Biblical-mythological topos articulate life truths hidden behind images, symbols, and narratives. Geo Milev lives on forever in the poem “September” as a corrective to the problematic search for justice. Life and work become narratives of a suffered human fate on the way to its own Golgotha. Key topos stand out: “The voice of the people is the voice of God”; the biblical warrior Priest Andrey; Chaos and Wrath; the Resurrection and the “New Adam”; sacrifice and the Apocalypse; iconoclasm and the “godless”; the tragic hero and the conflict between personal honor and collective destiny. Through a survey conducted among tenth-grade students, existing opinions and attitudes are identified regarding the resonance that Geo Milev’s narrative leaves in the context of the rebellion against injustice, the motif of a meaningfully lived life, and human will as the engine of change for a better tomorrow. The aim of the article is to establish students‘ attitudes, opinions, and expectations regarding the interpreted meaning of the poem in terms of universal human values. The method used is a group online survey. The subject of the study is the biblical-mythological topos in “September”.
The study examines the grammatical realization of the semantic opposition animacy ~ inanimacy with a focus on the word classes, mainly in the Russian and Bulgarian languages. This opposition does not have a universal and unambiguous grammatical manifestation, but is realized differently in individual languages and language systems. Animacy cannot be treated as a full-fledged morphological category, since its formal explication is inconsistent, but is considered as a lexical-grammatical class. The analysis covers the interaction of the opposition with the categories of gender and case, with the classes of adjectives and numerals, showing that it is most clearly manifested in the case system, especially in the accusative case in Russian. Special attention is paid to the Bulgarian numeral forms, which represent a unique morphological realization of the semantic feature animacy. In conclusion, we confirm the understanding of animacy as a universal semantic constant with a broad but heterogeneous grammatical expression.
The popular text of the Alexander Romance contained many animals and strange creatures that meant a challenge for the translators of the Greek text into Slavonic in any of its two recensions. The techniques employed varied, as much as the illustrations that often accompanied such literary depictions. No other text contained such a variety of fantastic animals except for the Physiologus, with which the Alexander Romance has particularly interesting connections, especially in East Slavic. The present article explores the translations of real and fantastic animals and creatures as well as the literary connections between both works.
Written after his abdication from the Byzantine throne in 1354, the polemical discourses against Islam and in defence of Christianity by John VI Kantakouzenos (d.1382), were soon translated in the fourteenth-century Balkan Slavic milieu. Typically for the apologetic genre, they present an encyclopaedia of Byzantine theological views, in which exegesis plays an essential role as a technique of persuasion and refutation, and communicates Christian understanding of nature, animals and human body. Kantakouzenos does not invent the interpretations, but choses them from the existing pool of Byzantine exegetic tradition. The paper1 explores some of the ways in which these exegetic components were interpreted and presented by the Slavonic translator and later copyists.
This study examines how medieval South Slavonic translators rendered Greek botanical terminology into Old Church Slavonic (Old Bulgarian) and how their choices varied. Early translations from the 9th-11th centuries tended to be contextual and flexible, while 14th-15th-century translators preferred greater lexical and grammatical precision, frequently adopting Greek loanwords. Using different translations of the commentaries to the Song of Songs and of John Chrysostom's De statuis as case studies, the article illustrates how botanical terms were interpreted differently according to the translators' strategies and skill. Particular attention is given to plant names whose interpretation depended on theological commentaries, especially in late catena translations, where loanwords were introduced, but sometimes explanatory synonyms were added for clarity. These examples highlight the translators' efforts to render Greek sources faithfully while remaining comprehensible to Slavic readership.
The text presents an idea for an educational research project, developed according to the principles of project-based learning. The project is intended for fifth-graders and focuses on the study of colloquial speech – and more specifically, colloquial vocabulary in comparison with its literary equivalents. Students collect language data, analyze them and create a final product – a mini-dictionary, a poster, a collage, a scene, a comic strip, in order to present the results obtained. Despite some of its shortcomings, such as the danger of uneven distribution of tasks and risks for weaker students, the project method is a good teaching and learning tool, as it emphasizes active and inquiry-based learning – students do not just perceive information, but apply it in practical activities. Project-based learning places the student at the center of the learning process, gives him the opportunity to actively participate in the study of real problems from real life and, in addition, develops important abilities and skills such as independence, responsibility, critical thinking, creativity, teamwork, etc.
The article examines how the learning journal supports the development of students’ critical self-reflection in the context of their interaction with artificial intelligence in Bulgarian language education. It outlines the ways in which the journal encourages critical thinking, metacognitive awareness and digital literacy, and discusses its role in transforming students from passive consumers of information into active constructors of knowledge. Key parameters for implementing the journal are presented, including aims, format, structure and assessment criteria, together with the challenges related to motivation and time commitment. The text highlights the potential of the learning journal in relation to developing autonomy and responsible engagement with knowledge, as well as fostering skills needed for lifelong learning.
This article examines the motif of the automaton in E. T. A. Hoffmann (Die Automate, 1814; Der Sandmann, 1816), Vladimir Odoevsky (Derevyannyy gost’, 1833), Gustav Meyrink (Der Golem, 1915), and Aleksandr Grin (Zolotaya tsep’, 1925) as a literary model for reflecting on the transformation of subjectivity from Romanticism to early Modernism. In Hoffmann’s works, the uncanny arises not from technology itself but from the projection of interiority onto external signs. Odoevsky shifts the focus to the reproducibility of cultural markers of personhood, while Meyrink radicalizes the problem by presenting identity as a fragile occupation of form rather than a stable inner core. In Grin’s novel, the speaking automaton exposes the mechanisms through which subjectivity is attributed in dialogic interaction. The article argues that literary automata function not as technical precursors of artificial intelligence, but as analytical models of attribution processes that continue to shape contemporary debates on AI.
This article examines the fundamental relationship between Bulgarian and foreign language studies in secondary school, based on the attitudes of 8th grade students. Their opinions are examined through a survey that seeks an answer to the question of how the study of Bulgarian affects the study of a foreign language and vice versa. The emphasis is on the usefulness and interdependence of language subjects from the perspective of the respondents. The study seeks to highlight and revisit important issues regarding the native and foreign language learning process in order to draw conclusions useful for theory and practice.
The article presents a functional approach to the use of artificial intelligence in Bulgarian language classes at school. It discusses the characteristics of different language models, with an emphasis on their use in teaching and education. It analyzes tools suitable for teaching the Bulgarian language and for preventing unacceptable use of AI. Data from a pilot experiment with teachers who use AI is included.
The article examines, in a comparative perspective, works from Serbian, Croatian and Slovenian literature that are representative of the family novel. The analysis focuses on the following aspects of novelistic structure: modes of conceptualizing family history; the relationship between history, memory, and trauma; narrative and stylistic strategies. Particular attention is paid to the autobiographical code present in a large number of the examined works, as well as to the frequent use of a female narrative perspective. The synthesis of the analytical observations reveals a number of similarities among the works discussed, which makes it possible to define shared typological characteristics.
The article outlines key moments in the history of the Zahari Stoyanov (1850 – 1889) Museum in the village of Medven and analyzes the current state of the cultural topos. The museum was established in 1968 in the house where the prominent writer and politician lived with his parents, brothers and sisters before leaving his native village in 1866. The old wooden residential building is well preserved and excellently restored. Together with the courtyard and the two monuments to Zahari Stoyanov in Medven, it is a major place of local and national memory for one of the most remarkable Bulgarian artists and statesmen of the 1880s. The historical site is included in the register of immovable cultural values of national importance. It is in the administrative structure of the Historical Museum, Kotel. The main exhibition includes three halls with ethnographic and historical materials. There are also several authentic artifacts that belonged to the Chronicler. The historic building and the exhibition in it are the subject of cultural and educational tourism, which is a prerequisite for the development of the region. Both the museum and the memory of Zahari Stoyanov in Medven are essential elements of the nation’s cultural memory of the Bulgarian Renaissance era.
The article examines the place and the social roles assigned to intellectuals following the events of the autumn of 1989 in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, and Poland. The central questions are, among others, why exactly were they the ones expected to shape political life; did they manage to observe political processes objectively, since they were also active participants in them; how did they perceive their own place in politics; which events did they comment on, etc. Investigated as emblematic examples of intellectuals in power are V. Havel, Zh. Zhelev, B. Dimitrova and A. Michnik. The analysis focuses primarily on some of their interviews, public speeches, discussion contributions and essays, all dating from the first decade of democracy. A number of statements and assessments of the political crises in the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, Romania, and Yugoslavia before and after 1989 reveal a sense of community. At the same time, it is notable that Zhelev and Dimitrova comment on the recent past and the present in the Central European countries much more frequently than Havel and Michnik do on events in Bulgaria. The article develops the argument that the overlap in the analyzed authors’ perceptions is due as much on their similar experience of totalitarianism as on the fact that even before entering politics, they had been reading each other’s works, both literally and figuratively.
The paper is dedicated to a fundamental issue in derivatology-the issue of productivity (understood as the derivability of one word from another at a formal level) and motivation (understood as the semantic conditioning of a given word by another) of derived/motivated words. Based on generally accepted definitions of the concepts of derivation and motivation at a synchronous level, some controversial issues related to the so-called "mutual motivation", "splitting of formal and semantic motivation", and the boundaries between derivation and adaptation are considered. The determination of the exact inventory of units of the word-formation system-derived/motivated words-and its boundaries depends on the resolution of these issues.
