The “National Revival” of the Bulgarians under Ottoman rule took place from the 1830s until the establishment of the Bulgarian state in 1878. It was triggered by a manuscript book of history – Istorija slavenobolgarskaja (“History of the Slavo-Bulgarians”) by the monk Paisij of Hilendar, finished in 1762. A few similar histories appeared afterwards: the anonymous “Zograf history” (undated, in manuscript), the Istorija vo kratce o bolgarskom narode slovenskom (“A short history of the Slavic Bulgarian people”) by the hieromonk Spiridon of Gabrovo (1792, likewise in manuscript) and the Carstvenik (“A book of kings”) of Hristaki Pavlovič (printed in Budapest in 1844). They all strove to prove that the Bulgarians had also known a glorious history with kings, patriarchs and military victories over their enemies. They were particularly concerned with origins and genealogies and (except for Paisij) shared the so-called Illyrian theory, according to which all South Slavs were primordially autochthonous in the Balkans, descendants of the ancient Illyrians.

The Istorija raznih slovenskih narodov, najpače Bolgar, Horvatov i Serbov (“History of various Slavic peoples, especially of Bulgarians, Croats and Serbs”, 1794-95) by the Serbian Jovan Rajić contained a section on Bulgaria which was published in Bulgarian translation by Atanas Neskovič (editions in 1801, 1811). These histories were all heirs to an older Christian (biblical) tradition and representative of a South-Slav revival under Pan-Slavic inspiration. Although the historians themselves did not directly issue from a Romantic literary movement, they are known in Bulgarian historiography as “Romantic historicism” because of their popular (and national) pathos and subsequent nationalist influence.

A distinctly Romantic twist to Bulgarian historiography was given by the Ukrainian scholar Jurij Venelin (1802–1839) in his Drevnye i nyneshnye bogary (“Ancient and contemporary Bulgarians”) of 1829, which popularized the Bulgarian cause in the Russian Empire and converted some Bulgarian intellectuals into ardent patriots. Among the Bulgarian followers of his (false) theory of origins (equating proto-Bulgars with Slavs) were the amateur historians Vasil Aprilov (1789–1847) and Gavril Krustevič (1817–1898). The Bulgarian national revolutionary and writer Georgi Stojkov Rakovski (1821–1867) was another ardent Romantic historian, author of a patriotic theory of the Bulgarians’ Indo-European origins (to wit: from India), and of many historical myths. In general, the influence of Western Romanticism (German in particular) upon Bulgarian historiography was seldom direct, and mostly mediated by Czech and Russian historians, linguists and folklorists. Spiridon Palauzov (1818–1872) and especially Marin Drinov (1838–1906), both of them closely connected with Russia, are considered to be the first Bulgarian “academic” (professional) historians, but the influence of Romantic Nationalism persisted with them and beyond them.