Petar Draganov
Petar Draganov was a Russian philologist and slavist.Biography
Draganov was born in Komrat, Russian Empire in 1857. In ethnic sense he was a Bulgarian born in Bessarabia. Draganov studied history and philology at the University of Saint Petersburg. In the period from 1885 - 1887 he was working as a teacher in Thessaloniki after he was invited by the Bulgarian Exarchate.
He came in Thessaloniki with the claim that the Slavic speakers in Ottoman Macedonia are Bulgarians. However, after the huge research that he has done in Macedonia he came up with his own scientific opinion about them. In other words, Draganov claimed that Macedonia is a separate ethno-geographic unit of the Balkans and the Macedonian dialects form a separate language. In St. Petersburg, the prominent Slavist P.L. Lavrov criticized the Draganov concept. As a result of this claim and his personal beliefs, he was sent back to Russia, where he set the foundations of the Macedonistics.
