Legacy

What Paisiy left behind. From a short book written by one monk on the Holy Mountain in 1762 came the founding impulse of the Bulgarian National Revival — the recovery of a people’s language, memory, church, and nationhood over the century that followed. This file gathers his legacy under four heads: the awakening he began, the model of the churchman-awakener, the recovery of the Bulgarian language and memory, and his place among the saints.

Tradition: Bulgarian Orthodox

The Founding of the Revival

Paisiy’s largest legacy is the movement he began. The Slavo-Bulgarian History of 1762 stands at the head of the Vazrazhdane — the long process of Bulgarian cultural, educational, ecclesiastical, and finally political self-recovery that ran to national liberation in 1878 and beyond (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, ch. 1). He did not single-handedly cause the Revival — awakenings have many sources, and Bulgaria’s had schools, printers, merchants, bishops, and revolutionaries yet to come (see Father of the Bulgarian Revival). But he wrote first, and wrote the thing that named the awakening’s purpose: know your own nation and language, be not ashamed of the Bulgarian name, remember that you were a people with tsars and saints (Paisiy, Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska, 1762, appeal). Everything the Revival became — the Bulgarian schools, the literary language, the church struggle, the recovered nationhood — grew in the soil his book helped to break. That is a legacy out of all proportion to the size of the work or the obscurity of its author.

The Model of the Churchman-Awakener

Paisiy left, second, a model — the figure of the monk who serves his people not only by prayer but by memory and letters. His immediate heir in this is St. Sofroniy of Vratsa, who copied the History in 1765 and became a founder of Bulgarian letters in his own right (see The Manuscript and Its Copies) (Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 3rd ed., Rowman & Littlefield, 2015, “Sofroniy Vrachanski”). But the pattern reaches further: the Revival was carried in large part by churchmen — priests, monks, bishops, teachers formed in the church — who understood the recovery of the nation and the recovery of its Orthodox faith as one work (Crampton, Concise History, 2005, ch. 3; Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1). Paisiy is the archetype of that fusion. He stands in the long Orthodox line — from the disciples of Ss. Cyril and Methodius to the copyists of the monasteries — for whom the giving of letters and memory to a people is itself a form of Christian service (see Ss. Cyril and Methodius).

The Recovery of the Language and the Memory

Third, Paisiy left an impulse toward the Bulgarian language and the Bulgarian past that outlived every particular claim of his book. By writing in a Slavonic close to living Bulgarian, and by insisting on the worth of that tongue against the prestige of Greek, he gave an early impulse to the modern Bulgarian literary language and to the whole project of Bulgarian-language education (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 1; Crampton, Concise History, 2005, ch. 3). And by gathering — however unreliably — a connected narrative of the Bulgarian past, he restored to his people the idea that they had a history worth knowing, and set in motion the search for it. The critical Bulgarian historiography of the nineteenth century, which corrected Paisiy and superseded his book as a factual authority, was itself in a sense his heir: it took up the task of knowing the Bulgarian past that he had first insisted mattered (Daskalov, Making of a Nation, 2004, ch. 6). The university and the schools that bear his name are the institutional monument of this legacy (see Paisiy in Bulgarian Culture).

A Place Among the Saints

Fourth, and finally, Paisiy left the Church a saint. His glorification in 1962 placed him among the holy men of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church and of the wider Orthodox communion — commemorated on 19 June, honored in icon as the monk with his book, venerated for a life spent in the service of his people’s faith (see Glorification 1962) (Detrez, Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria, 2015). He takes his place beside the other saints of the Bulgarian tradition — beside St. John of Rila, the great hermit whose life he retold, and the saints of the medieval empires he sought to recall his people to. In the communion of saints, the awakener joins the awakened; the monk who gathered the Bulgarian saints into his book is himself gathered among them. That his cult lives on the border between the ecclesial and the national — that he is at once a saint and a symbol — is the subject of the collection’s both-sides sections (see National Saint and Symbol); but the ecclesial fact stands: the Church received Paisiy as holy, and honors him still.

The Shape of the Legacy

Paisiy’s legacy has, in the end, a single shape: a small act of remembrance that became a nation’s awakening. He was one monk, of thin biography and uncertain birthplace, who wrote one short and historically unreliable book, in an obscure life that ended around 1773 unnoticed by the world. And from that book came, over the following century, a language recovered, a church regained, a nation reborn, and a saint added to the calendar. Few lives so hidden have left so much. The honest measure of that legacy — neither the national myth nor a merely deflationary correction of it — is the work of the final assessment (see Assessment).

See Also

References

  • Paisiy Hilendarski. Istoriya Slavyanobolgarska. Zograph Monastery, Mount Athos, 1762. (The appeal that named the awakening’s purpose; the vernacular language; the gathering of the Bulgarian saints.)
  • Crampton, R. J. A Concise History of Bulgaria. 2nd ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. (The Revival and Paisiy’s place at its head; the churchmen of the Revival; the Bulgarian language.)
  • Daskalov, Roumen. The Making of a Nation in the Balkans: Historiography of the Bulgarian Revival. Budapest: Central European University Press, 2004. (Paisiy as founding impulse; the model of the churchman-awakener; the language and the recovery of the past; the later critical historiography as his heir.)
  • Detrez, Raymond. Historical Dictionary of Bulgaria. 3rd ed. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2015. (Sofroniy Vrachanski; the 1962 glorification and the feast; the institutions bearing Paisiy’s name.)