Ancestry

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Ancestry

Peter Dunov was a descendant of two outstanding families of the Bulgarian National Revival period. His mother Dobra was the daughter of Attanas Georgiev, founder of the first Bulgarian school in the region of Varna in 1847. His father, Konstantin Dunovski, consecrated the first Bulgarian church in Varna in 1865. Both his grandfather Attanas and his priest father will be remembered in Bulgarian history as champions of religious freedom and education. Atanas Georgiev had received the best education of his time, in Bulgarian, Greek, and Turkish. His reputation as a learned man led to his election as "muhtar" or mayor of his village. In 1847 he fulfilled his patriotic idea of opening a Bulgarian school in order to avert the assimilative ambitions of the Greek Patriarchate. Later on, Atanas Georgiev was sent by the people of Varna to Istanbul to claim Bulgarians' right to religious freedom. After four years of futile claims to the Sublime Porte, on July 20, 1865, he fell victim to a cholera epidemic.

Konstantin Dunovski was the first Bulgarian teacher in the Varna region. He was also the first Bulgarian priest in Varna. His long life was rich in memorable events. Born on August 20, 1830, in the village of Ustovo in the Rhodopes, he began his education with a monk from Mount Athos at the local monastery school. It was under the influence of Nikifor Konstantinov Mudron of Pazardjik that he chose the teacher's vocation. In 1847, he visited his uncle in Varna. There he met Atanas Georgiev who, impressed by the young man's spiritual excellence and erudition, invited him to teach at the first Bulgarian school in the village of Hadarcha (now Nikolaevka).

An antimensium:a sacred image of the burial of Jesus.Lithograph, Thessaloniki, 1747.

Deeply religious, Konstantin Dunovski was equally devoted to his thirst for knowledge and his Christian faith. Because of a vow is once taken by his mother that he would be ordained, in the spring of 1854 he set off on a journey to Mount Athos. In Thessaloniki, in the St. Dimitri church, he met an [G8] old priest. A day before Easter, the old priest gave him a precious sacred relic and suggested that he go back to Bulgaria to serve his people.

The relic was the last preserved antimensium; for a hundred years, Bulgarian priests had been praying over it for independence and Christian unity. Konstantin Dunovski took the event as an opportunity for spiritual advancement, no less valuable in the eyes of God than monasticism in Mount Athos. After that meeting, he returned to Varna and in 1856 married Atanas Georgiev's daughter Dobra. They had three children: Maria, Attanas, and Peter. Unfortunately, Dobra's life was all too short: she passed away at the age of thirty. 

On June 2, 1857, over the antimensium from Thessaloniki, Konstantin Deunovski was ordained as parish priest of Nikolaevka. In his life, he did many patriotic deeds. He was equally devoted to his work as a priest and as trustee of the school. On April 12, 1861, he consecrated a chapel next to the Russian Embassy, a gift by the Russian Consul Alexander Rachinsky to Bulgarians. Soon afterward, at the initiative of the Rev. Dunovski, the first floor of the Bulgarian school in Varna was transformed into a church. It was consecrated on February 14, 1865, as St. Archangel Michael. Konstantin Dunovski spent the rest of his life in the church building. His small room was very much like a monastic cell, an abode worthy of a man who did not belong in this world. He departed on November 13, 1918, and was buried in the churchyard.

 

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