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Written by Явор Георгиев
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Thursday, 14 June 2007 |
Mihalaki Georgiev was a famous Bulgarian writer and public figure.
 He was born on 11th August 1852 in Vidin. Mihalaki was the second child in the family of Georgi Lozanov - a merchant from Vidin and his wife Elena Ikonomova. His mother died when he was only one year old, and when he was 13, his father died, too. So he was brought up by his elder sister.
In the autumn of 1868 Mihalaki Georgiev joined his sister's family, who went to Jerusalem. So he became a Hadji (pilgrim), but he never added this title to his name.
Thanks to the money, left by his father, he could go and study in Tabor, Czechia. There he finished his secondary education in the High school and then he continued his further education in the Academy of Agriculture and Industry - education, which was really very impressive at that time. He could speak and write in Bulgarian, Russian, Czech, German, Serbian, French and Polish.
On the eve of the Liberation Mihalaki Georgiev sent valuable information - the plan of the fortress in Vidin and other economic and military information- to the Russian headquarters by pigeon mail .
When he came back to Vidin, he became a teacher in the school in Vidin, and on 1st May 1878 he was appointed chief manager of the customs in Vidin by the Russian governor Tuholka.
On 12th April 1879 he married Magdalina Mihaylova Tsarichinska. A year later he became a member of the Physical and Medical Society in Sofia.
In 1882 he published the first "Coursebook in Botany", which was printed in Belgrade. According to the eminent Bulgarian botanist Bаhtarov " Mihalaki Georgiev should be considered the founder of the Bulgarian botanical science for this work." Thanks to his achievements in Bulgarian literature and his contribution to our national heritage, in 1884 Mihalaki Georgiev was admitted a regular member of the Bulgarian Literary Society (called Bulgarian Academy of Sciences today). In the same year he was appointed Head of the Department of Agriculture and Trade in the Ministry of Finances. He was engaged with the preparation of agricultural legislature and the dissemination of the modern ways of cultivating the soil.
 Together with Todor Vlaykov and Anton Stramishirov Mihalaki Georgiev became the founder of the prose with plots taken from the rural life. His talent was fully expressed in his wonderful short stories, in which he used the colloquial Vidin dialect. Therefore he is called "the most typical writer from Vidin".
In 1892 he was appointed Head of the First Bulgarian Agricultural and Industrial Exhibition (Fair) in Plovdiv. He worked a lot for the construction and organization of the fair. He also organized the first Bulgarian state lottery and all 300 000 tickets had his signature on them.
On 9th August 1894 he was appointed Secretary of the Bulgarian Principality in the Diplomatic Agency in Vienna, Austria.
In the period 1906-1907 he financed and published the independent newspaper "The Balkan Tribune". The authorities made all their efforts to prevent him from publishing the paper. They not only ruined its publishers, but also persecuted them. In 1907 the writer was arrested and imprisoned in the Black Mosque, where he had to stay for 2 whole months. After he was discharged, he had to stop publishing the paper because he was short of money.
It is worth knowing that our fellow-citizen wrote the libretto to the opera "Tahir Бegovitsa", based on his short story of the same title. In 1911 it was performed in Sofia. Twenty years later, in 1931 the musical community performed the same opera on the stage of "Vida" theatre in Vidin.
In 1911 he suffered his first heart attack. A year later, being the Chairman of the Bulgarian Literary Society, he was invited to take part in the Eleventh Slavonic Congress of Journalists in Prague. Disappointed by the life and social order in Bulgaria after the Liberation and depressed by the permanent money shortage Mihalaki Georgiev got very ill and was bed-ridden.
On 14th February 1916, in the heat of the First World War, he died in Sofia.
Today the Town Library in Vidin and a street in the town are named after this eminent citizen of Vidin.
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