Petar Draganov

Pyotr Danilovich Draganov (; ; ; – February 7, 1928) was a Russian philologist, teacher, historian, ethnographer and slavist of Bessarabian Bulgarian origin. He established Macedonian studies in Russia.

Biography Draganov was born in Comrat, Russian Empire (now part of Gagauzia, Moldova), in . He was of Bessarabian Bulgarian origin. Regarding his origin, Draganov wrote: "...by language and by tribe, on both my father's and mother's sides, as our family tree testifies, I belong to the purest Bulgarians from the depths of the Balkans". His daughter Angelina, in her biography of him in 1929, made at the request of the directorate of the Comrat Secondary School for Boys, wrote that Draganov "was Bulgarian by origin, Russian by upbringing and education".

He graduated from the Bulgarian Central School in Comrat in 1875. Then he studied at the Chișinău progymnasium, the provincial gymnasium from 1875 to 1877 and the Kharkiv gymnasium from 1877 to 1880. After graduating from the gymnasium, as he was fascinated by history and geography, he entered the Faculty of History and Philology of the Imperial Kharkov University, studying there from 1880 to 1882. In the same period, on the recommendation of his professor Vladimir Lamansky, Draganov researched Macedonia. With the help of his students from various cities in Ottoman Macedonia, such as Skopje, Bitola, Voden, Kukush, etc., he collected folklore, linguistic and ethnographic material,

Draganov argued that the Macedonian Slavs are a distinct Slavic ethnic group, have a distinct culture and the Macedonian dialects form a separate language. Per Bulgarian academic Grigor Grigorov, his theses were not unanimously accepted in Saint Petersburg and Bulgaria, and his articles on the Macedonian issue sparked polemics in Russian academic circles, with Draganov being accused of having inadequate knowledge of the Macedonian vernacular. According to academics Tchavdar Marinov and Alexis Heraclides, the Russian Empire was trying to find a balance between Bulgarian and Serbian influence in Ottoman Macedonia then, and thus it accepted the idea that the Macedonian Slavs were neither Serbs nor Bulgarians.

After World War II, his daughter Angelina moved to Hunedoara, Romania, and his son Vladimir lived his life in Saint Petersburg. Since 1994, the Central Library of Gagauzia has been named after him.