{{Short description|Bulgarian educator (1789–1847)}} {{Use dmy dates|date=August 2021}} {{Infobox person | name = Vasil Aprilov | image = BASA-546K-1-108-21-Vasil Aprilov (cropped).JPG |caption = Depiction of Aprilov | birth_date = {{birth date|1789|7|21|df=y}} | birth_place = Gabrovo, Ottoman Empire | death_date = {{death date and age|1847|10|2|1789|7|21|df=y}} | death_place = Galaţi, Moldavia | citizenship = Russian }}
'''Vasil Evstatiev Aprilov''' ({{langx|bg|Васил Евстатиев Априлов}}; 21 July 1789 – 2 October 1847) was a Bulgarian educator, merchant, philanthropist, writer and a national activist.<ref name="mmd">{{cite book |last=MacDermott |first= Mercia |author-link= Mercia MacDermott |title= A History of Bulgaria 1395–1885 |place= New York |publisher= Frederick A. Praeger |year= 1962 |accessdate= 18 June 2021 |url=https://archive.org/details/historyofbulgari00macd |url-access= registration |pages=[https://archive.org/details/in.gov.ignca.36048/page/125/mode/2up 125–127] |via= Internet Archive }}</ref><ref>{{cite book |author=Roumen Daskalov |title=Master Narratives of the Middle Ages in Bulgaria |date=2021 |publisher=Brill |isbn=9789004464872 |page=46}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |author=Mitko B. Panov |title=The Blinded State: Historiographic Debates about Samuel Cometopoulos and His State (10th-11th Century) |date=2019 |publisher=Brill |isbn=9789004394292 |page=190}}</ref> Aprilov was a leading figure of the Bulgarian National Revival.<ref>{{cite book |author=Roumen Daskalov |title=The making of a nation in the Balkans: Historiography of the Bulgarian revival |date=2004 |publisher=Central European University Press |isbn=9789639241831 |page=2}}</ref> He contributed to the establishment of secular Bulgarian education and the modern Bulgarian school.<ref>{{cite book |editor1=Dominik Gutmeyr |editor2=Karl Kaser |title=Europe and the Black Sea Region: A History of Early Knowledge Exchange (1750-1850) |date=2018 |publisher=LIT Verlag |isbn=9783643802866 |page=299}}</ref>
==Life== Vasil Evstatiev Aprilov was born in Gabrovo, Ottoman Empire (now Bulgaria), in 21 July 1789, to a rich merchant family.<ref name="js">{{cite book |author=Janette Sampimon |title=Becoming Bulgarian The Articulation of Bulgarian Identity in the Nineteenth Century in Its International Context: an Intellectual History |date=2006 |publisher=Pegasus |isbn=9789061433118 |pages=192–199, 212}}</ref><ref name="tm">{{cite book |author=Thomas A. Meininger |title=The Formation of a Nationalist Bulgarian Intelligentsia, 1835-1878 |date=1987 |publisher=Garland Publishing |isbn=9780824080280 |pages=68, 77, 86}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |author=Raymond Detrez |title=The A to Z of Bulgaria |date=2010 |publisher=Scarecrow Press |isbn=9780810872028 |page=17}}</ref> In that period, Gabrovo was an important center of manufacture and trade.<ref name="js" /> He was raised as a Hellenophile.<ref name="tm" /> Aprilov went to a cell school in his hometown. At the age of 11, after the death of his father, he went to Moscow in the Russian Empire, where his brothers Hristofor and Nikofor traded cotton and rose oil. He went to study at a Greek school because working in trade required proficiency in Greek.<ref name="mmd" /><ref name="js" /> Aprilov continued his education at a grammar school in Braşov. The city harbored Bulgarian refugees and many of its inhabitants were from his hometown. Since he was classified as an orphan, it is likely that the school gave him a scholarship too. In 1807, he entered the University of Vienna to study medicine but he did not have the opportunity to graduate due to an illness and the bad financial situation of his brothers.<ref name="mmd" /><ref name="js" />
In 1809, he returned to the Russian Empire and received citizenship. From 1811 he became a merchant in Odessa along with his brothers.<ref name="js" /> In the Nizhyn Greek Registry, he was classified as a Greek.<ref>{{cite book |author=Yanni Kotsonis |title=The Greek Revolution and the Violent Birth of Nationalism |date=2025 |publisher=Princeton University Press |isbn=9780691263618 |page=167}}</ref><ref name="ch">{{cite book |editor1=Eleonora Naxidou |editor2=Yura Konstantinova |title=Christian Networks in the Ottoman Empire A Transnational History |date=2024 |publisher=Central European University Press |isbn=9789633867754 |pages=265, 278}}</ref> He assisted volunteers from Odessa who wanted to participate in the Greek War of Independence and after retiring from trade in 1826, he gave large sums of money to the Greek educational movement. However, in 1830, he came into a dispute with the Greeks and went to Constantinople. Inspired by the reforms there, he came up with the idea to create a European-style school.<ref name="js" /> After leaving Constantinople,<ref name="js" /> under the influence of Yuriy Venelin's book "The Ancient and Present Bulgarians" (1829), he abandoned his Hellenophilia and adopted Bulgarian nationalism in 1831. Afterward, he worked to shift Bulgarian education and culture toward Russia and away from Greece.<ref name="en1">{{cite book |title=Entangled Histories of the Balkans - Volume One: National Ideologies and Language Policies |publisher=Brill |date=2013 |editor1=Roumen Daskalov |editor2=Tchavdar Marinov |isbn=9789004250765 |pages=170, 185}}</ref>
In 1832, he suggested the establishment of a school in the hometown to Nikolay Palauzov.<ref name="js" /> In 2 January 1835,<ref name="mmd" /> he established the Aprilov High School in Gabrovo, with education in Bulgarian.<ref>{{cite book |editor1=Hadrien Rambach |editor2=Stefan Krmnicek |title=Academia and Trade: The Numismatic World in the Long Nineteenth Century, Volume 1 |date=2023 |publisher=Taylor & Francis |isbn=9781000843002 |page=88}}</ref> This was the first Bulgarian secular school using the Bell-Lancaster method.<ref name="rc">{{cite book | last =Crampton | first =Richard J. | title =A Concise History of Bulgaria | publisher =Cambridge University Press | year =2005 | pages =60–62, 65 | isbn =9781139448239}}</ref><ref>{{cite book |editor=Jana-Katharina Mende |title=Hidden Multilingualism in 19th-Century European Literature: Traditions, Texts, Theories |date=2023 |publisher=De Gruyter |isbn=9783110778656 |page=28}}</ref> Aprilov and Palauzov had contributed 2,000 groschen for the school, while monk Neofit Rilski started working as a teacher there. The Greek archbishop of Tarnovo had also encouraged their efforts and the Bulgarian émigrés from Bucharest also contributed money.<ref name="mmd" /><ref name="js" /><ref>{{cite book |author=Richard J. Crampton |title=A Short History of Modern Bulgaria |date=1987 |publisher=Cambridge University Press |isbn=9780521273237 |pages=12, 14}}</ref> The emergence of this school gave a boost to Bulgarian education and soon other schools were opened all over the Bulgarian-populated regions of the Ottoman Empire. Both he and Rilski remained members of the Ecumenical Patriarchate.<ref name="rc" /> Aprilov also came into contact with Venelin in 1836 and financially supported him, until his death in 1839.<ref name="js" /> He offered stipends for Bulgarian students for studying in the Russian Empire, starting with four stipends in 1840.<ref name="en1" /> On 15 September 1843, the Holy Synod of the Russian Orthodox Church allowed him to send books to four churches in the area of Gabrovo.<ref name="ch" /> Aprilov died on 2 October 1847, in Galaţi, Moldavia (now Romania), from tuberculosis.<ref>{{cite book |title=Огнища: пътуване из книжовни средища на Възраждането |date=1983 |language=bg |author=Иван Коларов |publisher=Изд-во на Отечествения фронт |page=222}}</ref> In his will, he had written that he dedicated his savings for the education of the Bulgarians. Aprilov also had 60,000 rubles in his bank account, which were to be used for his Gabrovo school.<ref name="js" />
== Works, views and legacy == Aprilov collected folk songs and sent them to Venelin. He published a booklet called ''Bulgarian letters or to which Slavic people does the Cyrillic alphabet actually belong?'' in 1841, where he disputed the claim by Dimitrije Tirol that Cyril and Methodius were of Serb origin. In the same year, he published ''Dawn of the new Bulgarian education''. In 1845, in Odessa, he published ''Bulgarian charters'', a collection of historical texts about Bulgarian tsars Kaloyan and Ivan Shishman. In his 1845 address ''Letter to my fellow countrymen'', he urged Bulgarians to work on having Bulgarians appointed in episcopal sees. Until 1847, all of his works were written in Russian, while his book ''Ideas about the current Bulgarian education'', which he published in Odessa, was his first book in Bulgarian.<ref name="js" />
He was among the first Bulgarians to write about the Bulgarian revival and traced its beginning to the abolition of the Janissaries in 1826 and implementation of the Tanzimat reforms.<ref name="js" /><ref>{{cite book |title=Entangled Histories of the Balkans - Volume Three: Shared Pasts, Disputed Legacies |date=2015 |publisher=Brill |isbn=9789004290365 |page=431 |editor1=Alexander Vezenkov |editor2=Roumen Daskalov}}</ref> Aprilov thought that liturgical Greek should be taught alongside Bulgarian.<ref name="rc" /> He regarded Russian education as more progressive than Greek education. For him, the school curriculum was to be secular, rationalist and patriotic.<ref name="tm" /> Eastern Bulgarian was his proposal for the basis of literary Bulgarian.<ref>{{cite book |author1=Victor Roudometof |title=Nationalism, Globalization, and Orthodoxy: The Social Origins of Ethnic Conflict in the Balkans |date=2001 |publisher=Bloomsbury Academic |isbn=9780313319495 |page=144}}</ref>
Aprilov Point on Greenwich Island, South Shetland Islands, Antarctica, is named in his honor. A monument of him is in Gabrovo.<ref>{{cite book |author=Stefan Rohdewald |title=Sacralizing the Nation Through Remembrance of Medieval Religious Figures in Serbia, Bulgaria and Macedonia |date=2022 |publisher=Brill |isbn=9789004516311 |page=746}}</ref>
==References== {{reflist}}
==External links== * {{Commons category-inline}}
{{Authority control}}
{{DEFAULTSORT:Aprilov, Vasil}} Category:People from Gabrovo Category:1789 births Category:1847 deaths Category:19th-century Bulgarian educators Category:Bulgarian philanthropists Category:19th-century deaths from tuberculosis Category:Expatriates from the Ottoman Empire in the Russian Empire Category:19th-century philanthropists Category:Tuberculosis deaths in Romania Category:19th-century Bulgarian writers Category:19th-century Bulgarian male writers Category:Russian-language writers Category:Bulgarian nationalists Category:Merchants from the Ottoman Empire
{{Bulgaria-bio-stub}}