Veda Slovena

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   Now, I don't know if this is the right sub-forum, but it is literature after all...

The "Veda Slovena" Mystery

In 1874 in Belgrade, and in 1881 in St. Petersburg, the
two volumes of "Veda Slovena" were published - "Bulgarian folk songs of
the pre-historical and pre-Christian age". Compiled by the Bosnian Serb
Stephen Verkovich, "Veda Slovena" created a furore among the scholarly
world ranging from Russia to France, and went down in history as the biggest
folklore mystery, the debates over which are still going on. 
The sensation lies in the fact that these, as well as
some other songs published by Verkovich, "written down" in an isolated
part of Macedonia, provided evidence which turned the prevailing conceptions
about Europe's pre-written history upside down.  The "Vedas", whose
"Indian" name was picked up by no chance, not only contained legends of
how the plough, the sickle, the boat, wheat, wine, writing, etc. came into
being, but  created a legendary-mythological conceptual framework,
in which all - the Indian god Vishnu, the Thracian singer Orpheus, the
Macedonian kings Phillip II and Alexander the Great, the Trojan War, etc.,
were present.  Moreover, the famous German epic, the "Song of the
Nibelungs" consisted of "only" 9776 lines, while the two volumes of "Veda
Slovena" included as many as 23809 lines, and Verkovich himself claimed
that he had available at least  ten times as many. 
In the debates that followed in the field of European
Slavonic studies, "denouncers" exceeded in number "apologists". "Veda Slovena" 
succeeded in winning suport by not only a great number of recognized foreign
scholars, but by quite a few of the Bulgarian scholars from Macedonia itself,
who knew the local folklore and dialects in minute detail. The French government,
in turn, twice sent its emissaries, who had to establish the authenticity
of the epos on the spot of its "discovery" - in the South-Western parts
of the Rhodopes, among the so-called Pomaks  - a Bulgarian-speaking
ethnic group professing Islam. Neither the French, nor, later, the Bulgarian
inquiries, however, provided unequivocal and weighty answers to all questions
provoked by "Veda Slovena". 
What is known for certain is that  the rise of this
mystery is due to the Bulgarian Ivan Gologanov (1839-1895). He was born
in the village of Tarlis, in the neighbourhood of the mentioned Pomak region,
nearby the town of Valovishta (now Siderokastron in Greece), and spent
his whole life as a village teacher in his native place. He was the man
who claimed to have found and written down (for a small charge paid by
Verkovich) the "Veda Slovena" songs. He did this in the course of 12 years.
The Serbian Verkovich published the songs thus collected under his own
name. 
Ivan Gologanov's critics, former and present, have rejected
the authenticity of "Veda Slovena". Their argument is, most generally,
that Gologanov was simple-minded and, therefore, he lied. Such argument,
however, is not correct. Gologanov could hardly be considered one of an
uneducated crowd. 
The "plain" village teacher actually did not come from
just any family - one of his brothers later became an academician, as well
as Metropolitan of Skopje, the capital of, then, Vardar Macedonia and the
Republic of Macedonia today; the other one was Abbot of the Bachkovo monastery,
the second important Bulgarian cloister. Ivan Gologanov himself had command
of ancient and modern Greek; he knew the Hellenic mythology in detail,
and his idol was the immortal epic poet Homer. Gologanov knew Homer's works
perfectly well. 
Even today the argument about "Veda Slovena" goes on:
what in the songs is authentic, and what invented by Gologanov himself.
Is everything faked? Or is everything authentic? 
It is certain that neither the scale of "Veda Slovena"
and the artisitc qualities of the songs, nor their huge number could be
the work of a talentless graphomaniac. What is more, as we will  see
further, the motivation underlying his striking capacity for work, if he
was the inventor, did not boil down to just making both ends meet. 
The Bosnian Serb Stephen Verkovich (1827-1893), too, 
was not someone to ignore. A former Franciscan monk, he settled in Macedonia
in 1850, with the purpose of extending, as a paid agent,  the propaganda
of the Serbian government among the local people. The historical moment
was such that Serbia and Greece, which had been liberated at the beginning
of the century from a four-hundred-year Turkish domination, crossed their 
Pan-Serbian and Pan-Hellenic appetites in Macedonia, i.e. in one of Bulgaria's
regions, and Bulgaria was still under the rule of the Sultan (its statehood
would be revived only in 1878). 
Initially Belgrade, whose aim was to form a Southern-Slavic
federation under Serbian control, was still far from the idea of declaring
the Macedonian Bulgarians to be  "Southern Serbs", and yet farther
from referring to them as a "separate nation". On the contrary, in those
years Belgrade supported the struggle of the Bulgarians to emancipate themselves
from the guardianship of the Greek Patriarchate and to restore their own
Church hierarchy. In this sense, what Stephen Verkovich did is an isolated,
but telling example of noble efforts made in the name of the Bulgarian
Revival. 
What is more, when the Serbs changed their policy and
started large-scale activities, which were detrimental to the Macedonian
Bulgarians, the Franciscan Verkovich remained loyal to the morality of
his Order. He did not reject the historical and real life truth, opposed
all political falsifications, and persisted in his service in support of
the causes he believed to be true and just. During the long years he lived
in Macedonia, he proved to be a remarkable scientist in the field of Macedonian
folklore, ethnography and geography. In addition, owing to his collector's 
zeal, Verkovich saved a great number of ancient manuscripts, coins, objects
of art, etc. 
The efforts Verkovich made in the study, conservation
and popularization of the Macedonian ancient culture, as well as the work
of his assistant Ivan Gologanov, had also a practical effect for the Bulgarian
people. At that time Bulgaria (Moesia, Thrace, and Macedonia) was agitated
by a  feverish struggle on two fronts - against her national oppressors,
the Turks and the Ottoman Empire, and against her ecclesiastical oppressors
- the Greek Church and clergy. In this sense, the activity of  Verkovich
and Gologanov was an integral part of Bulgaria's powerful desire for educational,
cultural, religious and economic emancipation, which reached its apex in
the Bulgarian revolutionary movement and the restoration of the national
state. 
No matter how specific, all these processes were linked
with the tendencies and changes occurring in the whole of Europe from the
late 18th up to the mid-19th century. This was the epoch of the powerful
European revolutionary romanticism, seeking reforms and social freedom,
and, in the case of the oppressed peoples - national liberation. Disappointed
by the existing reality, romanticists looked for a base of its rejection
and reformation in the fertile roots of tradition, in the idealized past
of their countries. In all the fields of thought and art they abandoned
the ancient models and the rationalism of the  Enlightenment, seeking
inspiration in the history, folk art, folklore, music, and architecture
of their peoples. Messianic ideas flooded the sphere of ideology, naturally,
glorifying the respective nation. At the same time, no other cultural age
produced such huge collections, studies, and works based on folklore material
like romanticism. Although with a delay of several decades, this wave overflowed
the Balkans too. While Germany had its Grimm brothers, the Miladinov brothers 
were their Bulgarian analogue. Everywhere in Europe romanticists collected,
adapted, recast, authorized folk works. This was the foundation on which
the geniuses of Byron and Pushkin, Chopin and Liszt evolved. 
And whenever the facts, or their abilities, were deficient,
romanticists did not hesitate to resort to sometimes harmless, but other
times not that innocent falsifications. The founder of this "technique"
was the Scotsman James Macpherson, the predecessor of the romantics, who
published in 1765 his revised versions of the Celtic sagas and legends
as an authentic collection of works of the legendary warrior and bard Ossian.
The circle around the linguist Vaclav Hanka produced, in 1817-1818, the
then much talked about "ancient" manuscripts, which were presented as original
9th and 13th century works. The aim of this mystification was to prove
the ancient character of the Czech culture and to activate the national
self-identification of the Czechs, under Austrian power at that time. 
By its scope and scale "Veda Slovena"  surpassed
the phenomena mentioned above. Let us assume that this work is a fake. 
If Verkovich himself had unconsciously been involved in
its creation, the Bulgarian Gologanov was far from doing it by chance.
As evidenced by one of his sons, the main motive of his father was patriotic.
In fact, because of his activity in this field, Gologanov was persecuted
and imprisoned by the Turkish authorities, very much like other Bulgarian
"romanticists". Therefore, not all of his contemporaries felt  inclined
to blame him. The most remarkable statesman of modern Bulgaria, Prime Minister
Stefan Stambolov (1887-1894) offered to Gologanov to move to Sofia, promising
him a pension of considerable amount. Stambolov's response to some criticisms
that he wanted to reward an impostor, was the following: "All European
academies have shown interest in the songs of the Rhodope region, so that
no matter whether he has heard them from somebody else's tongue, or has
invented them himself, for us, Bulgarians, it is one and the same..." 
The assumption that "Veda Slovena" is a fabrication, means
to recognize Ivan Gologanov as a poetic genius, who deserves a place of
his own in the history of world literature. To assume that these texts
are authentic folklore, implies the necessity of reconsidering the cultural
development of Europe as a whole. This dilemma has waited its turn for
more than a century.

Taken from here

Now if somebody has and could show some part of this "Veda Slovena", I believe it would be an interesting read...