Assuredly the Omladina Society had some knowledge of affairs in
Macedonia, for Dimitri Miladinoff, the elder of the two brothers, had
been at Karlovci, where he was offered the professorship of Greek at
the Serbian school. Miladinoff had been born at Struga in Macedonia
and educated at Jannina, where he noticed that a number of the names
of forests, rivers, villages and ruins sounded odd in Greek--they
seemed to have much more resemblance to the language spoken by the
Slavs who lived beyond his home, the Bulgars. This awoke a flame in
him. At Ochrida, where he was presently appointed as a teacher in the
school, he gave his lessons in the customary Greek, nor did he
undervalue the advantages the Macedonian Slavs could draw,
particularly at the stage they were in, from the study of Greek
literature and from the contemplation of the patriotic virtues of old
Greece. But at the same time he began to give his pupils a Bulgarian
translation of what they were learning; and one day in 1845 while he
was in the middle of a lesson, taught in that strange manner, on
Thucydides, the Russian archaeologist Grigorovi['c] appeared and in
amazement cried, "But we are brothers!" It was to him a marvel that
these people's mother-tongue was Slav. Miladinoff had a project to
retain the Greek at college and to introduce Bulgarian in the
elementary schools, but when in 1848 he spoke of this at Ochrida the
notables had grown so hellenized that they considered an allusion to
their Slav origin as most offensive. Far from giving up his plan,
Miladinoff began a pilgrimage through Macedonia, pretending that his
object was to gather funds for the construction at Constantinople of a
Bulgar church. Everywhere he taught as he had done at Ochrida, and the
elucidation, for example, of Demosthenes enabled him to plant his
patriotic seeds. It was in the course of his travels that he (and
afterwards his younger brother Constantine) collected the folk-songs
that were published by the generosity of Strossmayer. He stayed for a
time at Sarajevo and at Karlovci, where he was filled with emulation
by the progress which the Serbs had made. On his return in 1857 to
Macedonia the people of the town of Kuku[vs]--near the future
boundaries of Bulgaria, Serbia and Greece--invited him to be
headmaster at their school. He was overjoyed that this town had the
courage to have the Bulgarian language taught, and we have his reply.
The Phanariote Greeks, he says, "will hurl their anathema against us!
The Bulgarian script is contrary to God! It will not be the first time
that they have proclaimed this! But those days are past! Already the
rays of dawn...." This letter is written in Greek. "Oh, how I am
ashamed," he says, "to express my sentiments in the Greek language!"
But the literary form of Bulgarian is, as yet, undeveloped. One year
after his arrival at Kuku[vs] the population removed the Greek books
from their cathedral and listened to the singing of the Mass in Slav
by a Bulgarian monk from Mt. Athos. When he began to recite the Credo
in the ordinary Bulgarian tongue, the congregation fell on their knees
and burst into tears.