Bulgarian National Renaissance

From Slavic.info

In the Turkey of earlier days there long existed religious relationships between the Serbs and the Bulgars on the one hand and the Russians on the other, and these tended indirectly and directly to -assume a political complexion. At an early date official Russia formulated her antagonism to Turkey in a program of liberating the Christian nations of the Balkans.

The Bulgars partly owed their political enfranchisement to their relationship to Russia, but their idea of national renaissance dates from the eighteenth century, and may be considered to have originated with the appearance in the year 1762 of a History of the Bulgarian People written by a monk named Paisii. Among Paisii's successors may be mentioned Venelin (1762-1839), a Ruthenian medical man, educated in Russia, who collected folk-songs and manuscripts in the south, his historical, archaeological, and ethnographical studies stimulating the growth of national consciousness. Religious relationships with the Greeks were important to the Bulgars. During the fifties the religious question powerfully promoted nationalist sentiment, the Bulgars demanding Bulgarian bishops, and this demand securing sympathetic understanding in Russia. In 1870 the Bulgarian exarchate was founded, Ilarion, the first exarch, being a warm advocate of national liberation.

The example of Serbia, too, exercised a certain influence upon Bulgaria. It was under Serbian influence that Paisii was led to write his history, and Serb struggles for political freedom invigorated the similar Bulgarian endeavours. Before long, however, there ensued violent struggles between these two neighbour nations, especially over Macedonia. But this very antagonism served on both sides to promote the progress of nationalisation, and ultimately, for the purposes of the war of liberation against Turkey, there originated that SerboBulgarian understanding which was the real foundation of the Balkan federation.

Bulgaria, having acquired independence, found it necessary like the other Balkan nations to devote herself to making up for lost time in the way of cultural development, which had been hindered under Turkish rule. The Bulgars, too, have to solve the ethnographical and religious problems of their multilingual state.