Abstract

The saga of Bulgarian education tells about the birth, growth and metamorphoses of Bulgarian national identity. It started in the 9th century a.c.e. but the part that best explains what we are today happened in the last hundred and fifty years. The fifty years in the 19th century comprise several decades before the Russo-Turkish war of 1878, when Bulgaria broke free from the Ottoman Empire, and another couple of decades after, which lay the foundations of the modern Bulgarian state. The building process lasted till the communist takeover in 1944. What followed was another half century of difficult growth and permutations, induced by a complex interplay of internal and external factors.