Neofit Rilski

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Neofit Rilski (1838): Portrait of Sachari Sograf (1810-1853), Bulgarian National Gallery, Sofia

Neofit Rilski ( Bulgarian Неофит Рилски ), born as Nikola Poppetrow Benin (Bulgarian Никола Поппетров Бенин1793 in Bansko , then Ottoman Empire ; † 4 January 1881 in Rila Monastery , Bulgaria ) was a Bulgarian priest, reconnaissance of the Bulgarian National Revival and Activist fighting for an independent Bulgarian church . In the Slawistik Rilski is known by the first Bulgarian grammar of modern times (1835).

Rilski had enjoyed a theological training, like the majority of the Bulgarian intelligentsia at that time, who combined their duties with teaching practice and made a decisive contribution to the spread of the Bulgarian education system. They were the ones who took great care of the influx of books from abroad. They also supported local authors and translators and helped found secular schools. During the Ottoman rule, the Bulgarian church was able to play an important social and political role.

Today several educational institutions and places in Bulgaria bear his name, including the South West University in Blagoevgrad .

biography

Family and childhood

Nikola Benin was born in the Macedonian city ​​of Bansko, one of the centers of Bulgarian revival in the Ottoman Empire. His father, Petar Benin, was a priest (pope) and teacher in the city. The Bulgarian school also belonged to him (see cell school ). Nikola Benin's patronymic was Petrow, after his father's first name. However, since his father was Pope, the patronymic became Poppetrow (Pop Petrow).

Some Bulgarian etymologists associate the name of the city Bansko and thus the family names Banow (plural: Banowi), Benin (plural: Benini) with the medieval Bulgarian nobility title " Ban ". The family members of the Benin family could be descendants of a noble family. It is documented that after the restoration of the Serbian principality (1804) there were two representatives of the Benin family at the royal court: Marko Teodorovič and Michail German , later Serbia's ambassador to the Ottoman Empire. For his part, Marko Teodorovič was a merchant in Vienna and published in 1792 as "Bulgarians from the Razlog region" (Bulgar. "Бугара, родом из Разлога") a primer known as the "primer by Marko Teodorovič" (bugl. "Буквердороркорчко "). Nikola’s mother, Ekaterina, also came from a wealthy family trading in cotton from Drama and Serres , which was sold to Serbia and Austria.

Life as a monk

In 1808 Nikola Benin came to the Rila Monastery to learn painting from the founder of the painting school of Bansko Toma Wischanow-Molera (Moler, from the German painter), who had studied in Vienna. In 1811, however, Nikola Benin was ordained a priest by Jerotej, Igumen (abbot) of the monastery, and took the name Neofit . As a priest of the Rila monastery, where he spent a large part of his life, he was given the nickname Rilski (from the bugl. Рилски, to English "from Rila "), that is, neophyte from the Rila monastery.

During this time Neofit learned the Church Slavonic language . In 1818 he was ordained a priest monk in Pirot by the Greek Metropolitan of Sofia . On his way home he met a young teacher - a Greek from Thessaloniki , who also spoke Church Slavonic. He took the young Greek with him to the Rila monastery and made him secretary of the monastery. As a secretary, he helped deal with correspondence with the Greek Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople and with the surrounding Greek bishops. The young teacher also taught Greek in the convent school . He left the monastery in 1821 to take part in the Greek uprising . In order to deepen his Greek studies, Neofit Rilski went to Melnik , a stronghold of Hellenism , in the then well-known Hellenistic school of the teacher Adam from Mezowo. Neofit stayed there from 1822 to 1826 and, as he later noted in his autobiography, became a good Hellenist.

Wandering as a teacher

After finishing the Hellenic school, Neofit returned to the Rila monastery, where he was invited by Ignatij, Bishop of Samokov, to teach at the local monastery school as a teacher. At that time Samokow was a place of famous icon and fresco painters (see Samokow Art School ) and offered Neofit a theological environment. In his educational work, Neofit Rilski was, like Neofit Bozweli, an advocate of the radical departure from the Greeks and the Greek language; a demand that came to a preliminary conclusion in 1870 with the establishment of the Bulgarian exarchate . Neofit taught there in addition to New and Ancient Greek and Old Bulgarian ( Old Church Slavonic ). Neofit taught in Samokow from 1827 to 1831, although he left the city on short notice in 1829, when Bishop Ingnatij was murdered after the Peace of Adrianople .

After his time in Samokow, Neofit Rilski retired again to the Rila monastery, where he taught at the local monastery school. So he witnessed the fire that almost completely destroyed the monastery on January 13, 1833. Then Neofit traveled with other monks on behalf of the monastery to Constantinople, where he successfully requested the ecumenical patriarch with the request for approval of a new building. The ecumenical Patriarch Constantine I started a foundation campaign for the monastery in March 1833 and supported the Sultan for the new building. In July of the same year the building application was approved by a Sultanferman (decree). Neofit Rilski contributed significantly to the reconstruction of the monastery in the era of the Bulgarian Enlightenment, which became an effort of national importance, so that the monastery is now honored as a national shrine.

After his return from Constantinople to the Rila monastery, Neofit was sent by the monastery management as a priest teacher to the Metoch (a small monastery, which is subordinate to another monastery) of Kazanlak . In Kazanlak he met Ilarion Makariopolski , later Bishop of Tarnowo , who brought him into contact with Wasil Aprilov . In 1834 Neofit accepted the request of the merchants Aprilow and Nikolaj Pasalusow, who came from Gabrovo and who lived in Odessa, to teach at a new school built according to the Bell-Lancaster school system . This type of school envisaged that more experienced students should teach younger ones and so gradually grew to become assistant teachers. The school should open in Gabrovo, the hometown of the merchants, and be based on the experience of the Russian school system. For this, Neofit moved to Bucharest, where he studied the Lancaster method at a well-known Greek school.

The opening of the school in the merchant town of Gabrovo on January 2, 1835 posed a major problem for Neofit: the lack of teaching materials in Bulgarian. Although the first primer in the New Bulgarian language was published by Petar Beron in 1824 , it was more of an encyclopedia than a textbook. In 1835, Neofit wrote the textbooks himself, including the first Bulgarian grammar. These textbooks (tables for mutual learning; primer, excerpt from the tables for mutual learning; Bulgarian grammar) were printed in the Serbian city of Kragujevac with the help of Michail German . Along with the primer by Petar Beron, they are among the first textbooks for the New Bulgarian language.

With the opening of the “Gabrovo Comprehensive School ” (Bulgarian Габровско взаимно училище - literally: Gabrovo mutual school) , the monk Neofit achieved both the change from a simple theological school education to a secular, as well as the abandonment of the Greek language that dominates everyday life . This system renewal became the model for the Bulgarian schools in the Ottoman Empire, and so a total of 17 new schools of this type were opened by 1845. The already existing monastery schools gradually introduced the new type of school and some scholars see the introduction of the New Bulgarian language in the “elementary schools” as the decisive impetus for the Bulgarian liberation movement. In 1836 he made the first globe with the Bulgarian name of the geographical locations.

It was not until the 1850s, as a result of the Tanzimat reforms by Midhat Pasha , that the Ottoman Empire attempted to influence the education of the Bulgarians through a state-controlled school reform, but this failed. At that time, the type of school introduced by Neofit Rilski had already established itself among the Bulgarian population.

In Gabrovo, Neofit Rilski translated the New Testament into Bulgarian. He stayed there for only two years until he retired to the Athos monastery in early 1837 for further studies. In September of the same year he complied with a request from the merchants of Koprivchitsa and became the head of the newly founded Bulgarian school there. Like Gabrovo, Koprivchitsa was a prosperous city whose merchants traveled to Western Europe and cultivated their economic ties there. It lies in the middle of the Sredna Gora Mountains and, with its will for freedom, was to play an important role during the April uprising (1876). Under the direction of Neofit Rilski, the school in Kopriwtschiza was able to reach the level of the well-known "Gabrovo comprehensive elementary school". It soon became a center of the Bulgarian liberation movement: it was there that the later Bulgarian intelligentsia learned to write and read in their mother tongue, which at that time was not a matter of course. Among them were the writers and scholars Najden Gerow , Christo Pulekow , Sachari Kjaneski , Dimtscho Debeljanow , Petko Karawelow , as well as revolutionaries such as Ljuben Karawelow and Georgi Benkowski .

In 1837 Neofit Rilski published instructions for handwriting before returning to the Rila Monastery in 1839. He became secretary of the monastery and, in addition to his teaching activities, supervised the painting and designing of the interior of the new monastery church. During this time, his portrait of Sachari Sograf (see above right ), the most famous Bulgarian icon and fresco painter, was created. Under the direction of Neofit, the expansion of the ossuary of Saint Luke in the Rila monastery was carried out. In addition to building supervision and teaching, during this time he wrote an extensive Greek-Bulgarian dictionary, textbooks and teaching materials, the Vitas of St. Ivan Rilski , St. Cyril and Method and Photios . In 1840 his translation of the New Testament was printed in Smyrna (now Izmir in Turkey ). The printing was done by the Greek Damiani, as it had been one of the few printing houses in the Ottoman Empire since the 1830s that had Cyrillic printing sets .

Neofit Rilski's theological and linguistic achievements were also recognized by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in Constantinople. In 1847 he became head of the faculty for Slavic languages ​​of the most renowned priestly college in the Ottoman Empire, the seminary of Chalki near Constantinople. In 1852 Rilski translated Aesop's fables into Bulgarian. Neofit stayed on Chalki until September 1852 to retire to the Rila Monastery. In the following years he was repeatedly invited as a teacher and school director in various places and institutions, which he repeatedly refused.

Last years

Neofit Rilski's grave tablet next to the monastery church

In 1852 Neofit Rilski returned to the Rila Monastery and continued his educational work. In the same year he published the "Христоматия славянского язика" ("Christomatija slawjanskowo jasika"; to German "Textbook of the Slavic Language"). From 1860 to 1864 Neofit Rilski was abbot of the Rila monastery, where he supervised the expansion of the monastery. In 1875 he published "Словар на българския език, изтълкуван от църковно-славянски и гръцки език" (to German about "Dictionary of the Bulgarian language, interpreted from the Bulgarian language,").

He died there on January 4, 1881. His grave is on the outer wall of the monastery church and is the only grave there. The house where he was born in Bansko was converted into a museum in 1981 and is included in the list of 100 national tourist objects of Bulgaria drawn up by the Bulgarian Tourist Board.

Neofit Peak , a mountain on Smith Island in Antarctica, has been named after him since 2008 .

Neofit Rilski and the Bulgarian school system

Church books were initially used as textbooks in the monastery schools. The training in these schools took place in several stages. After learning the script, the students learned large parts of the Book of Hours and the Book of Psalms as well as the prayers “ Heavenly King ” (Bulgarian “Царю небесен”), “ Our Father ” (Bulgarian “Отче наш”) and “Come to us to bow ”(Bulgarian“ Елате да се поклоним ”). Special emphasis was placed on the first prayer in class, as it was considered important in the fight against heretics. Higher levels of education in the monastery schools included reading, explaining and interpreting the biblical texts, memorizing the other prayers, and acquiring the knowledge and skills to transcribe religious texts and hymn books.

The main purpose of the monastery schools was to train young people for the clergy. But especially the children of the craftsmen and traders, a class that placed particular emphasis on education, attended these monastery schools. The educated monks who otherwise dealt with the transcription of books acted as teachers. Subjects were trained here to prepare for their duties as monks, but also children from the neighboring villages who were to become village priests and teachers.

At the end of the 19th century, the simple monastery school was the only Bulgarian school education in the Ottoman Empire. The number of Bulgarian schools in 1750 was 21 - 2 city and 19 village schools; In 1800 there were 48 - 6 in cities and 42 in villages. 31 years later, one year before the opening of the Garbow Comprehensive School , the number of Bulgarian schools rose to 189, of which only 30 were built in cities and the remaining 156 in villages. The majority of them were privately owned.

The simple Bulgarian (monastery) schools could not keep up with the secular Greek schools, which were supported by the Phanariots and the ecumenical patriarchate in the course of the Megali Idea . For this reason, many young Bulgarians were trained in the well-known Greek schools in Constantinople, Ohrid , Kastoria or Ioannina . Secular Greek schools were also opened in some Bulgarian cities - Kotel , Plovdiv , Samokov, Melnik, Veliko Tarnovo, Sliven . When, with the reforms that began in the Ottoman Empire, an up-and-coming business class formed among the Bulgarians, a Hellenization process began.

Introduction of the Lancaster School Method

Neofit Rilski was not the first to try to modernize the Bulgarian school system with the Bell-Lancaster method. The first noteworthy reform in the Bulgarian school system was offered by the scholar Petar Beron , who studied in Heidelberg and Munich , with his textbook, the Primer with Various Instructions (known as the Fish Primer , 1824). In it the author not only proceeded methodologically with the teaching material to be conveyed , but he also gave instructions on how this can best be achieved. With his primer, Beron campaigned against theological-religious instruction and for secular education. Education should be close to life and support the emerging classes of merchants ( Esnafi ). For this reason, the theological lessons should be replaced by learning the Church Slavonic language by learning real knowledge, reading and writing in the vernacular, arithmetic, an introduction to geography and natural science, ethics and morals, etc.

Petar Beron saw the best way to achieve and implement this in the Bell-Lancaster school method, which he also explained in his primer. This type of school envisaged that more experienced students should teach younger ones and so gradually grew to become assistant teachers. However, his ideas were too modern for his contemporaries and were discarded. His textbook was only used as a primer and not as a guide to better teaching methods.

In 1828, four years after the publication of the Fish Primer, Konstantin Fotinow opened a Hellenistic-Bulgarian school in Smyrna and although he kept theology as a subject, he moved away from theological-religious lessons and expanded the subjects to include foreign languages, arithmetic and geography. This was the first Bulgarian school to teach according to the Lancaster school system. However, the private school in Smyrna was also unable to assert itself, which was also due to the lack of unified school books.

Only Neofit Rilski could show successes in reforming the Bulgarian school system. In contrast to Beron and Fotinow, the Rilski mission was financially supported by the merchants Wasil Aprilow and Nikolaj Pasalusow , as well as the merchants of Gabrovo. Rilski also recognized the problem of the lack of unified textbooks very early on and wrote the required teaching materials himself in 1835, including the first Bulgarian grammar. In his textbooks, like Beron, Rilski proceeded methodologically from easy to difficult teaching material. So he had the Bulgarian language learned first in class and then a foreign language. A novelty among them were the 66 tables for mutual teaching.

In class, Neofit Rilski focused on learning the Bulgarian language, reading, writing and arithmetic. However, the curriculum was set up in such a way that, in addition to the basic subjects, teaching material from other subjects such as history and natural history could be taught. The theological and religious lessons were reduced to basic knowledge. With this, the monk Neofit Rilski established the first secular Bulgarian school and a model for its dissemination in the Bulgarian areas. His greatest contribution, however, was that through his grammar he set the first standards for learning the Bulgarian language. With this, Rilski created the first basis for the codification of the New Bulgarian language.

Bulgarian grammar

Cover sheet of "Bulgarian grammar"

In 1835 Rilski published several school books in Kragujevac, Serbia, including the "Bulgarian Grammar" (Bulgarian Болгарска Грамматика / Bolgarska Grammatika ). Rilski was convinced that only with a grammatical theory taught in elementary schools could the revival of the Bulgarian language succeed. In his foreword he wrote on page 3:

"Аз имах неизбежна должност да се потрудим по возможности моей да изложим настоящи те грамматически правила, собрав от различни нови и вехти славянски грамматики, за да можат нашите едноплеменни да разумеят перво на своят природный язык що е граматика и да се опознаят и подружат с музите , каквото що правят сичките народи на сегашното време. да се нарече училище онова, в което се не предава граматическо ученiе »

“I had the inevitable obligation to use my means to present the following grammatical rules, which I gathered from new and older Slavic grammars, so that our compatriots can understand what grammar is in their mother tongue, that they know and love the muses , just like it all the peoples of our time do. [... For this reason] a school may not call itself such if it does not teach grammar. "

- Foreword, p. III

This grammar was written on the basis of the old Bulgarian language . He set out its principles on pages 1 to 72. The textbook also contained a dictionary with 216 Turkish and Greek words and their translation into Bulgarian or Russian.

The Христоматия славянского язика (/ Christomatija slawjanskowo jasika ; to German textbook of the Slavic language , 1852) was published in Constantinople and served the students of the Faculty of Slavic Languages ​​of the Priestly College of the Chalki Seminary as a textbook. So pages up to 357 were written in Russian. All words have been explained with the Greek equivalent and examples of their use at the end of the book.

Fonts

In his earlier works and the lexica, Neofit Rilski, like Konstantin Fotinow and the Miladinowi brothers from Struga , used the West Bulgarian dialects, in contrast to Petar Beron and Najden Gerow and the East Bulgarian dialects used by them. In his main works, Rilski considered the Old Church Slavonic language to be synonymous with Old Bulgarian and tried to unite the Eastern and Western Bulgarian dialects when developing the New Bulgarian language .

  • Стiхи надгробнiи с красноречiем обясняющим имя и епархiю обiеннаго архiерея (to German funerary poems with eloquent explanations of the name and the bishopric of the bishopric who died in 1829)
  • Взаимоучителни таблици (to German tables for mutual teaching, 1835)
  • Буквар, извлечен от взаимоучителните таблици (1835)
  • Свещенний краткий катехизис (to German Short Holy Catechism, 1835)
  • Кратко и ясное изложение (to German short and clear explanation, 1835)
  • Болгарска граматика (on German Bulgarian grammar, 1835)
  • Краснописание (to German instructions for handwriting, 1837)
  • Аритметика (to German arithmetic, 1851)
  • The Fables of Aesop (translation from Greek 1852)
  • Христоматия славянского язика (to German textbook of the Slavic language, 1852)
  • Словар на българския език, изтълкуван от църковно-славянски и гръцки език (Dictionary of the Bulgarian Language, interpreted from Church Slavonic and Greek, 1875)
  • Описание болгарскаго священнаго монастира Рилскаго (to German description of the holy Bulgarian Rila monastery, 1879)

literature

  • Арсений, Стобийски Епископ: Принос към биографията на отец Неофит Рилски. С., 1984. (Arsenij von Stob: Contributions to the biography of father Neofit Rilski. Sofia 1984)
  • RJ Crampton: A short history of modern Bulgaria. Cambridge University Press, 1987, ISBN 0-521-27323-4 (p. 12) ( at google-books )
  • RJ Crampton: Bulgaria. , Oxford University Press, 2007, ISBN 978-0-19-820514-2 (pp. 50-72) at google-books
  • Hans-Dieter Döpmann : Church in Bulgaria from the beginning to the present. , Munich, Biblion Verlag, 2006, ISBN 3-932331-90-7
  • Gunnar Hering: The conflict between the Ecumenical Patriarchate and the Bulgarian Exarchate with the Porte 1890. (1988) in: Südost-Forschungen 47 (1988) pp. 187-208
  • Hans-Joachim Härtel and Roland Schönfeld: Bulgaria: from the Middle Ages to the present. , from the series: Eastern and Southeastern Europe. History of the countries and peoples, ISBN 3-7917-1540-2 , Verlag Friedrich Pustet Regensburg, 1998
  • Constantin Jireček : History of the Bulgarians. , Georg Olm Verlag, 1977 (Orig .: Verlag von F. Tempsky, Prague, 1876)
  • Michal Kopeček: Neofit Rilski: Bulgarian Grammar. In Discourses of Collective Identity in Central and Southeast Europe (1770-1945): Texts and Commentaries. Volume 1. Central European University Press, 2006, ISBN 978-963-7326-52-3 , pp. 246-252 ( online version at books.google.de )
  • Иван Снегаров : Принос към биографията на Неофит Рилски (гръцки писма до него). Sofia, 1951. (Ivan Snegarow: Contributions to the biography of Father Neofit Rilski (Greek letters to him). )
  • Edward Stankiewicz: Grammars and dictionaries of the Slavic languages ​​from the Middle Ages up to 1850: an annotated bibliography. 1984, p. 73.
  • Румяна Радкова: Неофит Рилски и новобългарската култура. Sofia, 1983. (Rumjana Radkowa: Neofit Rilski and the New Bulgarian Culture. )
  • R. Reinhold Olesch (Ed.): Neofit Rilski, Bolgarska grammatika. Kragujevac 1835. Tablici Bucharest 1848. Unchanged reprint with an introduction edited by Reinhold Olesch (Slavic Research, Volume 41). Cologne-Vienna: Böhlau 1989.

Web links

Commons : Neofit Rilski  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. Неофит Рилски. Личност и време. In: swu.bg. Archived from the original on March 21, 2013 ; accessed on February 20, 2015 .
  2. Vasilka Radeva: Bulgarian grammar: morphological and syntactic basics , Buske Verlag, 2003, p. 6
  3. ^ History of the Aprilov Gymnasium (Bulgarian)
  4. Katerina Gehlt: The Social Typing of Figures in Bulgarian Translations in Foreign Europe ?: Self- Image and Concepts of Europe in Bulgaria (1850-1945) , p. 171.
  5. ^ Edward Stankiewicz: Grammars and dictionaries of the Slavic languages ​​from the Middle Ages up to 1850: an annotated bibliography. 1984.