Bulgaria’s Homer perplexed Europe in the nineteenth century with the biggest literary mystification in the peninsula’s history. In hastily put-together verses, he described events from 4,000 years ago, while scientists in London, Paris and Moscow, tried to decipher The Epic of Gilgamesh

It all began with the confusing, in a typical Balkan way, personal story of Stefan Verković. Ethnically, he was a Serbianised Croatian from Bosnia, sent in the middle of the nineteenth century to defend the Serbian cause among Macedonians, but ended up betraying it in favour of the Bulgarians instead. He was a Franciscan, who converted to Eastern Orthodoxy, but dedicated his life to Slavic paganism.

As a kind of a natural progression of his own life, Verković stirred up one of the biggest literary scandals in the history of the Slavic world; its rumble still echoing today. In 1874 in Belgrade and in 1881 in Saint Petersburg, he published two solid volumes titled Veda Slovena: Bulgarian Folk Songs of the Prehistoric and the Pre-Christian Age.

Their 23,809 lines of verse, said to be folklore gathered throughout the Rhodopi Mounatins, created a furore in European intellectual circles, as they seemed to reveal that Slavs had preserved an epos dating to the time of the Hindo-European civilization (fourth to the second century BC), which referred to Orpheus and the Trojan War, let alone more recent occurrences, such as Philip II of Macedon and Alexander the Great.

One can only imagine the effect this news had in Paris, London or Moscow, where academics were still struggling to decipher the then recently discovered Epic of Gilgamesh, which – dating back to the 2000BC, was considered as the world’s oldest literary work.

“A collective outcry of admiration, of surprise, and disbelief broke the hitherto quiet and noiseless philologists’ atmosphere,” Bulgarian writer Ivan Vazov wrote. “A part of the Slavic press, loudly and with warm words, congratulated the great discovery; Geitler and the German Han applauded it; in the Paris department of Slavonic languages the scholar professor Hodzko announced that a nation which had created such songs is a most poetic nation; that Veda Slovena heralded a revolution in the science of the history of the East, ushering in a new era.”

Stefan Verković was the “impresario” of Veda Slovena but behind the “recording,” or more likely – the write-up of the Slavic version of The Epic of Gilgamesh stood a Bulgarian – Ivan Gologanov. As a brother of Skopje’s metropolitan and the abbot of the Bachkovo Monastery, he was a well-educated man who possessed in-depth knowledge of ancient and modern Greek, classical mythology and was an expert on Homer.

Before meeting Stefan Verković, he led a humble life as a village teacher in Turlis, located near the present-day Greek town of Siderokastron in the southern Rhodopi Mounatins. However, he gladly gave up his teaching career in exchange for the 300 silver Groschen a month, offered by the Serbian, and over the next two years, he “collected” verses. As he himself explained – he went around fares and took down the oral tradition of the local Pomaks – the Islam-practicing Slavs.

Regardless of Gologanov’s working methods, he must have written like a maniac – in the words of his publisher Verković the published verses constituted only a tenth of the total collected by his assistant. If the Bulgarian created 240,000 lines over ten years, that means he must have written at least three pages of poetry every day – a fact that left even Ivan Vazov – one of Bulgaria’s greatest poets and writers, enraptured, as he called Gologanov a “monstrously prolific Homer.”

After the bombshell of the two volumes’ publication, European literary men split up into two camps: while one, impressed, pondered the message of the incredible discovery, the other called it a mystification. Many of Bulgaria’s literati immediately rejected the notion that Veda Slovena contained authentic folklore.

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