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 North 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.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 fourteen. 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 col