Village Horo from the Samokov Region

By 1892 a scene like this one carried real weight. Bulgaria was only 14 years free of Ottoman rule, and a whole generation of painters, photographers and folklorists was hurrying to record village life before it changed. Obrazopisov gives us a horo, the linked-hands round dance of the Balkans, danced by a village in the hills near Samokov, south of Sofia. For most of his life he had painted the insides of churches, and he brings that steady hand to a worldly subject, setting rows of figures in local costume across an open meadow. He worked on canvas here, at 64, in a country that within his own lifetime had gone from Ottoman province to independent state and was learning to picture its own villages.