Marko Cepenkov

Marko Kostov Cepenkov (Bulgarian and Macedonian: Марко Костов Цепенков) (1829, Prilep, Ottoman Empire — 1920, Sofia, Kingdom of Bulgaria) was a Bulgarian folklorist from the region of Macedonia. In the Republic of Macedonia he is regarded a Macedonian writer and poet. In his own time, his language was described as Bulgarian, and Cepenkov regarded it this way himself. Now his dialect is still considered Bulgarian dialect in Bulgaria. Today, his dialect is classified as the Prilep-Bitola dialect of the Macedonian language.

He was a writer and collector of folk literary works. His family moved to Prilep from village of Oreovec. His father, Kosta, lived in Kruševo for a period of time, where Marko Cepenkov was born. Since his father was a traveler, Cepenkov earned the opportunity to travel. He lived in Ohrid and Struga and visited other places in the country by the time he was fifteen. Cepenkov was educated in small Greek schools. In 1844 he moved to Prilep, where he attended the private school of Hadji pop Konstantin Dimkov and father Aleksa, for two years. He also became a tailor and while working in the shop he met a lot of people who would tell him folk stories. Cepenkov was also a good narrator and knew a lot of folk stories. Since then he became a collector of folk stories and other folk works. In 1857 Cepenkov was a teacher in Prilep. After he met Dimitar Miladinov he started collecting more and more folk works: songs, stories, riddles, and others. In that time he knew more than 150 stories and wrote one to two stories per week, as he mentions in his Autobiography. Marko Tsepenkov contacted with other figures of the Bulgarian National Revival period who noted down folklore, such as Kuzman Shapkarev and Metodi Kusev. He was influenced by the works of Georgi Rakovski, Vasil Cholakov, Ivan Blaskov and Dimitar Matov.

He moved with his family to Sofia in 1888, where he was to live the rest of his life. Here he was encouraged by Prof. Ivan Shishmanov, who includes his recordings in several volumes of the “Collection of works of the popular spirit” (SBNU). In this collection, published until in 1900, Cepenkov publishes many tales and legends, songs, a great number of beliefs and curses, interpretations of dreams, magic formulas, habits and rites, proverbs, riddles and folklore for children. Between 1896 and 1911, he published about 10 of his poems and his play "Cane Voivoda," which confirmed his own creative and literary pledge. He also wrote about a dozen songs with patriotic themes, and his "Autobiography". Cepenkov was in close relations with his countryman, then Metropolitan of Stara Zagora, Metodi Kusev. The "Institute of Folklore" of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences works today with the complete edition in six volumes of these folk materials. His collected folk works were published in ten books in Skopje in 1972. A selection of his folktales have been published in English, such as 19th Century Macedonian Folktales by the Macquarie University in Sydney in 1991. In his honor, the Macedonian institute for folklore is named after him.