Professor Yosif Fadenhecht (1873-1953) and the Bulgarian-Polish intellectual exchanges during the interwar period

It is little known that thanks to the efforts of the leading Bulgarian scholar Yosif Fadenhecht (1873-1953), whose legacy has now, sadly, been largely buried, the 1933 Polish Code of Obligations, one of the greatest Polish legal achievements, was made available to the Bulgarian audience from early on. Fadenhecht’s fervent interest in Polish law developed following the First Congress of Slavic Jurists in 1933 at which one of the main topics of discussion was the possibility of unification of the laws of Bulgaria, Czechoslovakia, Poland, and Yugoslavia based on the Polish Code of Obligations of 1933. Fadenhecht spent the next eight years studying and writing about this code. One may argue that his research marked the beginning of a long-term curiosity about Polish law in Bulgaria. This chapter highlights the important contributions of Professor Yosif Fadenhecht to Bulgarian-Polish intellectual exchanges during the Interwar period by situating them in context and by tracing their impact on legal development in Bulgaria.