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The Sunrise (Izgreva)


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VII

 

THE SUNRISE
(IZGREVA)

 

WHAT IS SUNRISE?

 

ABOVE ALL ELSE, SUNRISE IS LIFE, IT IS NOT ONLY A THING.

 

SUNRISE CAN ALSO BE THE STATE OF THE SOULS WHO ARE WAITING FOR GOD.

 

THE MASTER SAYS:

 

SUNRISE IS A LIVING FOCUS TOWARDS WHICH THE THOUGHT OF GREAT, RATIONAL BEINGS IS DIRECTED.

 

When the sister member who was most frequently to be seen with the Master was asked whether
she had ever been abroad, whether she had ever crossed the frontiers of Bulgaria, her surprised answer was: “I’ve never lived in Bulgaria! I’ve always lived at The Sunrise!”

 

lzgreva! The Sunrise! As if it were part of another world, a radiant place filled with sunshine. A place that did not exist in Bulgaria, nor, indeed, in any other part of the world.

 

Life at “The Sunrise”, the settlement founded by the brothers and sisters, with its lecture hall, refectory, garden and vineyard — in which there is but one vine now — and its little coppice of pine trees; like a remnant of the Garden of Gethsemane.....

 

“The Sunrise (lzgreva)” is no more. It has gone away, perhaps to the sun itself.

 

They lived at “The Sunrise” with the Master. His footsteps illuminated that extraordinary place. He said it was a peak that rose ever higher... This was probably due to the vibrations that swelled it, as the moon swells the seas and oceans.

 

He lived in a modest whitewashed room with a bookcase, table and wooden bed. The door opened onto a semicircular balcony. Next to the balcony there was a small ante-room and a staircase leading upwards to a little, sun-filled observatory. From this room he would gaze through his telescope at the other worlds in the sky, worlds that inhabited his world. The sound of a violin came from his room — a rare and valuable Stradivarius which he jokingly referred to as “my fiancee”. With this violin he would turn the tragic and terrible life of his people into music. He changed the human condition, transformed worldly human suffering.

 

A Visitor to this earth.

 

It is no exaggeration to call him a great Visitor to this earth, because a universal Master comes down to earth once in two thousand years...

 

A particular atmosphere reigns in the village of Nikolaevka, near Varna, at the Black Sea. The village lies on a plateau beneath the skies. It is surely a wonder that such virile springs flow from this dry earth that they melt the soil with their fertility.

 

In the village there is a church that has been turned into a museum. Half of the building was intended as a school and half for worship. This was where the priest Konstantin Dunov taught children and adults to read and write the Bulgarian language. He also held his church services in Bulgarian, which needed a lot of courage at that time, because church services were held in Greek, which was a foreign language as far as the Bulgarians were concerned. A great struggle began in which the father of the Master took part. He was also a great composer of hymns, and of a Song of Praise to the Virgin Mary — all of which are known in the Orthodox church and which bear his name to this day.

 

In the yard of the church and school at Nikolaevka there is a marble gravestone bearing the name of Chorbadji Atanas, a loyal Bulgarian who gave his life in the cause of a free Bulgarian church.

 

It was he who sold his entire property and set out for Istanbul to recruit a Bulgarian who would be both priest and teacher in the village. One who would help to win back the freedom of the Bulgarian language -a language that had been used officially in the ninth century by the brothers Cyril and Methodius and their disciples at the church of Santa Maria Maggiore in Rome... The language in which the brothers had preached the gospel was to become the classical language of all the Slavic peoples. That was what the Bulgarians were campaigning for, and fierce was the struggle against the Greek clergy during the National Revival Period.

 

Patriots like Chorbadji Atanas gave all they had, including their lives, in the Bulgarian cause. He filled his saddlebags with gold, mounted his horse and set out through the mountain passes of the Balkans for Istanbul, where there was quite a large Bulgarian minority in the city’s Bulgarian quarter ... There were Bulgarian shops owned by patriotic men and there were educators such as Petko Slaveikov, who laid the foundations of the New Bulgarian Poetry and campaigned for freedom of speech for Bulgarians in their own language.

 

The patriotic Chorbadji from Nikolaevka and the young man from Ustovo in the Rhodopes, whence came the purest-blooded Bulgarians, met in Istanbul.

 

And what happened to the young man from the Rhodopes? He was an orphan and worked for his uncles, who were coppersmiths, members of an old and honourable profession. He finally went to study at the seminary at Tatar Pazardjik. Upon graduation he became the first Bulgarian teacher in his father’s village, Ustovo. The house is still standing. The people of Ustovo evicted the Greek priest and went to the Sublime Porte to obtain justice from the Sultan, to ask for permission to build a Bulgarian church, and they won!

 

Young Konstantin had thought of taking monastic vows on going to the Bulgarian monasteries on Mt Athos — the refuge of nationally-conscious monks and a stronghold of the Bulgarian monastic tradition. Monasteries that had been endowed with privileges by enlightened Bulgarian tsars in the early middle ages... There Bulgarian gospels were illuminated in crimson and gold and adorned with exquisite miniatures.

 

The memory of Bulgarian was preserved there. Some of these gospels, guch as the 13th century gospel of Tsar Ivan Alexander, w^ich are famous for their beauty and art, can be seen in the British Museum in London.

 

When Konstantin Dunov was on his way to Istanbul a miracle took place in the Church of St Demetrius in Salonika. Out of the gloom came an elderly monk who asked the young man where he was going. Konstantin told him of his desire to go to the Bulgarian monasteries on Mt Athos, to serve God and his people.

 

“No,” said the monk. “Go back. Your road is a different one. You will marry and have a son who will bring much benefit to our people.”

 

To convince him that this was reality and not a dream the monk gave him a prayer-book of the kind that is used in Orthodox services. The young man took the prayer-book and the elderly monk vanished. Who could he have been?

 

Meanwhile, in Istanbul, Chorbadji Atanas had met the young man from Ustovo and had realised his spiritual strength. Chorbadji Atanas persuaded Konstantin to return with him to Bulgaria, to the village of Haturdja, which later became Nikolaevka, to become its Bulgarian priest and teacher. And so it came to pass. Konstantin married the daughter of a patriotic Bulgarian... Her name was Dobra, which means “kind” or “Good”. Dobra was the mother of the Master. He was born of Goodness.

 

Chorbadji Atanas continued to go to Istanbul to seek justice for the Bulgarians. He was buried in Istanbul. Afterwards, the marble gravestone embellished with flowers and other motifs was brought back to Bulgaria and placed in the courtyard of the school in his memory. On the other hand, the grave of the priest Konstantin Dunov is in the courtyard of the Museum of the National Revival Period in Varna, the pearl of the Black Sea coast. On his white gravestone there is an open book embossed in gold... Here, in the church and school where he held services and lessons in Bulgarian for the rest of his life, was the first centre of Bulgarian education and learning in those years of foreign domination. Letters flew between Varna and Istanbul, from the bishop to the Patriarch. With anger and shock he informed the Patriarch that the Bulgarian priest

 

Konstantin had dared post Bulgarian youths at one of the city gates to invite passers-by to worship at the Bulgarian church. He had even dared do something more scandalous. He had ordained young Bulgarians as priests, trained them and sent them to different parts of the country.

 

It was in the parsonage belonging to the church which is now the Museum of the National Revival Period in Varna that the father lived alone -because he had been widowed early. He would rest beneath the old mulberry tree, and when his son Petur came, they would sing some of the finest hymns together.

 

Konstantin Dunov, the priest, knew of his son’s mission.

 

When Petur was grown up, his father asked him once: “Where is the prayer-book that I gave you in the church at that time?” This in itself was wonderful, but not strange. “Was it you?” he asked his father.

 

The old priest played an active part in the best years of the new Bulgarian state, together with the Shkorpilov brothers, who founded the Varna Archaeological Society. The Shkorpilov brothers, for their part, laid the foundations of Bulgarian archaeology. They were, in fact, Czechs, nephews of the first person to write the history of Bulgaria, Konstantin Iricek — a man who spent his life among the Bulgarian people. The Czechs, who are Slavs, gave great support to the cultural life of Bulgaria. They were also the first professors to teach in the Fine Arts Academy, musicians and teachers of music. Thus, imbued with the radiant spirit of the new Bulgarian state, the old priest worked in this region until the end of his life.

 

Books of remembrance in which gratitude and respect were expressed were issued after his death. There is a great deal of literature about the life and work of Konstantin Dunov, and a rich bibliography, too.

 

The old priest had the good fortune to visit “The Sunrise (lzgreva)”. He would sit in the green shade of the hazelnut trees. He was modest, with a face of beauty and inspiration.

 

It was to this place, where grass grew knee-high in the glades, that people started to come to greet the sunrise. Our Master would lead them and speak to them as they trod the dewy grass. “If you say so, this place shall be ours!”

 

“The Sunrise”, the place on a hill that becomes higher with every passing year, became a centre of the Brotherhood...

 

And here the finest speeches were made in Bulgarian.

 

His father had campaigned for the use of Bulgarian in churches and Petur had created, though not with his hands, a Temple of Truth!

 

Back in the 9th century the brothers Cyril and Methodius, creators of the Bulgarian alphabet and Slav literacy, translators of the holy scriptures, sacrificed themselves for the recognition of the Old Bulgarian Language in which they wrote and spoke, for its recognition as the equal of Greek and Latin.

 

In his missive to the Bulgarians and Slavs written in the ornate language of earlier days, the Master says: “O, Slavic people, I have called forth the Two Brothers from the depths of eternity to help you.”

 

Is this why there is no other people on earth that has a public holiday in honour of education — the day of Cyril and Methodius? The Teachers of the National Revival Period began to celebrate the memory of the Two Brothers. Children sang songs about them...

 

There is no other people on earth that has an anthem dedicated to education and science. This is sung on 24 May by the entire Bulgarian nation. The anthem was created by the poet Stoyan Mihailovski, who was pupil of the Master.

 

 

THE LAND OF MIRACLES

 

His Revelation was not one of religion or frontiers but of a World that encompassed the entire universe. Man’s abode was the Universe. That was why Sister T. was surprised when asked whether she had ever been out of Bulgaria.

 

“I’ve never lived in Bulgaria. I’ve always lived at the Sunrise!”

 

“The Sunrise” became the land of miracles. People from all walks of life, simple and educated, intellectuals, teachers, workers, peasants in their beautiful national costumes came to lzgreva and became followers of our Master. They all spoke the same language and lived in brotherly understanding, for theirs was the most open, the most democratic of spiritual communities. It was not a community in the strict sense, but a teaching of love in which the soul dissolves as it would in its own spiritual homeland. This is an incarnate light.

 

At their headquarters, which the Master and his followers naturally named “The Sunrise”, there were orchards where the trees were heavy with fruit and wild strawberries grew, as did the children of the community. The children would compare their height with that of the growing trees. Here people lived in brotherly love, which is the message of the Master’s songs.

 

First of all tents, and then little wooden houses, or rather huts, were erected. People from Sofia and other parts of the country settled here and pronounced the name with love — “The Sunrise”, “at The Sunrise”.

 

lzgreva was modest in appearance. Rambling roses covered the walls of the little houses with their irregular walls and ceilings built according to our Teacher’s instructions. There was no piped water. Water had to be carried from a spring discovered by the Master in a little hollow below the edge of the forest. There were no paths at first and it was muddy. Then a proper path was laid. And people would come from far and wide, through the dark forest, to hear his morning Talks — which were given at lzgreva. There is an unusual salon with huge windows facing eastwards. There are rows of benches in the hall and the sun’s rays warm the backs of the disciples sitting there dressed in white...

 

Chairs have been arranged in the salon. Facing eastwards there is a small platform with steps leading up to it. The Master ascends the steps and sits down at the simplest table of them all with its white tablecloth. It was from this table that his sermons were preached. So simple and natural that when one of the Brothers asked the person sitting next to him when the Talks would start, he was told: “It has already started.”

 

This Talk was so simple that it bore no resemblance whatsoever to a pompous speech or conventional sermon. The voice of the Master, quiet and musical, reached the back of the hall quite clearly. There was something in it new and unusual, devoid of effects and rhetoric. He has already started! He has been talking to us for half a century now!

 

What was so unusual about lzgreva? The fraternal life, the hall in the glade surrounded by pines and the circular track worn in the grass where Paneurhythmia was danced. He would dance in the centre, alone, and his white hair gleamed in the sunlight... Here he sang not one, but many of his songs. A blue lamp would burn in his little room above the salon. . .

 

 

 

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