Today is the Day of the People’s Awakeners – a national Bulgarian holiday commemorating the work of our educators, writers, revolutionaries and holy awakeners of the reviving national spirit, striving for education and literature. It is marked annually with torchlight processions on November 1. The spiritual enlightenment of the Bulgarian people gave impetus to the national liberation movement in the Bulgarian lands.
In a Bulgaria freed from Ottoman rule, both the intelligentsia and the mass people are aware of the feat of the Renaissance writers and revolutionaries who created the atmosphere and led the Bulgarian spirit to the determination to lead a struggle for state sovereignty. Many cities and villages want to pay the deserved appreciation to the people’s awakeners not only by naming streets, community centers and schools after them.
How the Day of the Wakers is established
For this reason, Stoyan Omarcevski, Minister of Public Education of Bulgaria, in 1922 submitted a proposal to the Council of Ministers to designate November 1 as the Day of the Bulgarian People’s Awakeners. On July 28, 1922, the Ministry of Public Education issued District No. 17,743, according to which November 1 was designated as “the holiday of the Bulgarian revivalists, a day to pay tribute to the memory of the great Bulgarians, far and near builders of modern Bulgaria.” On October 31, 1922, a decree was issued by the Council of Ministers announcing the holiday.
On December 13 of the same year, the 19th Ordinary National Assembly adopted a Law to supplement the Law on Holidays and Sunday Rest. Tsar Boris III signed the law for the introduction of the Day of People’s Wakers on February 3, 1923. For the first time, the holiday was celebrated unofficially in Plovdiv in 1909, and from 1922 to 1945 it was a national holiday. Since 1945, the holiday has been canceled by the communist authorities, but preserved in the memory of the Bulgarian people. In many settlements of Bulgaria, this Day was celebrated unofficially: in the area of the city of Pirdop, on this Day, primary school students made lanterns with written letters of the Bulgarian alphabet illuminated from the inside and paraded in front of the society of the settlement dressed solemnly, in many cases with folk costumes.
After a long break, with the Law on Supplementing the Labor Code, adopted by the 36th National Assembly on October 28, 1992, the tradition of the holiday was resumed.
The first of November is officially declared the Day of the People’s Wakers and a day of absenteeism for all educational institutions in the country. The idea for its restoration came from Professor Petar Konstantinov, chairman of the MATI BULGARIA National Association.
Among the most famous Bulgarian folk revivalists are Saint Ivan Rilaski, Konstantin Kostenechki, Grigoriy Tsamblak, Joasaf Bdinski, Vladislav Gramatik, Dimitar Kantakuzin, Petar Parcevich, Petar Bogdan, Paisiy Hilendarski, Matei Gramatik, Pope Peyo, Neophyte Bozveli, Neophyte Rilski, Ivan Seliminski , the brothers Dimitar and Konstantin Miladinovi, Georgi Stoykov Rakovski, Vasil Levski, Hristo Botev, Stefan Karadzha, Hadji Dimitar, Lyuben Karavelov, Dobri Chintulov, Ivan Vazov, Grigor Perlichev and many others.
On the occasion of announcing the holiday as a national minister, Stoyan Omarcevski says: “…our first concern is to turn the eyes of our youth to everything valuable and bright from our past and to associate them with this past, so that they can draw from it cheerfulness and hope, strength and impulse to activity and creativity. Our youth must know that life is only valuable when it is inspired by idealism, by aspiration; only then is life meaningful and meaningful, when it is overwhelmed by idealism, when souls and hearts tremble for the beautiful, the national, the ideal, and this is embedded in the images and creations of all those of our actors who awakened our people in the days of their slavery, which led him to enlightenment and national freedom during the Renaissance and which created eternal cultural values for him during his free life…
The Ministry of Public Education designates November 1, the day of St. Joan of Rila, as a holiday for Bulgarian revivalists,
for a holiday, let’s call it, of the great Bulgarians, through which a holiday, arranged in a planned and systematic way, to unite all efforts in this direction, as this day turns into a cult of the Bulgarian national genius: paying tribute to the memory of the people’s awakeners, to those who, as selfless warriors, led the Bulgarian people in the past to enlightenment, to freedom, to culture, let us inspire the youth through their bright images to national and cultural ideals”.
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