National Day of Bulgaria: Literary Evening

The National Day of Bulgaria

Literary evening

Bulgaria from the 16th century until early 20th century

by Nigel Middlemiss

Special guests:
Nigel Middlemiss, MA Oxon, formerly a teacher at the Angliiska Ezikova Gimnazya in Rousse, Bulgaria, and a long-standing fund-raiser for needy Bulgarian children
Dr Bryan Skipp, formerly Chairman of the British-Bulgarian Society
Sophie Middlemiss, MA Cantab, historian with a special interest in the politics and culture of south-eastern Europe and daughter of Nigel and Prisca Middlemiss

March 3rd 2013, Bulgarian National Day
Readings from Travellers’ Tales of Bulgaria from the 16th to the early 20th century, a collection of travelogues by British visitors

Background

Many years ago, Nigel Middlemiss and Dr Bryan Skipp searched the shelves of Oxford’s Bodleian Library, the London Library and the British Library for descriptions, by traders, diplomats, journalists, practitioners of the Grand Tour and many others, of the time they had spent in Bulgaria.
Nigel and Bryan will be joined by Nigel’s daughter Sophie to read out some of the extracts found, and to share their views on what motivated these journeys to the so-called “Wild East”, what their impressions were of the Bulgarians and the land they inhabited, and what pleased, surprised and shocked them.

Introduction to the collection

There have been visitors to the Balkans from Britain since the early years of the last millennium.
As a very broad generalization, we have assumed in the collection four travelperiods when British people passed through the Balkans and recorded their views on Bulgaria. We have concentrated on those accounts which focus on the smaller and more intimate aspects of social life and local topography in these periods.
The first period, which may be called the ‘trading years’, followed the granting of trading privileges to the English by the Turks in 1581 which opened up markets for trade between England and the Ottoman Empire. Travellers in this period were often merchants or merchant-diplomats connected with Britain’s Levant Company or Turkey Company.
There followed a second period when a few adventurous aristocrats extended their ‘Grand Tours’ of Europe to include Constantinople. This was a period when the opulence of the Ottoman capital impressed the drawing rooms of Europe and a gentleman’s leisure accoutrements included a turban and a nargile [shisha pipe].
The third period, the ‘crisis years’, saw the arrival of travellers with a journalistic bent, as well as diplomatic and military visitors whose motives were linked to the Eastern Question. This period started in the first quarter of the nineteenth century and culminated in the flood of correspondence between 1876 and the end of the century.
The fourth period, lasting up to the 1940s, was a period when travellers, mostly not motivated by political interest, the first heralds of modern-day tourism, wrote accounts of their journeys to what they called ‘the near East in Europe’.