Britanski Pateshestvenitsi Za Bulgaria – Presentation with Nigel Middlemiss

17.11.2023; 19:00; Sofia Gallery

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The Bulgarian Cultural Institute London is delighted to invite you to a presentation of Nigel Middlemiss’ travelogue collection “Britanski Pateshestvenitsi za Bulgaria”.

With special guests author Nigel Middlemiss and translator Miglena Parashkevova

You will also have the opportunity to enjoy a glass of lovely Bulgarian wine.

Description:

The presentation of ‘Britanski Pateshestvenitsi za Bulgaria’ will contain extracts and show pictures from this 188-page collection of travelogues drawn from across five centuries. They were collected from books in some of the UK’s great libraries, such as the Bodleian in Oxford, the London Library and the British Museum. They give a fascinating panorama of what travellers saw adventuring into this little visited and ‘exotic’ part of Europe between 1585 and 1939.

The travellers reflect the values of the eras they travelled in.

Early on, the people writing about their experiences in Bulgaria included merchants with the English Levant Company, travelling overland to Turkey or India, and diplomats posted to the British Embassy in Constantinople.

From the 1700s, the travellers and diarists were often doing their ‘Grand Tour’, a journey round Europe including classical Greece and Rome and beyond, into the more alien Ottoman Empire.

The 1800s saw the arrival in Bulgaria of visitors from the “Great Powers” (France, Britain), as conflict intensified between Russia and the so-called ‘Sick Man of Europe’, Turkey. There was a flood of visitors between 1876 and 1900 at the time of and just after Bulgaria’s liberation.

The personal motives for going to Bulgaria were many. They included the desire for adventure in “the mysterious East”, the need to escape from political oppression in Britain, the wish to become a landowner or farmer; or the chance to work as a Christian missionary to convert the Bulgarian people, an engineer laying down early railways, a folklorist reflecting on the different ‘characters’ of the Balkan peoples.

Most travellers had very good things to say of Bulgaria: across the centuries they were impressed by the hospitality of her people, fascinated by Bulgarian looks, dress and national ‘personality’, and intrigued by the magic of the nestinarki, folk music and dance. Not every opinion was glittering positive; it would be a monotonous book if it were.

Tragically, a shadow is often thrown over the writings by the shocking evidence of Ottoman oppression. Many writers foresee the invasion of ‘Turkey-in-Europe’ by Russia as a result. The Bulgarian cause becomes a key theme in British politics; the British Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone writes an introduction to one of our travellers’ books deploring the fact of a people “never knowing real security or peace, living a life poisoned by fear, and deprived of the freedom which is indispensable to all nobleness in mankind”.

Sometimes the tables of observation are turned to show Bulgarian people’s opinions of the British; it is interesting to compare them with the opinions of today.

Nigel Middlemiss has been an ardent admirer of Bulgaria all his life. Their acquaintance dates back to 1972, when his wife Prisca and him were appointed teachers at the Geo Milev English High School in Ruse. They were impressed both by the abilities and success of their students and by the kindness and dedication of their colleagues. On his return to the UK in 1975 Nigel became editor of the magazine of the British-Bulgarian Society and joined the charitable organisation “Friends of Bulgaria”. In 1989 together with Prisca they began to raise funds in London for Bulgarian orphans in need through concerts at Fulham Palace, St. Dunston in London and at the Bulgarian Embassy. Together with a friend, Dr Brian Skip, Nigel researched numerous first-person accounts of British travellers who visited Bulgaria in centuries gone by at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, the London Library and the British Museum, which he subsequently edited and revised to produce this book. Proceeds from the sale of the book are to support student theatre and drama at the English High School in Ruse. Nigel co-owns a house on the Danube near Ruse and enjoys teaching Bulgarian.

The translator of this book, Miglena Parashkevova, is a graduate of the Geo Milev English Language School in Ruse and is one of Prisca and Nigel Middlemiss’s students in Bulgaria. This is why she decided to support Nigel Middlemiss’ charity initiative with this book to raise funds for talented students from the High School, kindly translating it into Bulgarian in order to expand the readership. Miglena is a long-time professional translator in a wide variety of fields, and for the last ten years has been mostly involved in translations in the fields of museum, culture and social affairs. Among the organisations she has worked with are the British Know-How Fund, the British charities Save the Children and Hope and Homes for Children, the National History Museum, the Institute of Ethnology and Folklore Studies with the Ethnographic Museum at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, the Ruse Regional History Museum and many others.