Symbolized by the respective points of Bucharest and Sofia

Given these situations, there’s maybe no trigger for marvel that their inner growth ought to have proceeded within the opposite instructions, symbolized by the respective points of Bucharest and Sofia. My information of Roumania is simply too restricted and too superficial to allow me to talk with any confidence as to the correctness of my deductions. I can solely give, for what it’s value, the impression left upon my thoughts that, in Roumania, there’s a whole lot which is hole and synthetic within the indicators of progress you witness on each aspect. However, no matter progress there’s in Bulgaria—and in lots of respects this progress is small compared with that of Roumania—is strong, secure, and enduring. In truth, to place the matter plainly, there’s a kind of gilt-and-ginger- bread look about Bucharest which may hardly fail to impress even a passing customer. This impression is confirmed by what he hears on each aspect from overseas residents within the metropolis, who can’t be accused of being unfriendly to the reason for Roumanian independence. Whereas doing justice to the nice quickness and pure intelligence of the Roumanians, to their energy of expression, and their marvellous rapidity of comprehension, your informants guarantee you on the identical time that the individuals, from the very best class to the bottom, are wanting within the qualities that are required to make a nation. Whether or not the Roumanians are morally extra corrupt and wicked than their neighbours south of the Danube, I’ve no technique of judging for myself; however a really cursory inspection is ample to point out that bodily they’re a far much less strong, stalwart, and wholesome race. Sure lessons of maladies flourish so vigorously on Roumanian soil, and attain such proportions, that entire villages have incessantly to be surrounded by a cordon of troops, with orders to not enable anyone to depart the village and disseminate the illness overseas till the docs, who’re despatched with the troops, can provide the contaminated villages a relatively clear invoice of well being. Fortunately for Roumania, the general public opinion of the group approves of very drastic measures of coping with illness, and has no sympathy with any of the sentimental objections which, in our personal nation, are put ahead by the Anti-Vaccination League.

Between Servia and Bulgaria

Between Servia and Bulgaria the outward variations are far much less putting than these which distinguish Bulgaria from Roumania. Certainly, the bodily and ethical situations of the 2 first-named nations are very a lot the identical. They’re each Sclav States, talking the identical language.

Come to Bulgaria and let me let you know in regards to the places to visit in Bulgaria. Imagine me, there’s a lot to be seen on this nation and the emotion you’ll take again with you’ll be nice.

 

Father Palssi from Bansko

Father Palssi from the town of Bansko, a monk in the Hilendar Monastery on Mount Athos, became the mouthpiece of the intensified national feeling of the people which marked the beginning of the Bulgarian National Revival. After many years of studies, travel and selfless work he wrote his ‘Slav-Bulgarian History’. It was written in a simple language, but passionately and was imbued from the first word to the last with ardent patriotism. The Slav-Bulgarian History’ made of its readers ardent patriots and fighters for national independence. The only manuscript copy of the History was carried around by Palssi himself from one village to another and was copied by hand in several years in scores of copies which, like the secret books of the Bogomils, passed from hand to hand, and were read and reread many times over.

Palssi’s great cause had many followers, called ‘people’s enlighteners’. Most prominent among them were Stoiko Vladislavov (later Bishop Sophronius of Vratsa), Yoakim Kurchovski, Kiril Peichinovich, Neophyte Rilski, Neophyte Bozveli, to mention but a few.

Struggle for a Bulgarian Church and Education

During the first half of the 19th century the Bulgarian people having come into contact with civilized Europe, became aware of their age-long backwardness, to which they had been inevitably doomed by the barbarous foreign domination, and began to strive for more education. Gradually the old monastery schools were replaced by secular ones which taught according to new methods and curricula. Hundreds of selfless teachers, who had dedicated their lives to the cultural upsurge of their people and to the struggle for their liberation, worked side by side

Rila Monastery

The Rila Monastery with the outstanding organizers of Bulgarian education Dr Peter Beron and Vassil Aprilov.

Besides the schools, the library clubs — voluntarily established public educational institutions with a wide range of activities — proved very useful in this work. In spite of the great number of obstacles put up by the Ottomans, the number of Bulgarian schools in the 1870s exceeded 1,500, and that of library clubs — 130. The first Bulgarian newspapers and magazines began to come out in the 1840s. It was during those days of national revival that the brightest Bulgarian holiday began to be celebrated, which is celebrated to this day – the Day of Cyril and Methodius,, the creators of the Slav alphabet of Bulgarian education and culture. In 1869 the Bulgarian Literary Society was founded in the Romanian town of Bralla, which constituted the foundations of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. Modern Bulgarian literature was also making its first steps, represented by the talented writers and poets, loyal to their people, Lyuben Karavelov, Hristo Botev, Vassil Droumev, Konstantin and Dimiter Miladinov, Raiko Zhinsifov, Grigor Purlichev, Naiden Gerov, Dobri Voynikov, Petko Rachov Slaveykov, Ivan Vazov and others. Many of them were also revolutionaries and became recognized ideologists and leaders of the Bulgarian national revolution.

 

Bulgaria holiday tours, a privilege to all

Bulgaria holiday tours, a great way to make your holiday to one of the ancient land with a great culture and hospitality.

Renaissance of Bulgaria

Renaissance tendencies appeared in Bulgarian pictorial art as early as the first half of the 13th century. The master-painters of the so-called Turnovo School of Pain-ting, who painted the icons in scores of churches all over the country, boldly turned away from the church canons. The saints painted by them were living men and women of flesh and blood, their compositions were freer and the way of life of the ordinary people of the time was ever more clearly reflected in the various religious scenes they painted. The most famous frescoes of those times are the ones preserved to this day in the Boyana Church near Sofia, in the Zemen Monastery near Kyustendil, in the churches carved in the rocks near the village of Ivanovo, Rousse district, in Hrelyo’s Tower, which defended the Rila Monastery and elsewhere.

During the second half of the 14th century the arts and crafts received a significant impetus as well as the art of decorating church books with exquisite miniatures. Time has spared for us two books which were decorated on the order of Tsar Ivan Alexander — a Bulgarian translation of the Chronicle of Manasses, a Byzantine chronicler, and a Tetraevangelicum. These masterpieces not only of the Bulgarian, but also of the European Middle Ages, which are an irreplaceable source of Bulgarian history, are kept among the most valuable manuscripts in the Vatican Library in Rome, and in the British Museum in London.

Dante and Petrarca

It is difficult for secular literature to flourish in a doomed and declining country, and that is why Bulgarian literature of the 14th century does not have its Dante and Petrarca. Instead of this, however, Bulgarian literature gave to the Eastern Orthodox world religious writers of exceptional stature. During Ivan Alexander’s reign the Kilifarevo Monastery near Turnovo became a centre of very lively literary and cultural activities. It was here that Theodosius of Turnovo worked, an eminent theoretician of Hesychasm, – a religious teaching preaching extreme mysticism and asceticism, which was also called ‘miLitant Orthodox Christianity’. The Kilifarevo School turned out a number of prominent theologians and religious writers, disciples of Theodosius of Turnovo. The most famous among them was Patriarch Evtimi – the last Bulgarian patriarch before Bulgaria was conquered by the Turks. In the course of five years he managed to set up a whole un-iversity in the small monasteries near Turnovo; there, besides Bulgarians, foreigners also studied, mainly Russians, Serbs and Romanians. Patriarch Evtimi is the author of scores of works, whose religious content does not hide his original literary style, rich in artistic com-parisons, vivid natural pictures and militant patriotism. Of particular importance was the spelling reform introduced by Patriarch Evtimi, whose aim was to create a unified literary language. The literary style of the entire Turnovo School was characterized by an elevated lofty tone aimed at causing a patriotic upsurge among the Bulgarian people, to prepare them for the forthcoming bloody battles with the Ottoman invaders.

 

Victory at Adrianople

Kaloyan took immediate advantage of his victory at Adrianople and tried to free the whole of Thrace. In 1207, the Bulgarian army besieged Salonika, but Kaloyan was dastardly murdered by a hired killer. The throne was then occupied by Tsar Boril who became famous not for his military exploits, but rather for his persecution of the Bogomils. In 1218 he was overthrown and the crown went to its legitimate heir – Ivan Assen II, son of Assen I, the founder of the Second Bulgarian Kingdom.

Ivan Assen II proved worthy of the memory of his father, and during his reign Bulgaria reached its former might. What is most remarkable about Ivan Assen II is that he, like Prince Boris before him, achieved most of his successes by peaceful means. He became guardian of the under-aged Latin Emperor Baldwin II, concluded peace with the Epirian ruler Theodor Comnenus and through well calculated dynastic marriages established lasting peaceful relations with Hungary and Serbia.

Ivan Assen II

The only war of any significance waged by Bulgaria during the reign of Ivan Assen II was that with the Despot of Epirus, Theodor Comnenus, who had made it his aim to restore the past grandeur of the Byzantine Empire. Per-fidiously, he broke in L230 his peace treaty with Bulgaria and invaded South Bulgaria at the head of a numerous ar-my. His perfidy, however, was justly punished. In the bloody battle which was fought near the village of Klokot- nitsa (northwest of the town of Haskovo) his army was routed and Theodor Comnenus himself was taken prisoner, together with his entire retinue.

The Bulgarians had not forgotten the inhuman cruelty of Basil II, but their King proved that he was a strong and wise man by displaying great magnanimity. He freed all prisoners, Theodor Comnenus included, without touching a hair of their heads. The Bulgarian state annexed new vast territories and again, as during Simeon’s reign, its frontiers came out on three seas: the Black, the Aegean and the Adriatic.

The reign of Ivan Assen II was marked not only with the restoration of Bulgaria’s former political might, but also with a remarkable economic and cultural upsurge. Animated handicraft and urban centres appeared, new commercial roads and public buildings were built. Ivan Assen II was the first Bulgarian king to mint his own coins. In 1253 he signed a trade agreement with the flourishing at that time Dalmatian city of Dubrovnik (Ragusa), which contributed a lot to boosting economic life in the country.

After 1235 Ivan Assen rendered military assistance to the Nicaean ruler to chase the Latins away from Constan-tinople and restore the Byzantine Empire. This led to a break of the Unia with Rome and to Bulgaria’s return to the Eastern Orthodox Church. The head of the Bulgarian Church again received the title of Patriarch, as during Simeon’s time. Ivan Assen II died in 1241, after having achieved for Bulgaria as much and even more than his greatest predecessors. It was an unfortunate concurrenceof circumstances that the end of his reign also marked the end of the achieved political balance on the Balkans, the end of a lasting and beneficial peace for the Bulgarians.

 

Decline of the Bulgarian State

Under Simeon’s successor, Tsar Peter, the Bulgarian state began to decline irresistibly. The Magyars took away the Bulgarian lands north of the Danube. The Serbians rose to arms and won their independence. Chaos reigned in the country. Encouraged by Bogomil preachers, the peasants refused to pay taxes and to perform the diverse corvees. The number of feudal lords (boyars) who refused to obey the Tsar was growing, which weakened the central power.

The Byzantine Empire could hardly have found a more opportune moment to square accounts with its dangerous northern neighbour. In 968, summoned by the Byzantine Emperor, Russian contingents of the Kiev Prince Svyatoslav invaded North-Eastern Bulgaria. The Byzantines, however, were taken by surprise when Svyatoslav signed an agreement with the Bulgarian Tsar Boris II for joint struggle against Byzantium. In face of this fresh menace, the Empire gathered forces and in 971 managed to defeat the Russian and Bulgarian troops. Boris II was taken prisoner and brought to Constantino-ple, but this was not the end of the Bulgarian state. After the fall of the Bulgarian capital and of the eastern parts of the country, the other regions continued to offer stubborn resistance for another half century. The sons of Komit Nikola – David, Moses, Aaron and Samuil – played an exceptional role during the years of this resistance. They were rulers of southwestern Bulgaria. The first two were killed in battle, Aaron as bribed by the Byzantines and Samuil killed him for this treason.

Samuil proclaimed himself as Tsar of Bulgaria and Prespa (today in Yugoslavia) – as his capital. He waged a manly struggle against the Byzantines for almost thirty years, and for a short period of time he even enlarged his state by liberating the country’s northeastern part and conquering the whole of Thessaly, present-day Albania, and some Serbian territories. In 986 Samuil dealt a crushing blow on the Byzantine Emperor Basil II at the Trayanova Vrata Pass (Trayan’s Gate) near the town of Ihtiman. The Emperor saved himself by some miracle and for a long time had no desire whatever to fight the Bulgarians. Almost twenty years had passed before he ventured again to attack Bulgaria in 1014.

Armies of Bulgaria and Byzantium

The armies of Bulgaria and Byzantium, led by the two rulers, met at the northern foothills of the Belassitsa Mountains, not far from the present-day town of Petrich. The front attack brought the Byzantines no success, so they used roundabout paths, appeared in the Bulgarians’ rear and routed the army. Basil had his revenge for the defeat at Trayanovi Vrata, but he was not satisfied. In order to break the morale of the Bulgarians and make them give up all further resistance, he ordered all 14,000 Bulgarian soldiers taken prisoner to be blinded and sent them back to Samuil in Prespa through the winter bliz-zards. He had left one soldier with one eye in every 100 blinded men to show them the way. For his cruelty which had no equal even in those cruel times, Basil II was nicknamed Bulgaroctonos — Slayer of the Bulgarians.

 

The Work of the Slav Enlighteners Cyril and Methodius

Chance was on the side of Prince Boris in his struggle against the Byzantine danger. In 855 the brothers Cyril and Methodius evolved the Slav alphabet. They were born in Salonika of a Slav mother. Their father was a high- ranking Byzantine functionary. For some time the elder brother, Methodius, had been an administrator of a dis- crict with a predominantly Slav population. Later he became Father Superior of a big monastery in Asia Minor. Cyril got a brilliant education in one of the best schools at the time – the Magnaura School in Constantinople. After graduation, he started teaching there and in a surprisingly short time became one of the most eminent representatives of the early Mediaeval philosophy and literature. The Byzantine government sent the two brothers more than once as Christian missionaries to the Khazars and the Arabs, but their mission to Great Moravia left indelible traces in the history of the Slav peoples.

Rostislav, Prince of Great Moravia, had the same sort of problems with the systematic and massive attempts at assimilation on the part of the German clergy, as Boris had had with the Byzantine priests. In his desperate struggle against the Germanization of the Slavs in his state, he requested in 862 from the Byzantine Emperor missionaries who would preach Christianity in a language comprehensible to the people and who would train Slav clergymen to replace the German ones. The Emperor’s choice naturally fell on the two brothers, who had already composed the Slav alphabet, which was based on the ver-nacular of the Slavs in the environs of Salonika.

Great Moravia

In Great Moravia, however, Cyril and Methodius revealed themselves not so much as ordinary Byzantine missionaries and agents, as apostles of Slav culture and education, with Slav blood running in their veins. In less than two years they succeeded in setting up a Slav Church, independent from the German bishops, and trained scores of disciples. Their activities acquired the character of a grandiose ideological, popular and political struggle which had wide-ranging international repercussions. In Cyril’s own words the idea of a script in the Living Slav language had been so dangerous and unusual, that it was enough ‘to earn the name of a heretic for anyone who would only give it a thought’. The two brothers dared not only to give it a thought, but also to carry it through, to start a courageous struggle for the equality of the Slav language with all other languages, considered as ‘civilized’ at that time. What is more, in animated disputes with the most experienced polemicists of the Roman Catholic German church they succeeded in breaking the ‘trilingual veto’ of Mediaeval Europe, which prohibited any church service that was conducted in a language otheT than the three‘holy’ languages: Latin, Greek and Hebrew.

The creation of the SLav script was a shield barring all attempts at foreign assimilation, because it contributed to stepping up the self-awareness of the Slav peoples and their joining mankind’s universal culture. The cause of the two brothers from Salonika was of great significance not only to the Slav peoples, but also to human progress in general. It was imbued with ideas which have not lost their topicality to this day: humanism, democracy, equality of all peoples. Cyril and Methodius rank among the brightest minds of their times, for in the darkness of the early Middle Ages they sowed the sparks which several centuries later kindled the fire of the Reformation.

On February 14, 869 Cyril died in Rome, while Methodius remained in Great Moravia as bishop until his death in 886. His death was also the death of almost everything they had created in that Slav country: the Ger-man clergy launched an irresistible attack against it and won a decisive victory. They destroyed mercilessly all Slav church service books, and subjected to ruthless persecution the numerous disciples of Methodius. The cause of the Slav enlighteners, however, did not perish. It was resurrected and bore rich fruit in another Slav country – Bulgaria.

Balkan provinces of the Byzantine Empire

Once they had settled in the Balkan provinces of the Byzantine Empire, the Slavs entered into direct contact with its highly developed material and spiritual culture, which accelerated their social and economic development. The Slavs, on their part, who had not passed through the stage of slavery, contributed to the ‘rejuvenation’ of the Empire and to doing away with the last vestiges of slave relations in it. The policy of assimilation adopted by the Byzantine Emperors with regard to the immigrants influenced the regions where the Slavs were not the predominant power (Central and Southern Greece, Asia Minor), but in Moesia, Thrace and Macedonia the Slavs were the masters of the situation. Too weak to oppose on their own the powerful pressure of Byzantium, the Slav tribes began to unite into tribal unions (the beginning of a state) and courageously to defend their independence. In their struggle against the Byzantine Empire during the last decades of the 7th century, they suddenly acquired a peerless ally in the Proto-Bulgarians.

Ethnicity of Proto-Bulgarians

The Proto-Bulgarians ethnically belonged to the Turkic tribes which inhabited the steppes of Central Asia. Their origin and name have to this day not been positively established. It is known that early in our era they had settled in the northern part of the foot of the Caucasus. Those lands had been populated from time immemorial by the Sabiri and Alani. It is probable that the Alani gave the Proto-Bulgarians their name, for in the language of that tribe ‘bulgaron’ meant ‘people living at the foot of the mountain’.

At the end of the 4th and the first half of the 5th cen-tury A. D. the Proto-Bulgarians became members of the motley conglomerate of peoples called ‘Hunnish tribal union’ and took part in the horror-sowing Hunnish raids in Central and Western Europe. After the Union dis-integrated, part of the Proto-Bulgarians settled in Italy, others went back to their former places – along the northern Black Sea coast. For several decades they formed part of the powerful Avar Khaganate and numerous Proto-Bulgarian contingents again went as far as Pannonia and, after the internecine wars within the Khaganate during the middle of the 7th century, part of them went to settle in Italy, and another part, a more numerous one, led by Kouber, penetrated deep into the Balkan Peninsula and settled in the Bitola Plain in Macedonia.

Proto-Bulgarians

The Proto-Bulgarians who had remained in their former settlements fell for a short time under the domination of Turkic tribes which had come from the east, but after a persistent and bloody struggle, they managed to free themselves and by the year 630 they had formed a powerful multi-tribal union known under the name of ‘Great Bulgaria’. Legend has it that the leader of Great Bulgaria, Khan Koubrat, gathered his five sons at his death-bed and made them take turns in breaking a bunch of tightly bound resilient twigs. After none of them succeeded in doing so, he undid the bunch and without any effort started breaking the twigs, with his fingers of an old man, one after the other. In this way he bequeathed to them his advice – never to quarrel or fight with each other, in order to be unbreakable, like the tightly bound bunch of twigs.