Read about the 150th Anniversary celebrations for Dimitar Blagoev

I was born in the well-known Macedonian village of Zagorichane, Kostour district. It is a large, clean Bulgarian village, situated at the foothills of the southern spurs of the large mountain massif of Vich and on the brink of a large valley, stretching to the south of the village.

A remarkable event in my life at that time was the arrival of the first Bulgarian teacher in the village. He was Georgi Konstantinov from Soloun, or, as we called him, Dinkata. He was engaged as teacher in the Greek school, the only one which existed at the time. But he was above all an agitator, an apostle and that is why the very first days be assembled us and asked us whether we wanted to learn the Bulgarian alphabet. There was no end to our happiness and the lessons in Bulgarian in the school began in secret. I remember very well our school room with a row of benches, strewn with sand on which we used to write. But our teacher Dinkata was not satisfied with teaching only the children of our village and he made the rounds of the villages as an agitator of the national idea.

In a neighbouring village he was beaten almost to death and he was brought back to our village wrapped in raw hides. But he persisted. Typical of the energy of this Bulgarian nationalist revolutionary was his act in 1870. After the Firman on the independence of the Bulgarian church was issued that same year, he went somewhere - whether to Constantinople or somewhere else, I don't know, but whatever he did, one day he appeared in the village with a copy of the Firman which he later read in the neighbouring villages. I wrote more about this teacher, a Bulgarian revolutionary in the newspaper "Makedonski glas" in 1885 in a special article headed 'Dinkata, the Teacher'. I personally owe a great deal to him. He taught me to read and write very quickly.