Teachers and students from the Bulgarian Men's High School of Thessaloniki. He is the third man with the white beard, sitting from left to right in the first row.The first page of Parlichev's autobiography published by the Bulgarian Ministry of Education in the magazine Folklore and Ethnography Collection, a year after his death in 1893.
Grigor Parlichev was born on 18 January 1830 in Ohrid, Ottoman Empire (present-day North Macedonia), as the fourth child of Maria Gyokova and Stavre Parlichev, a craftsman.[5] He was six months old when his father died. His paternal grandfather, who was a farmer, took over the care of the family. He was taught to read Greek by his grandfather.[6] Parlichev studied in a Greek school in Ohrid. He was taught by Dimitar Miladinov, a Bulgarian National Revival activist.[7] In 1839 or 1840, his grandfather died. His family lived in poverty. Parlichev's mother worked as a house servant, while he also contributed to the living of his family by selling goods at the market and copying Greek handwritings.[6] He went to Athens to study medicine in 1849 but due to lacking money, he returned to Ohrid in the next year.[8] In the 1850s he worked as a teacher of Greek in the towns of Tirana, Prilep and Ohrid. In 1858 Parlichev returned to Athens to study medicine in the second year but later transferred to the Faculty of Linguistics.[6] Adopting the Hellenized form of his name - Grigorios Stavridis, in 1860, he took part in the annual poetry competition in Athens, winning first prize for his poem "O Armatolos" (Greek: Ο Αρματωλός), written in Greek.[9] Acclaimed as "second Homer", he was offered scholarships to the universities at Oxford and Berlin. However, Parlichev declined the offered scholarships.[10] Part of the literary critics and the public in Athens also challenged the decision, with fellow contestant Theodoros Orphanidis accusing him of being a Bulgarian.[10] In 1862, he also wrote another poem called "Skenderbeg" (Greek: Σκενδέρμπεης) in Greek, with which he participated in the poetry competition, but it was not awarded.[11] After the death of his teacher Dimitar Miladinov in the same year, he returned to Ohrid.[4]
Upon his return, he became familiar with the Bulgarian language and the Cyrillic script.[11] Parlichev joined the struggle for independent Bulgarian church and schools, though he continued to teach Greek. In May 1868, he went to Istanbul (Constantinople) to study the Church Slavonic language.[11][7] He returned to Ohrid in November where he advocated the substitution of Greek with Bulgarian in the town's schools and churches.[12] In the same year, Parlichev was arrested and spent several months in an Ottoman jail in Debar after a complaint was sent by the Greek bishop of Ohrid Meletius.[8]
From 1869 Parlichev taught Bulgarian in several towns across Ottoman Empire, including Struga, Gabrovo, Bitola, Ohrid and Thessaloniki. In this period, he married Anastasiya Hristova Uzunova and had five children: Konstantinka, Luisa, Kiril, Despina and Georgi.[5][6] In the 1870s, Marko Balabanov and the other editors of the magazine Chitalishte (Reading room) in Istanbul made him the suggestion to translate Homer's Iliad into Bulgarian.[11] In 1870 Parlichev translated his award-winning poem "O Armatolos" into Bulgarian in an attempt to popularize his earlier works, which were written in Greek, among the Bulgarian audience.[6] Parlichev was the first Bulgarian translator of Iliad in 1871.[9] However, he was criticized by Bulgarian literary critics because they considered his knowledge of Bulgarian as poor.[4] Parlichev used a specific mixture of Church Slavonic, Bulgarian, Russian and his native Ohrid dialect.[11] In 1872, he published the poem called 1762 leto.[5] In 1883 Parlichev moved to Thessaloniki where he taught at the Thessaloniki Bulgarian Male High School from 1883 to 1889. During his stay there he wrote his autobiography between 1884 and 1885.[4][13] After his retirement in 1890, he returned to Ohrid, where he lived with a pension until his death on 25 January 1893.[8][6]
Identification and views
Per historian Raymond Detrez, who received his PhD for his thesis on Parlichev,[14] in his early life Parlichev was a member of the Romaic community, a multi-ethnic proto-nation, comprising all Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Empire.[15] It had been under way until the 1830s, with the rise of nationalism in the Balkans. In his youth, he had no well-defined sense of national identity and developed a Greek (Rum Millet) identity (in the sense of being an Orthodox Christian), but as an adult, he adopted a Greek and later a Bulgarian national identity. In the last decade of his life, he adhered to a form of vague local Macedonian patriotism, though continued to identify himself as a Bulgarian. Thus, in the context of discussions about the existence of the Macedonian nation, his national identity became disputed between Bulgarian and Macedonian (literary) historians.[16] As a Bulgarian national activist, he used German historian Jakob Fallmerayer's discontinuity thesis against the Greeks.[17] In 1889, under a translation, he signed himself as "Gr. S. Părličev, killed by the Bulgarians"
(Гр. С. Пърличевъ, убитий българами).[6]
Language
As a child, Parlichev learned to write excellent Greek and later wrote in his autobiography that he mastered literary Greek better than a native speaker. However, as an adult, despite his Bulgarian self-identification, Parlichev had poor knowledge of literary Bulgarian, which appeared to him as a "foreign language". He started learning to read and write in Bulgarian only after his return from Athens in 1862.[11] In his autobiography, Parlichev wrote: "I was, and I am still weak with the Bulgarian language,"[18] and "In Greek I sang like a swan, now in Slavic I cannot even sing like a donkey."[12] The then-emerging standard Bulgarian language was based on the easternmost Eastern South Slavic dialects, while his native dialect belongs to the western dialects.[19] He used a mix of Church Slavonic, Russian and Bulgarian words and forms, as well as elements typical of his native dialect, calling it Common Slavic. He also wanted to enrich the emerging standard language with elements taken from the Russian language.[19] Because of this, he was criticized for his translation of Homer's Iliad.[20] Thus, according to Bulgarian historian Roumen Daskalov, Parlichev reacted against his Bulgarian literary critics by withdrawing into "an alternative Macedonian regional identity, a kind of Macedonian particularism."[17] However, when he came to write his autobiography, Parlichev used the standard Bulgarian language with some influence of his native Ohrid dialect.[21][10][22]
Legacy
His autobiography was published posthumously in Sofia in a Bulgarian periodical called Folklore and Ethnography Collection, produced by the Bulgarian Ministry of Education, in 1894.[7] Parlichev's son Kiril Parlichev became a prominent member of the revolutionary movement in Macedonia and a Bulgarian public figure.[4] After World War II, Macedonian historians started regarding him as an ethnic Macedonian author.[23] Both North Macedonia and Bulgaria regard him as a pioneer of national awakening.[4] The Parlichev Ridge in Antarctica is named after him.[24] A digital monument honoring him was set up in the center of Ohrid in 2022.[25][26]
^Janette Sampimon (2006). Becoming Bulgarian: the articulation of Bulgarian identity in the nineteenth century in its international context: an intellectual history. Pegasus. pp. 61, 89, 124. ISBN9061433118.
^İpek Yosmaoğlu (2013). Blood Ties: Religion, Violence and the Politics of Nationhood in Ottoman Macedonia, 1878–1908. Cornell University Press. pp. 72–73. ISBN0801469791.
^ abcdefDimitar Bechev (2019). Historical Dictionary of North Macedonia (2nd ed.). Rowman & Littlefield. p. 248. ISBN9781538119624.
^ abcBlaže Ristovski, ed. (2009). Makedonska enciklopedija: M-Š (in Macedonian). Macedonian Academy of Sciences and Arts. pp. 1226–1227. ISBN9786082030241.
^ abcdefgRaymond Detrez (2001). Криволици на мисълта (in Bulgarian). ЛИК. pp. 20–23, 33, 140, 147, 205, 227. ISBN9546074543.
^ abcEleonora Naxidou (2015). "Competing Representations of Shared Legacies: Greek and Bulgarian Narratives in the 19th Century". Nationalism and Ethnic Politics. Routledge: 362–364. doi:10.1080/13537113.2015.1063920. ISSN1557-2986.
^ abCorinne Ondine Pache; Casey Dué; Susan Lupack; Robert Lamberton, eds. (2020). The Cambridge Guide to Homer. Cambridge University Press. p. 484. ISBN9781107027190.
^ abcElka Agoston-Nikolova, ed. (2010). Shoreless Bridges: South East European Writing in Diaspora. Rodopi. pp. 56–57. ISBN9042030208.
^ abLoring Danforth (1997). The Macedonian Conflict: Ethnic Nationalism in a Transnational World. Princeton University Press. pp. 50, 62. ISBN9780691043562.
^Raymond Detrez (2015). "Grigor Parlichev's Autobiography as a "self-hagiography"". Литературна мисъл (2). Bulgarian Academy of Sciences: 56–79. Summary/Abstract: Among the many Bulgarian autobiographies written in the national revival period, that by Grigor Parlichev one occupies a particular place due to its highly fictional nature. On the one hand, the author provides very little factual information on the historical developments he participated in; on the other hand, he widely elaborates on events with little documentary relevance, inserting dramatic dialogues that cannot possibly be authentic. These particularities of Parlichev's Autobiography can be explained assuming that Parlichev used the medieval zhitiye (hagiography, vita) as a model for his own biography. Strikingly, nearly all the topoi of the zhitiye as described by Th. Pratsch in his exhaustive Der hagiographische Topos. Griechische Heiligenviten in mittelbyzantinischer Zeit (Berlin, New York, 2005) also feature in Parlichev's work, moreover in roughly the same order. The most elaborate episodes in Parlichev's Autobiography ― his victory at the Athenian poetry contest on 1860, which made him a Greek celebrity, and the weeks he spent in prison in Ohrid and Debar in 1868 ― transpire to be secularized versions (in the spirit of national revival) of the main topoi in most hagiographies: the temptation of the saint and his or her suffering for the sake of Christ. As a result, Parlichev succeeds in similarly representing himself in his Autobiography as a "martyr" for the Bulgarian national cause. Happily for the reader, this whole operation is accompanied by a refreshing dose of (unconscious?) self-irony that sometimes makes Parlichev's Autobiography remind of Sofroniy's Life and sufferings.
^"Book Reviews". Southeast European and Black Sea Studies. Routledge: 178. 2007. doi:10.1080/14683850701189915. More surprising is another omission: there is no entry on Grigor Parlichev, a Hellenised Bulgarian author who, in the course of his literary career, rejected Hellenism and reverted openly to Bulgarian nationalism. This is rather odd, given that Parlichev was the subject of Detrez's doctoral thesis.
^Raymond Detrez (2007). "Canonization through Competition: The Case of Grigor Părličev". Литературна мисъл (in Bulgarian) (1). Institute of Literature - Bulgarian Academy of Sciences: 61–101. Summary/Abstract: The normal criteria for an author to be included in a national literary canon are that he should belong to the nation to which the canon is related, that he must write in the nation's (standard) language, and that his work is of reasonable size and aesthetic value. A criterion of secondary importance, valid in societies marked by nationalism, may also contribute to an author's canonization: the "national" character of his work in the sense that it deals with national themes, displays the national identity, or attests to the author's devotion to the national cause — a devotion preferably supported by his real-life heroism or martyrdom. Părličev's canonization has proven to be problematic in all respects. To which nation did he actually belong? In his youth he had no well-defined sense of national identity and probably considered himself a "Greek" in the sense of being an Orthodox Christian. As an adult he explicitly identified himself initially with the Greek and later with the Bulgarian nation. In the last decades of his life, he seems to have tended to exhibit some vague Ohrid-based or Macedonian particularism, though apparently continuing to perceive himself as a Bulgarian. With such an evolution, it is understandable why disputes between Bulgarian and Macedonian (literary) historians flare up around the issue of Parlichev's national identity, which also refer to the debate about the existence of a Macedonian nation.
^Slavica Gandensia, Issues: 33–34. Rijksuniversiteit te Gent, Department of Slavonic Philology. 2006. p. 48.
^Raymond Detrez (2007). "Canonization through Competition: The Case of Grigor Părličev". Литературна мисъл (in Bulgarian). Institute of Literature - Bulgarian Academy of Sciences. И накрая, Автобиографията е написана на приемлив стандартен български, който все пак носи в себе си известно влияние от родния охридски диалект. (Finally, the Autobiography is written in acceptable standard Bulgarian, which nevertheless carries some influence from the native Ohrid dialect.)
^Harvard Slavic Studies. Harvard University Press. 1953. p. 369.
^Raymond Detrez (2007). "Canonization through Competition: The Case of Grigor Părličev". Литературна мисъл (in Bulgarian) (1). Institute of Literature - Bulgarian Academy of Sciences: 61–101.
Parlichev, Grigor. Автобиография. Сборник за народни умотворения, наука и книжнина, book IX, Sofia (1894). ( Media related to Parlichev's Autobiography at Wikimedia Commons) (in Bulgarian)
Parlichev, Grigor. Автобиографија. Skopje, 1967 (scan) (in Macedonian).
Shapkarev, Kuzman. Материали за възраждането на българщината в Македония от 1854 до 1884 г. Неиздадени записки и писма (Materials about the Bulgarian Revival in Macedonia from 1854 to 1884. Unpublished Notes and Letters). Balgarski Pisatel, Sofia (1984) [1](in Bulgarian)
Sprostranov, Evtim. По възражданьето в град Охрид (On the Revival in the City of Ohrid), Сборникъ за Народни Умотворения, Наука и Книжнина, book XIII, Sofia, pp 621–681 (1896) [2]Archived 2019-05-11 at the Wayback Machine(in Bulgarian)
