Paisiy in Bulgarian Culture

Paisiy in the national imagination. More than any document, it was Ivan Vazov’s ode “Paisiy” — part of The Epic of the Forgotten — that fixed the image of the lone monk writing to awaken his people, and made him a fixture of the Bulgarian canon. Around that literary image gathered a wide civic memory: monuments, the University of Plovdiv that bears his name, place-names, and the celebrated fate of the Zograph autograph of his History. This file surveys that memory.

Tradition: Bulgarian Orthodox

Vazov’s Ode “Paisiy”

The single most influential shaping of Paisiy’s image in Bulgarian culture is a poem. Ivan Vazov (1850–1921), the “patriarch of Bulgarian literature,” included an ode titled “Paisiy” in his cycle Епопея на забравените (Epopeya na zabravenite, The Epic of the Forgotten), a series of odes to the heroes of the national awakening and liberation written and published in the early 1880s, in the first years after Bulgaria’s liberation (Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 3rd ed., Rowman & Littlefield, 2015, “Vazov, Ivan”; Daskalov, The Making of a Nation in the Balkans, CEU Press, 2004, ch. 6). Vazov’s ode presents Paisiy as the solitary monk laboring by night on Athos to write his history — the awakener who breaks the silence of a forgotten people — and gives the History and its author a heroic, Romantic grandeur that entered the national memory and never left it (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 6). Generations of Bulgarian schoolchildren have learned Vazov’s Paisiy, and the modern image of the saint — including his iconography as the monk with the book (see Feast and Cult) — owes much to it.

The ode’s importance is also a caution. Vazov’s Paisiy is a literary creation, shaped to the needs of a young nation celebrating its origins; it heightens, simplifies, and ennobles. Much of what “everyone knows” about Paisiy — the lonely candle, the heroic defiance — is Vazov’s poetry as much as history, and it belongs to the making of the national symbol treated in the companion file (see National Saint and Symbol). The ode is a monument of Bulgarian literature and a key to Paisiy’s cultural afterlife; it is not a source for his life.

Monuments and Civic Memory

Paisiy is commemorated across Bulgaria in the ordinary furniture of national memory. Monuments and busts of the monk-historian stand in towns and before schools; his image appears in civic and educational settings; his name is invoked at national commemorations, and the bicentenary of the History in 1962 and later anniversaries have been marked with public ceremony (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 6). His most probable birthplace, Bansko, honors him as the town’s great son (Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 2015; on the disputed birthplace see Paisiy of Bansko). This civic veneration is the national counterpart to the ecclesial cult, and the two overlap: the same monk is honored on the plinth in the square and in the icon at the altar.

Place-Names and Institutions

Paisiy’s name has been given to places and institutions throughout Bulgarian public life. The most prominent is the University of Plovdiv “Paisiy Hilendarski” (Plovdivski universitet “Paisiy Hilendarski”), one of Bulgaria’s major universities, which bears his name in his honor (Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 2015, “Paisiy of Hilendar”). Numerous schools across the country are named for him — fittingly, given that his cause was the recovery of Bulgarian letters and learning. His name is attached to settlements and localities as well: the village of Paisievo (in the Silistra region) and other place-names carry his memory into the map of the country (Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 2015). The pattern — universities, schools, villages — reflects the specifically educational and cultural character of Paisiy’s national significance: he is honored above all as the man who called Bulgarians to their own language and learning.

The Fate of the Zograph Autograph

A thread of the cultural memory attaches to the History‘s original manuscript itself. The autograph draft — the Zograph draft (Zografska chernova) — was lost to scholarship until it was rediscovered at the Zograph Monastery on Mount Athos in 1906 by the scholar Yordan Ivanov, who identified it as the original in Paisiy’s hand (see Writing the Istoriya, 1762) (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1; Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 2015). The recovery of the autograph turned the manuscript into a national relic — the physical origin of the nation’s founding text — and its custody and eventual transfer from Athos to Bulgaria have been treated in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries as matters of national moment, the original of the History being received as a treasure of the Bulgarian people (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1). The manuscript thus took on, in the national imagination, something of the character of a founding document and a relic at once — again on the border between the civic and the sacred where so much of Paisiy’s memory lives.

The Culture’s Paisiy and the Church’s Paisiy

The cultural Paisiy — Vazov’s monk, the man on the monuments, the name on the university — is inseparable from, but not identical with, the Church’s saint. The national culture has given Paisiy a vividness and a reach the ecclesial cult alone could not; it has also, at times, remade him in its own image, abstracting the monk from the faith (see National Saint and Symbol). The honest reader will use the cultural memory for what it is — a rich record of what Bulgaria has made of Paisiy — while remembering that Vazov’s ode is poetry, that the monuments honor a symbol, and that the historical monk of Hilandar, and the saint the Church venerates, stand behind and beneath all of it. The culture remembers Paisiy magnificently; it does not, by itself, tell us who he was.

See Also

References

  • Daskalov, Roumen. The Making of a Nation in the Balkans: Historiography of the Bulgarian Revival. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004. (Ch. 6: Vazov’s ode and the Romantic image of Paisiy; the monuments and civic memory; the successive cultural appropriations. Ch. 1: the 1906 rediscovery of the Zograph autograph and its status as national relic.)
  • Detrez, Raymond. Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria. 3rd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. (Entries “Paisiy of Hilendar” and “Vazov, Ivan”: The Epic of the Forgotten and the ode “Paisiy”; the University of Plovdiv “Paisiy Hilendarski”; place-names; Bansko.)
  • Paisiy Hilendarski. Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska. Zograph Monastery, Mount Athos, 1762. (The autograph that became a national relic; the call to Bulgarian letters that the schools and university commemorate.)