Paisius of Hilendar
Bulgarian clergyman
Saint Paisius of Hilendar or Paìsiy Hilendàrski (Bulgarian: Свети Паисий Хилендарски; 1722–1773) was a Bulgarian Orthodox clergyman and a key figure of the Bulgarian National Revival. He is most famous for being the author of Istoriya Slavyanobolgarskaya (Slaveno-Bulgarian History, 1762), the first significant modern Bulgarian history that became famous and was copied and distributed everywhere in the Bulgarian lands. The book is, overall, the third modern work of Bulgarian history, after the works titled History of Bulgaria by Petar Bogdan Bakshev in 1667 and by Blasius Kleiner in 1761. He is considered the forefather of the Bulgarian National Revival.
Paisius was born in the Samokov eparchy. There is academic dispute about the exact place of his birth, although the prevailing consensus points to the town of Bansko. He established himself in the Hilandar Monastery in 1745, where he was later a hieromonk and deputy abbot. Collecting materials for two years through hard work and even visiting the Habsburg monarchy, he finished his Istoriya Slavyanobolgarskaya in 1762 in the Zograf Monastery. The book was the first attempt to write a complete history of Bulgaria and attempted to awaken and strengthen Bulgarian national consciousness.
The most famous part of the whole book is the paragraph:Oh, you unwise moron!
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This entry incorporates text from “Paisius of Hilendar” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.