How a school changed a town

Before the new school, Gabrovo had cell-school teaching. In her survey of cell schools in the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries, Penka Tsoneva describes reading prayers and service books, writing and arithmetic. This is a general account of the earlier tradition, rather than a surviving Gabrovo curriculum from the 1820s. In this tradition, a teacher could be a clergyman or a literate craftsman.

Nikolay Hristoforov Palauzov was born in Gabrovo in 1821 and attended a local cell school. In 1830 he left for Odessa to join his uncle Nikolay Stefanov Palauzov, an associate of Vasil Aprilov.

Vasil Aprilov was born in Gabrovo in 1789. In 1809 or 1811 he settled in Odessa and set up a trading firm with his brother. In 1826 Aprilov withdrew his capital from the firm and deposited it in a bank. Historian Teodorichka Gotovska-Henze links his turn towards Bulgarian education from 1831 to the influence of Yuri Venelin's book "The Ancient and Present-Day Bulgarians".

Together with Nikolay Stefanov Palauzov, Aprilov helped establish the school in Gabrovo. Vasil Rasheev was also among the donors. According to BTA's calendar, the Bulgarian population took on the school's upkeep.

The school opened on 2 January 1835. That date is Old Style; in today's calendar it is 14 January. The first teacher was Neofit Rilski, a monk of the Rila Monastery born in Bansko. A year earlier he had gone to Bucharest to learn the mutual method, and he prepared charts and textbooks for the new school.

According to local historians, the first building was an old two-storey house next to the Holy Trinity church. It no longer stands. The school is remembered as the first New Bulgarian secular school: lessons were in Bulgarian, and not only from church books.

There was one teacher and many children. So the teacher trained the most advanced pupils, and they showed the rest. The method is associated with Andrew Bell and Joseph Lancaster, who developed different versions of it.

The reconstruction of a mutual school in Bansko shows roles such as monitors, called pokazvateli, and door-keepers. The monitors are pupils who help the others. The door-keepers check the pupils' appearance and the supplies they need. The display also shows the stages of writing: first in sand, then on a slate with a slate pencil, and finally with a pen on paper. The most advanced pupils write with pen and ink on paper. Above the teacher's desk in the reconstruction are white signs for praise and black signs for reprimand. For Gabrovo, Neofit Rilski published mutual-instruction charts in 1835.