Grigor Parlichev


Grigor Stavrev Parlichev was a Bulgarian writer and translator. He was born January 18, 1830 in Ohrid, Ottoman Empire and died in the same town January 25, 1893. Although he thought of himself as a Bulgarian, according to the post-WWII Macedonian historiography, he was an ethnic Macedonian.

Biography

Parlichev studied in a Greek school in Ohrid. In the 1850s he worked as a teacher of Greek in the towns of Tirana, Prilep and Ohrid. In 1858 Parlichev started studying medicine in Athens but transferred to the Faculty of Linguistics in 1860. The same year he took part in the annual poetic competition in Athens winning first prize for his poem "O Armatolos", written in Greek. Acclaimed as "second Homer", he was offered scholarships to the universities at Oxford and Berlin. At that time he was pretending to be a Greek, but the public opinion in Athens emphasized his non-Greek origin. Disappointed Parlichev declined offered scholarships and returned to Ohrid in the next year.
, North Macedonia
In 1862 Parlichev joined the struggle for independent Bulgarian church and schools, though he continued to teach Greek. After spending some time in Constantinople in 1868 acquainting himself with Church Slavonic literature, he returned to Ohrid where he advocated the substitution of Greek with Bulgarian in the town's schools and churches. The same year Parlichev was arrested and spent several months in an Ottoman jail after a complaint was sent by the Greek bishop of Ohrid. At that time he began to study of standard Bulgarian, or, as he called it himself, the Slavonic language. From this time until his death Parlichev continued writing only in Bulgarian.
From 1869 Parlichev taught Bulgarian in several towns across Ottoman Empire, including Struga, Gabrovo, Bitola, Ohrid and Thessaloniki. He initiated the creation of the Bulgarian Men's High School of Thessaloniki. In 1870 Parlichev translated his award-winning poem "The Serdar" into Bulgarian in an attempt to popularize his earlier works, which were written in Greek, among the Bulgarian audience. He also wrote another poem "Skenderbeg". Parlichev was the first Bulgarian translator of Homer's Iliad in 1871, though critics were highly critical of his language. Parlichev used a specific mixture of Church Slavonic and his native Ohrid dialect. He is therefore also regarded as a founding figure of the literature of the later standardized Macedonian language. In 1883 Parlichev moved to Thessaloniki, where he taught at the Thessaloniki Bulgarian Male High School. In the period April 16, 1884 - May 1, 1885 he wrote his autobiography. After his retirement in 1890, he returned to Ohrid, where he died on January 25, 1893.
Parlichev's son Cyril Parlichev was also a prominent member of the revolutionary movement in Macedonia and a Bulgarian public figure.

Identification

Per Raymond Detrez, who is an expert of the issue, in his early life Parlichev was a member of the “Romaic community”, a multi-ethnic proto-nation, to comprise all Orthodox Christians of the Ottoman Empire. It had been under way until the 1830s, when the rise of Greek nationalism destroyed it and that lead later to the formation of the modern nations on the Balkans. Parlchev, is seen by Detrez as belonging basically to the Romaic community, and initially he had no well-defined sense of national identification. However in his youth he developed Greek, and as an adult, finally he adopted Bulgarian national identity. In the last decade of his life, he adhered some form of vague local patriotism, though continued to identify himself as a Bulgarian. In this way Parlichev’s national identity has been used by Macedonian historians to prove the existence of some kind of alleged Macedonian ethnic identification during the late 19th century.

Parlichev's ''Autobiography''