History
When I first saw the abandoned school in Milanovo in 2022, it was a cold December day. I won't go into details about how it looked then, what I thought and what it cost us to reconstruct it. But today, 5 years later, it will welcome people again.
This is a great reward for me — after 25 years of decay, to open the doors again of a beautiful building, built with voluntary labor and so much desire from the people of the village and for me to have a hand in this.
Education in Milanovo village — then Osikovo existed since 1858, still during the Ottoman rule. Initially, the only teacher taught the children in homes and in the cell school at the church.
In 1887, a building with two rooms was built specifically for the school. In 1908, girls were enrolled to study for the first time, and in the following years until 1945, the number of students grew so much that the desks were not enough and the children stood upright along the walls of the rooms. For 70 years from the Liberation of Bulgaria to 1950, 3 school buildings were built. The land for some of them was donated by village residents.
In 1945, after the end of the war, construction of today's school building began. It was built by youth and volunteer brigades, who participated in making bricks, extracting sand and gravel from the Preboynitsa and Iskar rivers, etc.
In the 1990s, the depopulation of villages became increasingly large and in 2002, the school built with so much desire and labor closed its doors due to lack of students.
I learned all this from the book of the school's last director, Mrs. Dinova. I tell it because it's impressive what value education was for Bulgarians then.
If you're curious to see what's hidden around Osika Park, here you can view some of the most beautiful landmarks in the area.
Landmarks