Илинденското въстание в българските учебници по история (1944 – 1989)
The Ilinden Uprising in Bulgarian history textbooks (1944 – 1989)

Summary/Abstract: The text analyzes how the 1903-uprising was presented in Bulgarian history textbooks under the communist regime. It invariably occupied half or a whole lesson in the textbooks dedicated to the History of Bulgaria throughout the entire period, most often in all three educational levels: in primary, intermediate and high school. From the very beginning, since 1946, the Bulgarian Communist Party, often by means of specially appointed textbook authors such as Tushe Vlahov, imposed a distorted Macedonianist view of the uprising, presenting it as the outcome achieved by a putative Macedonian nation, and not by the Bulgarian nation. In a more moderate form, this version persisted in the 1950s and in the first half of the 1960s. The Bulgarian character of IMARO and the Uprising began to stand out more clearly after the second half of the 1960s, especially in the high school. During the entire period up to the beginning of the 1980s, textbooks followed the regime’s ideological patterns and the so-called ‘class-party approach’, according to which some malicious conquering role of the Bulgarian bourgeoisie, Prince Ferdinand and the Bulgarian governments was to be highlighted, which was opposed to the democratic and republican spirit of the Macedonian revolutionary movement, strongly influenced by socialism. Only at the beginning of the 1980s, a new high-school textbook was introduced, which was freed from these ideological patterns and was largely in line with scientific discoveries and theses of Bulgarian history science, which adopted part of the achievements of pre-war Bulgarian historiography on Macedonian topics. In the 1950s and 1960s, textbooks presented two separate uprisings with different names: the Ilinden Uprising in Macedonia and the Preobrazhenie Uprising in Eastern Thrace, and in 1969 – 1981 they coalesced in one single uprising styled ‘Ilinden-Preobrazhenie’. After 1981 – 1982, textbooks adopted the traditional name of this uprising, used before the Second World War and especially before 1934: the Ilinden Uprising.

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