Yordan Ivanov (literary historian)
Yordan Ivanov was a Bulgarian literary historian, archaeologist, folklorist specializing in Bulgarian medieval literature and culture. A full member of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences since 1909, he was an expert on the literary and cultural heritage of the Bogomils.
Ivanov is known as the discoverer of the manuscript original of Istoriya Slavyanobolgarskaya in the Zograf Monastery. Favorite lecturer of Yordan Yovkov.
He was the author of several fundamental historical works revealing the Bulgarian character of Macedonia, and the author of many studies on his hometown and region.
From 1892 to 1894 he specialized at the University of Lausanne, where he became acquainted with the languages and literatures of the Romance peoples, studied Latin and Latin paleography, and learned French. Until 1898 he was a high school teacher of French language and literature in Sliven. In 1899 he became a lecturer in French at the University of Sofia.
From 1906 to 1908 he was secretary of the Bulgarian Trade Agency in Thessaloniki, enabling him to travel through Macedonia, to study its history, ethnography, and written monuments. He studied Greek, visited the Holy Mountain, where he worked in the monastery book stores. In 1909 he held a teaching position at the Department of Bulgarian and Slavic Literature at Sofia University, and in 1925 he was made a full professor. He taught courses in French, Bulgarian literature from the 9th to 18th centuries, Bogomil literature, Slavic paleography, Serbian literature, and Bulgarian folk poetry.
From 1920–1923 and again from 1927–1930, he was posted as a professor of Bulgarian language at the Institut national des langues et civilisations orientales in Paris, which laid the foundation for Cyrillo-Methodian Studies in France.
