Najden Gerow

Najden Gerow

Nayden gerov ( Bulgarian Найден Геров * 23. February 1823 in Koprivshtitsa , Bulgaria , as nayden gerov Chadschidobrewitsch , Найден Геров Хаджидобревич ; † 9. October 1900 in Plovdiv ) was a Bulgarian linguist , folklorist , educator and author and activist of the Bulgarian Revival .

Life

Gerow's father Gero Dobrewitsch was a teacher. From 1834 to 1836 he attended a Greek school in Plovdiv; until 1839 he continued his education again in his hometown and finally finished it in Odessa ( Russian Empire ), where he graduated from the Richelieu Lyceum in 1845 .

Gerow became a Russian citizen, but came back to Koprivshtitsa, where he founded his own school, named after Cyril and Method . His scholarship attracted attention and he was asked to open a high school in Plovdiv, which he did.

As a publicist, Gerow fought against the assimilation of the Bulgarians into Greek culture, especially in Plovdiv. During the Crimean War from 1854 to 1856, as a Russian citizen, he was temporarily forced to leave the country. In 1857 Gerow became "First Vice-Consul" of Russia in Plovdiv. In this capacity he continued to work for the Bulgarian national movement; Among other things, he helped young Bulgarians to get a scholarship abroad.

Gerow campaigned for the liberation of Bulgaria from the Ottoman Empire . He trusted in the support of Russia and was thus in opposition to radical revolutionary emigrants such as Lyuben Karawelow , Wassil Levski and Christo Botew , who wanted an independent uprising. During the April uprising in 1875, Gerow was suspected of being one of the organizers and was forced to go into hiding. He sought refuge in the Russian embassy in Constantinople . After the liberation he took on some administrative tasks, but gave them up again a short time later and devoted himself exclusively to philology .

Gerow's main work is his dictionary of the Bulgarian language ( Речникъ на блъгарскый языкъ ). For 50 years he collected a large number of words , expressions , folk songs and proper names from common people . In Russia, the first three writings were published between 1855 and 1856, and the entire dictionary appeared in five volumes from 1895 to 1904. In 1908, Gerow's colleague T. Panchev added an appendix. Including the appendix, the dictionary has around 100,000 entries. It is considered a valuable source for studying the Bulgarian language of the 19th century.

Trivia

The Gerow Pass in the Tangras Mountains on Livingston Island in Antarctica is named after Najden Gerow.

swell

• Куманов, Михаил и Колинка Исова. 2006. Историческа енциклопедия България
• A biography of Nayden Gerov, author Georgi Konstantinov, online (Bulgarian)

Web links

• Literature by and about Najden Gerow in the bibliographic database WorldCat
• Entry in the Universal Lexicon