Petar Draganov
Petar Draganov (Russian: Петар Драганов, – February 7, 1928) was a Russian philologist and slavist. Biography. Draganov was born in Komrat, Russian Empire in 1857. He was a Bessarabian Bulgarian. Draganov studied history and philology at the University of Saint Petersburg. From 1885 to 1887 he was working as a teacher in Thessaloniki after he was invited by the Bulgarian Exarchate. He came in Thessaloniki with the claim that the Slavic speakers in Ottoman Macedonia are Bulgarians. However, after the huge research that he has done in Macedonia he came up with his own scientific opinion about them. In  other words, Draganov claimed that Macedonia is a separate ethno-geographic unit of the Balkans and the Macedonian dialects form a separate language. In St. Petersburg, the prominent Slavist P.L. Lavrov criticized the Draganov concept. As a result of this claim and his personal beliefs, he was sent back to Russia, where he set the foundations of Macedonian studies.