Konstantin Georgiev Fotinov (Samokov 1785 – Istanbul 1858) studied in Samokov and in the Greek schools in Plovdiv and İzmir (Smyrna), where he established himself in 1825, working as tradesman, teacher, journalist, translator and interpreter at the French consulate. Fotinov published the first Bulgarian journal, Ljuboslovie (“Philology”, 1842, 1844-1846), and textbooks on geography, Greek grammar and ethics. He also produced the first Bulgarian translation of the Old Testament, sponsored by the British Foreign Bible Society, which, however, declined to use it.

Fotinov’s works display a mixture of elements from Enlightenment Patriotism and Romanticism. One the one hand, he adhered to Enlightenment ideas about the cognitive, ethical and political “usefulness of history” and about the role of history as “the teacher of the nations”; he also pursued public improvements in the sphere of education by founding a Greek-Bulgarian school in İzmir (Smyrna) along the lines of the Bell-Lancaster method. The school’s programme included Bulgarian, Greek and French and attracted some 200 pupils. On the other hand, he was deeply influenced by Greek historiography and by the Ukrainian-born Romantic antiquary Jurij Venelin, who in turn was influenced by the ideas of Herder.

Fotinov was among those representatives of the Bulgarian secular intelligentsia who actively worked for the creation of a Bulgarian “imagined community”. He contributed to the construction of a national historical narrative aimed at legitimizing the community in its own eyes and in the eyes of others. He perceived history as a basic component of a Bulgarian national consciousness and of the Bulgarians’ Patriotic education through the recollection of their past. He is a proponent of the idea of a national destiny, character and uniqueness. In his view (derived from Venelin), the history of the Slavs, including the Bulgarians, went back 5000 years: Slavs allegedly populated Europe as early as 3000 BC and manifested their presence in all key moments in European history. Linguistic, ethnographic and geographic arguments were marshalled to date the origins of the Slavs back to biblical times; Fotinov also used folklore sources to claim that Achilles and the Amazons had been Slavs. Although he considered the Middle Ages a period of despotism and religious fanaticism, he described with unconcealed pride the Bulgarian Middle Ages, when the Bulgarian state reached its greatest territorial expansion.