Възрожденецът Калист Луков Хамамджиев
The National Revival Figure Kalist Lukov Hamamdjiev

Summary/Abstract: The fifties of the mid-19th century were years of economic uplift for the Bulgarian nationality within the framework of the Turkish Empire. At the same time a powerful movement emerged among the Bulgarians for national and cultural emancipation with respect to the Greek culture predominant up to that moment. This movement was expressed above all in the gradual driving out of the Greek language from education by the building up a network of Bulgarian schools at first for the mass doing away with illiteracy and shortly afterwards in higher educational tasks. K. Hamamdjiev was one of the figures of this Bulgarian cultural revival. He was born circa 1815 in Sopot, on the slopes of the Stara Planina mountain range. He received his elementary schooling in Greek, but afterwards studied in the upper grade of the first modern Bulgarian school in Gabrovo. Its founder and first teacher was the monk of Rila Monastery, Neofit Rilski, who with his activity as teacher, linguist and translator is rightly regarded as patriarch of modern Bulgarian education. Between the master and the pupil who meanwhile also became teacher was established a lasting creative co-operation the object of which was the compiling of full Greek-Bulgarian and later also of Bulgarian-Greek dictionaries. Due to the absence of norms in the Bulgarian language then and also to shortcomings in the methods of work, this project remained unfinished. Kalist Hamamdjiev was disappointed by the failure of this undertaking to which he had devoted many years of his time free from school work. He decided to seek realization in a practical fields and together with his brothers founded a commercial firm. The enterprise had a good start and soon the firm had offices in Galati, Romania, and in Istanbul. Together with their commercial activity the brothers continued to support in every way the cultural revival of their people. The initial successes which gave them confidence for a considerable expansion of trade on the basis of loan capital,, were followed by a year of bad economic conditions and bankruptcy of the firm. During his last years, dispirited by the failure, K. Hamamdjiev turned back to his teaching activity but his health was failing and he died in 1862. His life was a graphic example of the formation and work of a Bulgarian renaissance man

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