Matthew Gibson

Publishing under the Yoke: A Short History of the Bulgarian Book from Paisy of Hilendar to Peyo Yavorov

Whoever wishes to describe the history of the Bulgarian book will be confronted with unusual problems. Indeed, the ethnic and religious realities of the Balkan region are such as to complicate and embarrass any simplistic model of national identity. While Bulgaria is the oldest surviving named ‘country’ or ‘kingdom’ in Europe, with one of the oldest established national Churches (926 CE), it is yet one of its youngest nation states, its modern ‘rebirth’ date being 1878. Moreover, while the old Kingdom of Bulgaria was the first Slavic Orthodox region to develop a major culture of Church Slavonic, which was also the language shared with Serbs, Moravians and Vlachs, the later Bulgarian ‘enlighteners’ only agreed upon a (controversial) print language by the middle of the nineteenth century. Thus historians of the national Book who describe printed works from the Bulgarian culture anterior to 1878 often include the books of Makarije (from 1493),1 or Bozhidar Vukovic (from 1519),2 the works which are claimed equally by Serbs.3 Much of the ‘Bulgarian revival’ occurred among bookmen from the region of Macedonia — most of which is now a separate country, its ‘dialect’ the officially separate Macedonian language. When Sydney Shep claims in the first essay in this volume that the recent questioning of naive National Histories of the Book is already thwarted by the National Book History project itself, nowhere does there seem to be a more obvious potential for this naivete than a history of the Bulgarian Book.