Very Good Bulgarian Original blue cloth bdg. with embossing. Slightly stains on boards and toned on pages. Otherwise a very good copy. 12mo. (16,5 x 12 cm). In Bulgarian. 1230, [2] p. [HOLY BOOK IN BULGARIAN PRINTED IN TSARIGRAD (CONSTANTINOPLE)] Bibliia sirech sveshtenoto pisanie na Vetkhiia i Noviia zavet: Viarno i tochno prevedena ot pûrvoobraznoto. [.] In 1840 5,000 copies of the first complete translation of the New Testament were printed in Smyrna by the British and Foreign Bible Society. A second edition which was printed in Smyrna in 1850 was an almost exact reprint of the 1840 edition. A third edition followed in 1853 with 15,000 copies. The fourth edition was published in 1857 in Bucharest, and for the first time civil characters type was used. In 1859, two more editions were published. In 1866, a new "pocket" edition with text revised by Elias Riggs and Dr. Albert Long was printed in Constantinople. The New Testament was revised and reprinted a total of nine times. In the period from 1840 to 1860 the Eastern (Tarnovo) dialect was adopted as literary Bulgarian language and the Macedonian dialect, in which the New Testament had been translated, was widely rejected. By 1858 Neofit Rilski had finished large portion of the Old Testament. Riggs met with Neofit Rilski and discussed a possible revision of the Bulgarian New Testament to remove the Macedonian dialect elements. Neofit objected the revision, so Riggs took the translation and returned to Constantinople. In January 1859 Riggs invited the Bulgarian teacher Hristodul Kostovich to help him with the revision. In 1862 Long and Riggs visited the noted Bulgarian writer and poet Petko Rachov Slaveykov in Tryavna. Slaveykov agreed to help with the translation and began the work on the revising of Neofit's New Testament at once. Long joined the revision of the New Testament into the Eastern dialect in 1863 and later assisted with the translation of the Old Testament. In June 1871, after more than 12 years of revision and translation, 36,000 copies of the complete Bible translation in Bulgarian were published in Constantinople. The translation came to be known as the "Tsarigrad (Constantinople) Edition". Tsarigrad [or; Tsargrad, Tzargrad, Czargrad] Tsargrad is a Slavic name for the city or land of Constantinople, the capital of the Eastern Roman (Byzantine) Empire, and present-day Istanbul in Turkey. A physical copy of this edition is not located in OCLC. For digital register: OCLC 181122059.
