Day of National Awakening in Bulgaria (01/11)

Every year on November 1, Bulgaria celebrates People's Awakeners Day. The holiday is also known as Renaissance Leaders' Day.

In Bulgaria, it is customary to call active figures of the national and cultural revival of the early and mid-19th centuries, when the country was still under Ottoman rule, alarmists (Bulgarian awakeners, literally — « awakening»). They were mostly simple teachers and confessors, but with their asceticism they managed to set the impetus for the growth of national self-awareness.

Thanks to their efforts, theater appeared in Bulgaria, modern literary genres began to develop, and scientific science developed. Church leaders managed to achieve recognition of a separate Bulgarian Exarchy in 1860.

The deeds of ascetic awakeners are alive to this day: they are a dense network of folk reading rooms (district cultural centers), and the songs and poems they put together, which are honored by folk memory. Among the names of folk awakeners, for example, are: Hristo Botev, Vasil Levsky, brothers Konstantin and Dimitar Miladinov, Sophrony Vrachansky and many others.

The holiday was first celebrated in Plovdiv in 1909, and from 1921 to 1945, People's Awakeners Day was an official public holiday. In the modern history of Bulgaria, the holiday was revived again in 1992 according to the idea of the Bulgarian historian and public figure Pyotr Konstantinov.

Day of National Awakeners — is an absentee day for all educational institutions in the country. Usually on this day, ceremonial meetings and evenings dedicated to the memory of figures of the Bulgarian Renaissance are held; amateur groups perform concerts and recitals in reading rooms. Flowers are laid at the monuments of ascetic awakeners.

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