📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Sunday 1 November
Few Bulgarian names carry as much weight as General Nikola Zhekov: the commander of the army that fought British troops on the Salonika front, and later a nationalist whose antisemitic writing Bulgarian Wikipedia records plainly. He died in exile in Bavaria on 1 November 1949, and I will admit this is a harder anniversary to write than most.
What happened on this day
Zhekov was born in Sliven in 1865. As a young man he joined the 1886 coup against Prince Alexander of Battenberg, was demoted and then amnestied, and in 1887, newly an officer, he was posted to Shumen with the 2nd Artillery Regiment. He trained at the military academy in Turin, became head of the Sofia military school in 1912 and was the Second Army's chief of staff at Edirne in the First Balkan War. In 1915 he became Minister of War and, from 24 September, commander-in-chief, a post he kept to the end of the First World War. Bulgarian Wikipedia says he worked to bring Bulgaria into the war alongside the Central Powers.
He fell ill and left for treatment in Vienna on 8 September 1918, leaving his deputy, Georgi Todorov, in command while the Allied offensive broke the Bulgarian line at Dobro Pole and brought the Armistice of Salonica. I had always read that September from the Allied side, and it reads differently from this one. After exile in Germany and Austria he returned in 1921, was sentenced to ten years in prison and left jail in 1924 after an amnesty. He became a lecturer at the Military Academy, a general of infantry in 1936 and honorary chairman of the nationalist Union of Bulgarian National Legions. Bulgarian Wikipedia says he wrote antisemitic and anti-Marxist articles and was active on the German side in the Second World War, including a 1940 invitation from Hitler. He left for Germany in September 1944, and on 1 February 1945 the People's Court sentenced him to death in absentia, although the authorities did not know where he was. He died in Füssen, and in 1992 his remains were reburied in Sofia, in the Military Mausoleum.
Towns celebrating today
Kotel, in Sliven Province, has kept 1 November as its town day since 1993, and Bulgarian Wikipedia lists Petar Beron and Georgi Rakovski among its natives. Teteven, in Lovech Province, marks the day for a separate reason: it commemorates the town's liberation from Ottoman rule in 1877.
Why this matters for British expats
British soldiers were on the other side of Zhekov's war. On the Macedonian front an Allied army drawn from several nations faced the Bulgarian one, and at Doiran the British failed to take the Bulgarian positions twice in 1917 and were repulsed again on 18 and 19 September 1918. English Wikipedia's page on the front adds that the 10th (Irish) Division took a "live and let live" line with its Bulgarian opponents, an odd note of restraint on a front that cost the British heavy losses at Doiran. If you live in Shumen, the artillery regiment he was posted to in 1887 is the city's small footnote in his story. A street in Sofia bears his name, and the street sign tells you his rank, not his record: the Bulgarian page that records the street and his mausoleum burial also sets out his antisemitic writing. Today is also National Awakeners' Day, a schools-only holiday in our calendar data, and this year it falls on a Sunday.
Sources and further reading
The biography draws on the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry for Nikola Zhekov and its English counterpart, which differ on small dates. The Salonika front comes from English Wikipedia's pages on the Macedonian front and the Third Battle of Doiran, and the town details from its pages on Kotel and Teteven.