Notes on the anthology "Old Bulgarian Pages"

As often happens in the history of our new culture, we are in a paradoxical situation: we declare ourselves the heirs of the classical Bulgarian culture of the Middle Ages, the center of Slavic culture in general for certain historical periods, but we do not know it well. We are simply proud of the alphabet and old literature, we use catchphrases to prove that in the history of human culture we did not exist yesterday, and in our veins there is something of the blue blood of ancient cultural dynasties. But what do we know about Old Bulgarian literature? At school we learned about Presbyter Kozma, who "delivered some kind of discourse against the Bogomils (he was a reactionary and an obscurantist, because the Bogomils are progressive), and about Chernorizets Hrabar (he wrote something about the features and letters). Scientists argue about him whether he was not Tsar Simeon (this somewhat influenced our imagination - a great king, brilliant like Solomon, ruler of nations, but he puts on black hair and writes some writings in dark cells!). But in general, there is hardly a more boring subject at school. At university we learn the conjugations of verbs, we even try to spell the letters from some gospel (those terrible letters!). That is, so to speak, all our education on Old Bulgarian literature. We are so uninterested in it that we have even thrown out everything that reminds us of the Old Bulgarian language from spelling and orthography. We want to say, what do we care about various Nosovk and Ierov, there is no such thing in our modern language, let's leave them to the priests and philologists; our culture is folk, democratic, everyone should have easy access to it, it would be a manifestation of conservatism to treat a dead language and incomprehensible letters with care, even if our own history is reflected in this language and these letters!