On March 23, two communities — one town finding its name, another building its future through books — each added something lasting to Bulgaria’s history.
March 23, 1866 — Samundzhievo Becomes the Town of Orhanie
On March 23, 1866, the village of Samundzhievo was declared a town under the name Orhanie, in honour of Sultan Orhan. Gaining town status was not just administrative: it brought different rules for trade, courts, local institutions, and a changed sense of a community’s place in the world. The settlement later became Botevgrad in 1934, renamed for the poet and revolutionary Hristo Botev after Bulgaria’s national memory reshaped its place names.
The town’s story — from village to Ottoman administrative centre to modern Bulgarian city — compresses several layers of the country’s past into a single location. March 23 marks the moment Orhanie/Botevgrad formally entered the record as a town, beginning a journey through names that reflects how deeply history can settle into geography.
March 23, 1869 — Petko Slaveykov Founds the Prosveshtenie Charitable Brotherhood
On March 23, 1869, Petko Rachov Slaveykov and his associates founded the Bulgarian charitable brotherhood Prosveshtenie at the Bulgarian chitalishte in Constantinople. The organization supported schools by supplying libraries, textbooks, teaching materials, books, newspapers, and magazines — the full apparatus of an educated public. This was the logic of the National Revival: before there could be a free Bulgarian state, there had to be Bulgarian readers.
Slaveykov was one of the great public figures of the period — poet, journalist, teacher, and cultural organizer — and Prosveshtenie shows how seriously his generation took education as a form of national self-construction. March 23 belongs to the history of a society that built its future one classroom and one printed page at a time.
Follow Bulgaria’s story day by day: March 22 | March 24. Explore the country in our Bulgaria guides and Bulgaria From Above series.
