MEDIEVAL BULGARIAN CULTURE FROM THE 7th
THROUGH THE 17th C.
The medieval Bulgarian culture can be divided into two distinct periods
- the first one marked by heathenism (7th-9th c.) and the second,
post-Christianization (7th-l7th c.), marked by the conversion of faith.
This differentiation is thus made on the basis of the ideological
content pertinent to the culture of that epoch, content that draws the
demarcation line between two entirely different cultural patterns.
The factors which had affected the development and had delineated the
manifestation of Bulgarian culture should not be confined within the
influence of the religion predominating in a given space of time. For
example, one of the significant factors was the presence, or equally,
the absence at times, of independent state and church institutions.
Another important factor was the geographical position of the Bulgarian
lands at the junction of the routes connecting Europe and Asia, i.e.
Bulgaria had to play its allotted part of a two-way passage, linking two
culturally strong worlds, exchanging constantly and actively their
cultural values. Despite the dispiriting and almost permanent political
confrontation between Asia and Europe during the Middle Ages, the
Bulgarian culture, along with the Byzantine one, had acted as a
laboratory for creative interaction and as an indispensable mediator in
the onward transmission of culture in both directions. There is also one
very important factor, or rather, a fact which should not be overlooked
the Bulgarian people, state and church were never steeped in the
xenophobia (fear of or irresponsiveness to anything foreign) that was
customary in some other communities, nor were they blinkered by the
dogmas of their own beliefs and values.
A characteristic feature of the spiritual development of the Bulgarian
people during the Middle Ages was its written culture, i.e. its letters
and script. Rarely are we nowadays fully aware of the impact on the
overall development made by each people which had created and promoted a
written culture, nor of the advantages it could have enjoyed in the
antiquity. These are facts which, perhaps, were best illustrated by
Voltaire in saying that in the history of mankind there had been only
two great inventions - that of the wheel, which had helped eliminate
distances and that of the alphabet, which had made it possible to
preserve, multiply and disseminate through into the future the
information about the achievements both of forebears and contemporaries.
Bulgarian culture-studying experts have confirmed the validity of the
above statement with examples of the history of the Bulgarian lands. The
Thracians whom the authors of the antiquity described not only as the
second biggest people on the earth but also as a people which had failed
to create its own letters and script, are well-known to have disappeared
without trace, by contrast with the comparatively small Bulgarian
people, which had survived in spite of its frightfully stormy historical
lot in this part of the European continent. The Bulgarians, who settled
on the Balkan Peninsula in 681 had brought with them a runic alphabet of
their own. Its characters and symbols, appearing in several hundred
texts cut out on stone, metal and ceramics had probably had idiographic
meaning, i.e. one character signified one notion. The undemocratic
nature of that alphabet was all too obvious. It had not been suitable
for recording the evolving practices of the state, nor for writing down
or spreading knowledge among large communities of people.
That was why, still in the beginning of the 7th century, the Greek
language and script were introduced in the Bulgarian state activity and
literature. In this respect the Bulgarians were no different from the
other European peoples whose medieval literature was bound to be written
in either of the classical languages - Latin or Greek. Some of these
recorded messages of the past, discovered in Bulgaria, represent an
original expression of the medieval sense of patriotism, for they had
been inscribed in Bulgarian but by using characters of the Greek
alphabet. Such a trend could not have stood a fair chance of success as
it had obviously been impossible to transliterate all sounds of the
Bulgarian speech into the Greek phonetic symbols.
Nevertheless, the dozens of textual inscriptions containing state
decrees, historical chronicles and even philosophical reflections, had
laid the beginning of the Bulgarian literature - a unique phenomenon in
the cultural life of Europe. No other infant people and so young a state
in Europe had ever created through the 7th-9th c. such numerous
inscriptions, so diversified in their content, like Bulgaria had. These
are quite correctly treated as one of the most significant phenomena of
the Bulgarian culture in its heathen period.
In 855 AD, two highly educated Byzantine intellectuals of Bulgarian
origin, the brothers Cyril and Methodius, invented the Old Bulgarian
(Slavonic) script which is occasionally referred to in literature as the
Slavonic alphabet. A few years after, Christianity became the official
state religion in Bulgaria. In 866 AD the disciples of Cyril and
Methodius brought this alphabet to the Bulgarian lands, and in 893 AD
the General assembly of the nation declared it the official alphabet for
the whole of the Bulgarian kingdom. About that time (the precise date is
not known), Clement, one of Cyril and Methodius's adherents, devised a
new graphic system of the Old Bulgarian script, deriving characters from
both the proto-Bulgarian runic alphabet (naturally with phonetic
meanings attached) and the Greek uncial (official) script. The
cryptograhic, rather unintelligible, character of Cyril and Methodius's
alphabet should have prompted Clement to devise the new script which had
come to be known in history as the Cyrillic - a name given to it by
Clement himself as a token of recognition for his teacher. This is the
alphabet still used, with minor modifications, by the Bulgarians and
other Slav and non-Slav peoples from Central Europe through to the
Pacific.
The peculiarities of the Christian religious practices (as is known, it
cannot be professed without books and literacy), obliged not only parish
priests but also staunch Christians that were the majority of the
population at that time, to master reading and writing skills. Failing
that they would have been unable to acquaint themselves with the
religious dogmas in the basic Christian books - the Gospel, the Psalter
and the Book of Common Prayer, the Menologion (litturgical book
containing accounts of the saints' lives arranged by months), the
recorded accounts of the clergy, and the criticisms against heresies.
For the same reason literacy was absolutely compulsory for the adepts in
the various heretic teachings, too. Statecraft in general, and,
especially, the administrative management of Bulgaria - quite a big
state in the 9th-11th c. and again in the l2th-l4th c., also required a
given number of literate men. This should be the explanation for the
Bulgarian school network of the 9th century, developed early by the then
European cultural standards. Every parish priest had a duty to teach all
willing adolescents of both sexes to read and write at church-maintained
grammar schools. Further education in conjunction with book translations
and transcriptions took place in the monasteries and in some of the
major city centers (Pliska, Preslav, Dristra, Sredets, Ohrida, Bitolya,
Strumitsa, Devol, Prespa, Plovdiv, Sozopol, Nessebur, Pomorie).
All lessons were taught in the native tongue one very important
circumstance that rendered literacy courses a lot easier for all comers.
Their number should have been quite large, bearing in mind the
Bulgarians' eagerness to learn - one of the most valuable features of
their ethno-psychological type of race. Illiteracy was by far more
difficult to liquidate in Western and in Eastern Europe as teaching
there had to be done in the two dead and unintelligible languages -
Latin and Greek.
At any rate, the traces of written culture other than the books that had
come to light - inscriptions showing possession, graffiti on rock or
fortress walls, frescoes, etc., have all indicated that sixty to seventy
percent of the Bulgarian population during the Middle Ages, including
the lowest social strata, were literate people.
The content of the Old Bulgarian literature in the Middle Ages had
invariably been determined by the Christian doctrine, the single
dominant ideology in the official workings of the church and the state,
the latter being the one and only patron and consumer of this
literature. The predominating part of the written, translated and copied
literary work was of religious nature or was somehow connected with the
practices of the church. A pleiad of talented authors of Old Church
Slavonic literature matured in the tenth century - Clement of Ohrida,
Constantine of Pleslav, John the Exarch, Gregorius Mnah, Tudor Doksov,
Nahum of Ohrida, Patriarch Euthymius, Romil of Vidin and Grigorius
Tsamblak. The impressive Christian ideological and theoretical legacy
was not difficult to master as Byzantium was almost next-door and
contact with its cultural centers was permanent. As a rule, the highly
educated intellectual elite of Bulgaria was bilingual, i.e. they were
able to read and write in both the Bulgarian and the Greek languages.
The dearth of secular literature in Bulgaria was satisfied chiefly by
the translation of any work found in Byzantium, or by the compilation of
short saga-novels. The spread of literacy brought with it enhanced
interest in knowledge and skills connected with natural history,
science, philosophy and rhetoric.
Publicistic journalism-type of work also had some interesting output.
Some of it worth a mention is: 'On Letters' by Chernorizetz Hrabur
(beginning of the 10th c.) - a vehemently ardent piece in vindication of
the right to existence of the Old Bulgarian script; 'A Talk Against the
Bogomils' by Presbyter Cosma (middle of the 10th c.) - an alarming
analysis of the state, the Bulgarian society was in, at the end of the
reign of tsar Peter I, a society devoured by corruption, immobility,
social abstention and anti-state activities on the part of the heretics.
Alongside official literature there were translations and original works
written by adherents of heretic teachings, the Bogomils in particular,
who expounded the Code of rules and notions of the heresy. Those were
the books that penetrated in Western Europe to influence the development
of views and ideas adopted by the Cathars in Italy and the Albigenisians
in France. The heretics also devised historiography and natural science
bibliography of their own.
In the 14th century works critical of the official Church doctrine and
based on humanitarian knowledge gradually began making their way in
literature. This was a sign that the Bulgarian literature was following
a pattern common to the European literature of that time. The imposition
of the Muslim rule with all its laws, customs and patterns on
independence-bereft Southeastern Europe in the 14th century, led to the
detachment of Bulgarian literature from the general European trends. Its
ideological, genre and aesthetic development was forced to a freezing
point - a level congruent with the medieval literary pattern framework.
The thaw would begin to be felt only after the Bulgarian Revival
outburst in the 18th century. The emergence and evolution of the
medieval Bulgarian national literature is the most interesting
phenomenon in the Bulgarian culture as a whole. Its role in the context
of the Bulgarian people's historical destiny, i.e. its fall under
foreign viz Asiatic and non-Christian, in ideological content,
oppression - a standing menace to this people's national identity, had
been far and away more important than that of a conventional information
medium. In the environment and conditions of apparent foreign
barbarianism the role of literacy and literature was that of a steady
pillar propping up nationhood and safeguarding it against the inevitably
destructive process of erosion.
The role of the Bulgarian literature in the all-European cultural
development was of no lesser importance and value. Quite a few peoples
of the East (Serbs, Russians, Wallachs, Moldavians, Ukrainians,
Byelorussians) had adopted the Old Bulgarian alphabet. Up till the close
of the 14th century the Bulgarian literature was generally acknowledged
as model ideology and genre pattern.
The very frame and fibre of the Bulgarian literature build-up after the
9th century, i.e. the spoken mother tongue, was a novelty even to the
literature of Western Europe which had been written in Latin for
centuries on end. The new democratic trend toward the creation of
literature in one's own language which was to become prevalent in
Western Europe as late as the Renaissance, had undoubtedly been inspired
by the medieval Bulgarian literature.
Very few were the monuments of the medieval Bulgarian architecture that
were left standing after the outrageous destruction of the Bulgarian
towns by the ruthless Muslim conquerors at the end of the 14th through
the middle of the 15th century. It took Bulgarian archeologists doggedly
hard work and effort to restore some of the rubble leftovers of the once
brilliant architecture.
As is to be expected church and rampart building was the heyday of the
medieval Bulgarian architects. In the earliest period of church-building
the basilica was the most common architectural form. Large and imposing
buildings were some of the basilicas in the capital cities of Pliska,
Preslav and Ohrida as well as in some other town centers. The royal
basilica at Pliska nearly 100 meters long and 30 meters wide, was not
only the biggest building dating from the early Christian period in
Bulgaria but also the largest church built anywhere at that time.
In the 11th through the 14th centuries, smaller domed churches and
single-nave chapels (ossuaries) gradually superseded the solid and
austere structures of the 9th and 10th century basilicas. Of a basilican
but much more broken-up outline, the facades of the churches were
lavishly adorned with multicolored decorations and wall-facings made of
glazed and painted pottery. That type of church architecture was
tragically interrupted by the Muslim invasion. The conquerors did not
allow the erection of churches with complicated architectural design or
impressive dimensions. The churches of the 15th through the 17th
centuries were small, low and sometimes sunken buildings that would not
be any different from the slums in the respective settlements.
The various kinds of fortification building had unanimously been
recognized as the prime fame of the Bulgarian architectural skills by
both eastern and western medieval choniclers.
This uniquely diversified construction was obviously determined by the
permanently ominous situation in which the Bulgarian people, venturing
to set up their state in the most contended territory on the European
continent, had been living. The biggest fortresses were those which
surrounded large town centers and the capital cities. Their walls were
erected of immense masonry blocks plastered with mortar. They were 10-12
meters high and were equipped with dozens of turrets. Inside these inner
ramparts there was usually another set of walls which enclosed the
personal residence of the sovereign, the governor or the feudal in
subsequent times. The population had built thousands of bastions on
lofty hills and mountain tops 'for the survival and salvation of the
Bulgarians', as a medieval inscription reads. The desperate resistance
of these small fortresses built of ordinary stone slabs plastered with
mortar had frustrated not one invasion of the Bulgarian lands.
Sculpture and stone reliefs in the medieval Bulgarian art were used as
an individual or a supplementary element of decoration in secular and
church architecture and their grandeur and strict plasticity were
outstanding indeed. Long before the appearance of the impressive
sculptures as an element of architectural decoration in Western Europe,
they had appeared on the facades of palaces and churches in the
Bulgarian capital of Preslav. The most remarkable of all monumental
plastic art in the Bulgarian lands of that time is, undoubtedly, the
stone relief of a horseman, carved high up on a huge cliff at Madara
almost within sight of Pliska. It dates back to the beginning of the
eighth century and has become famous under the name of the Madara
Horseman. It is one of Bulgaria's listed monuments under the UNESCO
world treasures scheme.
Monumental painting is definitely the most interesting achievement of
the Bulgarian fine arts. The earliest monuments dating from the 9th
through the 12th centuries are the churches at Kostur, Ohrida, Vodocha,
Sofia and Bachkovo. They were built in the style of Byzantine art, with
its stationariness, archaism and asceticism characteristic of that
period. Even so, some of the monuments display the original vigour of
the Bulgarian artists overriding the monotony of rigid canon.
From the 12th through the 17th centuries fresco and other mural painting
was quite well spread. There are many monuments, extant examples of this
throughout the Bulgarian lands. The highest achievement of monumental
painting is usually considered to be the exceptional set of murals at
the Boyana church near Sofia, and the rock-cut church at the village of
Ivanovo. They are distinguished for their stateliness, lucidity, truth
to nature and humanism. Those two monuments are also listed in the
UNESCO treasures register of the world cultural heritage.
Miniatures in color associated with book illustration and icon painting
were another manifestation of the achievements of the Bulgarian fine
arts in the Middle Ages.
The name of the Bulgarian John Kukuzel, composer of a great number of
hymns related to liturgy, is directly connected with the evolution of
not only the Bulgarian but also of the medieval Eastern Orthodox
liturgical music and medieval Christiandom in general.
Extract from the book "Bulgaria Illustrated History"
Bojidar Dimitrov, PhD., Autor
Vyara Kandjieva, Photographer
Dimiter Angelov, Photographer Antoniy Handjiysky, Photographer
Maria Nikolotva, Translator
Published by BORIANA Publishing House, Sofia,Bulgaria
