Stjepan Verković

Stefan or Stjepan Ilija Verković was a 19th-century Bosnian ethnographer and folklorist. Born to Bosnian Croat parents, he identified as South Slav and initially he supported the Serbian and later the Bulgarian national cause.

Biography

Verković was born in the village of Ugljara near Orašje in the region of Bosanska Posavina, Ottoman Empire, on 4 March 1821. He passed his education in the Franciscan school of Tolisa, and then studied philosophy and theology at the Zagreb University, where he was influenced by the ideas of the pan-South-Slavic Illyrian movement. He left the Franciscan order in 1842 and theological studies in 1843.
Verković came into contact with Interior Minister Ilija Garašanin through Toma Kovačević, and became Garašanin's agent in 1843, it seems. In the period of 1843–1850 he travelled to Montenegro, bringing confidential post to Petar II, and collected information in northern Albania, Kosovo, Macedonia and Bulgaria. Since 1851, he was only in Belgrade temporarily, mostly travelling in Macedonia and Bulgaria where he collected manuscripts, coins and folk songs. He lived in Belgrade in 1854–55 during the Crimean War, and converted to Orthodox Christianity. He moved to the Ottoman Empire and settled in Serres in 1857, and was given the task of countering the Hellenization of Macedonian Slavs. His pseudonym was "Petar Vlašić" in correspondence. In 1860 and 1862 he lived in Belgrade where he published Folk Songs of the Macedonian Bulgarians. He became a member of Society of Serbian Letters in 1863.
With the increased conflict between Serbian and Bulgarian propaganda in Macedonia, he favoured the latter, which went unnoticed, but still received payment from the Serbian government until 1876. In 1862, Verković says he was sent by Garašanin to work on Macedonian Slavs to consider themselves Slav, rather than Greeks, and thus helping to resolve the Eastern Question. The manager of the agent network at this time was Atanasije Nikolić. He received irregular payments between 1872 and 1876. In February 1877 he moved to Russia, where he lived in poverty. Bulgaria offered him a life pension and he moved to Sofia in early 1891.

Work

During the years he lived in Ottoman Empire, Verković proved to be a scientist in the field of folklore, ethnography and geography. He regularly supplied also coins from the area to Copenhagen, Paris, London and the Hermitage. He еstablished intensive contacts with dozens of Bulgarian national movement activists, becoming their associate. Verković noted in the foreword of Folk Songs that the title was chosen because the locals identified themselves as Bulgarian. After 1868 he became increasingly Bulgarophile, disassociating from his given political mission. In addition, owing to his collector's zeal, Verkovich saved a great number of old manuscripts, coins, and objects of art, among others. His main and largest work is the mysticist Veda Slovena in two volumes, 1874 and 1881, which claimed to have contained "Bulgarian folk songs of the pre-historical and pre-Christian times, discovered in Thrace and Macedonia". He despaired at the increasing distrust on his life's work, Veda Slovena, which many took to be a hoax. With the cooperation of government, he settled in Plovdiv from where he undertook in 1892–1893, two trips among the Pomaks in the Western Rhodopes, trying to prove the authenticity of his Bulgarian folk songs collection, but the mission failed. He prepared a subsequent manuscript to publish also the third volume of Veda Slovena. However, without financial support he died in Sofia several months later.