Kiril Mirchev


Kiril Spiridonov Mirchev was a Bulgarian linguist, and one of the biggest specialists in Old Bulgarian, History of the Bulgarian language and Bulgarian dialectology in the country.

Biography

Mirchev was born in a large Bulgarian family in the then Ottoman town of Bitola, today in North Macedonia. At the age of 11, he and his entire family were forced to move to Sofia by the Serbian Occupation Force following Bulgaria's defeat in the Second Balkan War. In 1927, Mirchev was awarded a master's degree in Slavic Philology by the University of Sofia. He also specialised at the Jagiellonian University in Poland.
He chaired the Department of Bulgarian History and the Department of Bulgarian Dialectology at the Bulgarian Language Institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences from 1951 and 1970, respectively, until he died in 1975.
Mirchev's magnum opus was his Historical Grammar of the Bulgarian Language published in 1958 and republished in 1963 and 1978.
The other major area of interest in his work was Bulgarian dialectology, with a special focus on the Bulgarian dialects in Macedonia.

Selected works