The first Bulgarian chitalishtes were found in 1856 in the towns of Svishtov, Lom and Shumen. They, as well as the chitalishtes established later on (up until 1878 their number reached 131, located both in towns and in villages), had educational, modernization and nation building tasks, as well as some other complex functions. Even more, the first of them had notable resemblance to similar institutions in Europe – the German reading societies, the French signatory bookstores, the English community libraries, the Slavonic matitsas, the Serbian reading rooms, the Greek silogoses, etc. The Bulgarian chitalishte in Istanbul, which was established in 1866, was actually a methodological and coordination center for the other ones. Worth mentioning is also the autonomous community form of self-government of the Bulgarian chitalishtes and the existing of previous local experience in running municipalities, school boards, church boards or guild associations. The basic activities of the chitalishtes were the establishment of public libraries and reading rooms, as well as organizing collective reading practices, lectures, Sunday schools for adults and illiterate, and secular celebrations (balls, patron days, celebrations of nationally important figures and events, etc.). In the Bulgarian context very important was the practice of giving names to the chitalishtes. One could often find names including “People’s” or “Bulgarian”, while at the same time the most popular names in the nation building period were the ones of metaphorical and symbolic nature. They were all in the stylistics of wishful thinking for education, awakening, persistence, association, conscience, progress, development, renovation, etc. Within the chitalishte institution, especially in the first two decades of its development, the interest in folklore was under the strong influence of the romantic understanding of the nation and the widely spread idea that folklore is a symbolic resource for nation building. It is predominantly the musical and the dancing forms of folklore that were at that time deliberately “taken out” of their context and further presented as a cultural product in the environment of the chitalishte institution in different forms such as concerts, theatrical performances, balls, or evening gatherings. For national purposes the chitalishtes also took the tasks of gathering folklore artifacts in some cases such as for the so called Bulgarian national exhibition of 1873 in Istanbul or as requested in the special letter to the Bulgarian chitalishtes, written by Marin Drinov in 1869.