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Rediscovering the Dark Side of Samuel

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Rediscovering the Dark Side of Samuel CHAPTER 5 Rediscovering the Dark Side of Samuel 1 Neglected Samuel in the Reimagined Medieval Past The Treaty of Kucuk Kaynarca in 1774, resulting in victory for Russia, advanced its position among the Orthodox Christians in the Ottoman Empire. It also cultivated Russia’s increasing interest in the history of the Balkans. Proving the Slav roots of Bulgaria and its Russian connections formed important his- toriographical issues for Russia. For Russia it aimed both to present its own Slav origins and to establish historical legitimacy for the role as protector of its Orthodox Slav “brothers” in the Balkans. In the first half of the 19th cen- tury Russia set about recomposing, directly or indirectly, the history of the Balkans. Due to the national awakening of the population within the Ottoman territories in the Balkans, this was a particularly fertile soil for such an influ- ence. The environment surrounding Serbian and Greek rebellions against the Ottomans, resulting in recognition of the Serbian principality’s autonomy and Greek independence in 1830, provided a further pretext for Russian involve- ment in the region. Russia’s initial philhellene enthusiasm for the Orthodox Greeks at the time of Catherine the Great (1762–1796), twisted towards the in- creased awareness of the southern Slavs in the Balkans, resulting in the growth of Pan-Slavism.1 It implied not only a direct engagement of Russian intellec- tuals in creating their own narratives about the South Slavs but also secured their influence in shaping the historiographical works by Balkan revivalists.2 Certainly, Russia was not an isolated case in its efforts to position itself in the Balkans. However, it was Russia who managed to impose its historiographical views on the Balkan intellectuals, particularly the revivalists in Bulgaria, Serbia and Macedonia. 1 For the crisis of the Greek myth in Russia in the 1820s accompanied with the growth of Pan-Slavism, see Victor Taki, “The Russian Protectorate in the Danubian Principalities,” in Russian-Ottoman Borderlands: The Eastern Question Reconsidered, ed. Lucien J. Frary, Mara Kozelsky (Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 2014), 49–54. For the Russian involvement in the making of modern Greece during the second quarter of the 19th cen- tury, see Lucien J. Frary, Russia and the Making of Modern Greek Identity, 1821–1844 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015). 2 Giuzelev, Apologiia na srednovekovieto, 99, concludes that in the first half of the 19th century, “Russian science played essential and most important role for the birth, development and the results of the Bulgarian medieval studies.” © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004394292_007 Rediscovering the Dark Side of Samuel 185 Not coincidentally, the first published works in the second decade of the 19th century, which aimed to rediscover Bulgaria’s medieval past, were written by Russian intellectuals. Konstantin Fedorovich Kalaidovich’s (1792–1832) book Ioan Ekzarh Bolgarski (“John the Bulgarian Exarch”), published in Moscow in 1824, designated the period between the 9th and the beginning of the 10th cen- turies as the era of Bulgarian literacy.3 This era, which was associated with Slavic literacy and the enlightenment by Ss. Cyril and Methodius and their stu- dents, grew into a predominant Pan-Slav topic for the Balkan revivalists via the Russian and Czech Slavicists. The Russian Slavicist Iurii Venelin (1802–1839) had the most important role in uncovering Bulgarian medieval history and determining the directions of its research. Even the title of Venelin’s 1829 book, Drevnie i nyneshnie bolgare v politiceskom, narodopisnom, istoricesko i religioznom ih otnosenii k rosiyanam (“The Old and Today’s Bulgarians in Their Political, Ethnographic, Historical and Religious Relations to the Russians”), clearly reflects his focus on dem- onstrating Bulgarian–Russian historical relations through their common Slav ethnogenesis. Venelin stated that the Bulgarians, the predominant people within “European Turkey” were “not only deprived of their homeland, but of their history as well.”4 Based on this deprivation, he concluded, “It is unfor- givable for us to forget the Bulgarians, from whose hands we have received our baptism, who taught us to read, write, whose natural dialect is the lan- guage of our sermons, in whose language we used to write until the time of Lomonosov.”5 Composing the “forgotten” history,” Venelin sought to “restore the historical dignity to the Bulgarian people” by emphasizing their historical connections with the Russians. Proving the Slav ethnogenesis of the Bulgarians was carried out by Venelin by dissociating them from the Illyrian theory and by promoting the Pan-Slav theory, which he applied to the Proto-Bulgars as well. Venelin based his complex theory on the premise that the Bulgarian’s an- cient origins were in the Volga region and on the equation of the Bulgarians with the Russians – the closely related “mother tribe” of the Slav race. In that context, he concluded that the, “local name Bulgars is a specific kind of name for the Russians; i.e. the Bulgarians are the same Russian people … with re- spect to their Slav race, they did not represent a distinct tribe at all, but were related to Russians.”6 Regarding the Bulgarians’ movement from Volga to the 3 Konstantin Kalaidovich, Ioan Eksarh Bolgarski (Moskva: Semen Selivanskii, 1824). 4 Iurii Venelin, Drevnie i nineshnie bolgare v politicheskom, narodopisnom, istoricheskom i reli- gioznom otnoshenii k rosiianam, I (Moskva: Universitetskaia Tipografiia, 1829), 4. 5 Venelin, Drevnie i nineshnie bolgare, 11. 6 Venelin, Drevnie i nineshnie bolgare, 198–199..
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