that book stood at the beginning of everything the Revival became (Paisiy, Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska, 1762; Crampton, Concise History, 2005, ch. 3; Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1). The Revival would have had other sources and other leaders had Paisiy never written; awakening movements are not the work of one man. But Paisiy wrote first, and wrote the thing that named the awakening’s purpose, and it is not unjust that a nation should honor him as its first awakener — provided it remembers that he was a monk who loved his people, and not the demigod that later ages made of him. That double vision — the real monk and the constructed founder — is the honest way to hold the title “father of the Bulgarian Revival.”

See Also

References

  • Paisiy Hilendarski. Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska. Zograph Monastery, Mount Athos, 1762. (The programmatic themes — pride in the past, the worth of the language, resistance to Hellenization — that the Revival would develop.)
  • Daskalov, Roumen. The Making of a Nation in the Balkans: Historiography of the Bulgarian Revival. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004. (The Vazrazhdane and Paisiy’s place at its head; the retrospective construction and progressive magnification of Paisiy as founder; the successive appropriations.)
  • Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. (The Revival as cultural, educational, ecclesiastical, and political self-recovery, c. 1762–1878; its strands and phases.)
  • MacDermott, Mercia. A History of Bulgaria 1393–1885. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1962. (The course of the Revival; Paisiy and Sofroniy at its beginning.)
  • Detrez, Raymond. Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria. 3rd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. (The chronology of the Revival’s founding acts.)