Missionaries And Schools In Bulgaria Mavi Boncuk: American - Guide

Mavi Boncuk: American missionaries and schools in Bulgaria


American missionaries also founded the newspaper Zornitsa, which published for seventy-six years, with articles on science, history, and the theory and practice of western democracy. Besides Bible instruction, it taught mathematics, physics, chemistry, physics, and the English language. By 1868 half the student body were Bulgarians. By the end of the 1850s, American missionaries had printed and distributed a version of the Bible in the Bulgarian vernacular. Charles Morse published a full textbook of Bulgarian grammar in 1860, and compiled the first Bulgarian-English dictionary.In 1860, the first American school (today called the American College of Sofia) was founded in Plovdiv by missionaries from the Congregational Church. In 1839 a Protestant religious society, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, sent the first Protestant missionaries the Ottoman Empire, where the Ottoman Government had given them permission to preach to the Christian population. In 1863, a school for young women was opened in Stara Zagora. It opened its campus in Istanbul in 1863, teaching mathematics, natural history, economics, logic, political history, international law, philosophy, and the English language. One of these missionaries, Elias Riggs, learned Bulgarian and published the first guide to Bulgarian grammar for foreigners in 1843. The American School of Samokov offered an American-style education, taught in English to the Bulgarians.Robert College, a branch of the State University of New York, also played an important part in educating the new Bulgarian elite. The first American literature to be translated into Bulgarian was Benjamin Franklin's introduction to Poor Richard's Almanac, "The Way to Wealth", in 1837. The model of the American Republic was frequently discussed by Bulgarian intelligentsia as one model for an independent Bulgaria.The Protestant missionaries had limited success in Bulgaria. The two schools merged and moved to Samokov in 1869. Three future Prime Ministers of Bulgaria: Constantine Stoilov, Todor Ivanchov, and Ivan Geshov, studied there.