Epic_of_the_Forgotten

<i>Epic of the Forgotten</i>

Epic of the Forgotten

Add article description

Epic of the Forgotten (Bulgarian: Епопея на забравените; Epopeya na zabravenite) is a cycle of 12 odes composed by Bulgarian writer Ivan Vazov between 1881 and 1884. The poems deal with people and events connected with Bulgaria's struggle for national liberation against the Ottoman Empire.

Ivan Vazov (1850–1921)

Background

Vazov wrote the cycle to commemorate the Bulgarian fight for freedom against the Ottoman Empire and to criticize the moral decline of the Bulgarian nation after the Liberation, in comparison to the heroic figures and events of the then recent past. It could be said that the "Epic" formed the Bulgarian national consciousness[citation needed] and created many of the Bulgarian historical legends and myths. It served as an interpretation of the struggle against the Ottoman Empire and mostly the April Uprising, not in its real values (the limited number of participants and the military failure of the uprising) but in its morals. The Bulgarian fight for freedom was interpreted as a sacred act of heroes exactly because it did not have any perceivable chance of success. Despite the lack of demographic, military and other such possibilities of success against the Ottoman Empire which was still militarily resilient, the Bulgarians toiled under dire circumstances against it. The failure itself turned into a moral success and granted the Bulgarians the right to be free.

Contents

In collections, the poems are ordered by their time of composition, not the sequence of the depicted events.

Sources


Bulgaria

This Bulgaria-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.

Stub icon

This poetry-related article is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.
Share this article:

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article Epic_of_the_Forgotten, and is written by contributors. Text is available under a CC BY-SA 4.0 International License; additional terms may apply. Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.