Dynastic History | National Archaeological Museum, Sofia — The Officer Who Resigned at Eighty

The slab is limestone, 1.02 metres by 0.55, ten centimetres thick, with twelve lines cut into it in Old Bulgarian. S. Stanchev, who published as Vaklinov, and V. Ivanova-Mavrodinova found it in 1952 in the eastern part of the Selishte quarter at Veliki Preslav, beside the northern foundations of a monastery church.

The text is short enough to give whole. Here lies Mostich, who was chargobilya in the time of Simeon and of Peter; at eighty years old, having left the chargobilstvo and all his property, he became a monk, and so ended his life.

Two things in it reach past the man. The office is the old one. Chargobilya, ichirgu-boila, stood near the top of the administration the rulers had built before the state converted, and here it is being written down in Slavonic inside a Christian epitaph, a generation or two after the conversion. And the word used of Simeon and of Peter is among the earliest surviving uses in Bulgaria of the ruler's title later read as tsar, set on a private gravestone rather than a public monument, and set as though it required no argument.

The stone is dated to the middle or later tenth century, within a few decades of the capital's end as a capital. It is now some 290 kilometres from the city it was cut in, in the National Archaeological Museum in Sofia, the museum of the archaeological institute of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, where it stands upright in a hall among the medieval material.

📸 Cover: The tombstone of the ichirgu-boila Mostich in the museum, Севаръ (Sevar), CC BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons