Bulgaria celebrates National Awakeners’ Day

Bulgaria celebrates its National Awakeners’ Day on November 1. Every year on this day, the nation honours its teachers, writers, enlighteners and freedom-fighters who have preserved the spiritual and moral values of the Bulgarians.

Hundreds of champions of the Bulgarians’ national self-awareness and pride are remembered on Awakeners’ Day. Having lived manly in the 18th and the 19th centuries, the so-called National Revival Period, they worked for the education and freedom of their compatriots. But there were national awakeners more than 1,000 years ago as well, among them the holy brothers Cyril and Methodius, who devised the earliest Slav alphabet; King Boris I, who embraced Christianity together with his people; and Boris’s son Simeon the Great, under whom Bulgaria had its golden age.

Paisius of Hilendar (1722 – c.1773) was the quintessential awakener. In his time, the Bulgarians had all but lost their national identity after nearly four centuries of Ottoman rule. The people were illiterate and the past glory of the Bulgarian state was virtually forgotten. While the West was creating its Don Quixote and Hamlet, wealthy Bulgarians readily accepted Greek cultural influences. In 1762, Paisius wrote Slav-Bulgarian History, a seminal book aimed to bolster the national spirit.

There is no official list of national awakeners. Anyone who has contributed to Bulgaria’s intellectual development and well-being can be called an awakener.

The holiday was first celebrated in 1909 in Plovdiv. In 1922, education minister Stoyan Omarchevski proposed that November 1 be declared National Awakeners’ Day. The proposal was approved by the National Assembly (the Bulgarian parliament) on December 13, 1922.

On February 3, 1923, King Boris III issued a decree proclaiming November 1 as a day to honour outstanding Bulgarians. The holiday was banned in 1945, shortly after the communist takeover. It was reinstated in 1992 under a Labour Code amendment which officially declared it as National Awakeners’ Day and made it an off-school day.