Българското училище и православната църква до Освобождението
The Bulgarian School and Church before the Liberation

Summary/Abstract: The school and the church are the institutions of paramount importance for the spiritual and cultural development of the Bulgarian people. Their histories from the 9th to the 20th centuries are closely interwoven, and in particular periods, hard to separate. Notwithstanding the hundreds of pages devoted to both of them in scholarly literature, their relationship hasn’t been outlined as an issue in its own right. Parallels haven’t been drawn between the development of their relationship as institutions in the Bulgarian lands and in Europe or the other Balkan countries in order to distinguish the common aspects and to highlight the individual ones. The development of the contacts between the Bulgarian school and the Orthodox Church generally went through a number of major phases. The first one began with the establishment of the Bulgarian school at the time of Kliment, Naum and the Council in Preslav in 893 and went down to the Bulgarian state’s losing its independence at the end of the 14th and the beginning of the 15th centuries. The second phase spanned over the Late Middle Ages (15th–17th centuries), the third one was during the Bulgarian Renaissance, the fourth one – at the time of the Third Bulgarian State, and the last one – after the Second World War. During the first two phases the school was highly dependent on the Orthodox Church in terms of ideology and content, organization, methods of teaching and funding. At the time of the Bulgarian Renaissance the school gradually became an independent institution, breaking away from the ideological postulates of religion, although it continued to actively support the Church in its role of forming the Bulgarian nation.

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