The Letters of the Bulgarians от Bono Skodrov/ изд. Гута-Н

It is well known to all how much daily problems the Bulgarian people has in these days . However, more dangerous than anything is the tendency to lose identity and national self-confidence. This is a clearly visible tendency in the inscriptions of foreign languages, mass emigration and the wish for imitation of foreign culture. At other side, the answer to the question, “Why are you ashamed to call yourself Bulgarian?” is more than obvious: there is little in the present time to be proud of.

The above-described situation makes preservation and popularization of Bulgarian History extraordinarily important. If it succeeds, Bulgaria will stick out as a land with unique culture – a central part of the European civilization. In the opposite case, only a deserted state will remain.

The present book is concerned with the reconstruction of the history of the Bulgarian state, based on written monuments from Bulgaria as well as from foreign origin. An illustrative example for this approach is how a historian will think after a thousand years in the future, if he has a random collection of writings from our days for instance newspapers, official documents, or relief inscriptions from recent monuments. To extract reliable information clearly the historian has to realize and overcome three problems:

• First, different documents are written on different languages. The symbols receive meaning only if we know how they are pronounced and which meaning the words have.
• Second, frequently the same name of a person or geographical term is written in a quite different manner (for instance Germania in Bulgarian and Deutschland in German).
• Third, the written records reflect the point of view of the author or of the official propaganda of the corresponding state – not necessarily the absolute truth. So, for instance the victories could be over emphasized in own works, but under emphasized in foreign works.

The present study by Bono Skodrov starts with a detailed comparison of the form and the appearance of the writing signs themselves. This allows establishing the relation and the mutual influence of different alphabets over time. Further, the book continues with a comparative investigation of the content of different documents and comparisons of the documents of different authors, describing the same events.

During the investigation, it turns out that the Bulgarian state is much more ancient and highly developed as we thought up to now. It was a major force of the scale of the Roman Empire with huge territory and very sophisticated state organization.

With its reach on facts material and its logic, the study by Bono Skodrov sheds a new light on the history of the Bulgarian people and its neighbors.  This book is one of the most important historical investigations of our time.

Geori Skodrov, 2006

Брой страници: 296; меки корици