📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Thursday 1 October
Twenty years ago today, Bulgarian football lost the striker a Corsican newspaper once called the Puskás of the Balkans. Most Brits here have never heard of him, and plenty of Bulgarians under 40 would struggle too, which is rather a shame, because his story ends with a twist you rarely see in football: he turned the money down.
What happened on this day
Atanas Mihaylov, known to everyone as Nachko, died of cancer at five in the morning on 1 October 2006, aged 57. His health had collapsed quite suddenly that year: a failing kidney sent his blood pressure soaring, surgeons removed it on 21 February because of a tumour, and chemotherapy followed. He had joined the Lokomotiv Sofia academy at ten and made his top-flight debut on 3 July 1965, two days short of his 16th birthday, in a 4-2 home win over Spartak Pleven. Apart from a spell with ZhSK Slavia after the two clubs were merged in 1969 (he scored in a 2-0 European win over Kilmarnock that November), he was red-and-black through and through: 306 league games, 131 goals, the captain's armband, and the 1977-78 title that ended a 14-year wait.
The tie that made him came in the 1979-80 UEFA Cup. He put five past Monaco over two legs, which earned him the pun Monachko and prompted Corse-Matin's Puskás line. The French then reportedly put 1.3 million dollars on the table, a fantastic sum for the time. Nachko stayed put. In the next round, against Dynamo Kyiv in Sofia, he scored the only goal from a free kick, curling it around a wall of nine while the tenth outfield player stood on the line helping the goalkeeper. Lokomotiv went on to the quarter-finals. For the national side he won 45 caps and 23 goals, took Olympic silver in Mexico in 1968 (named best player of the tournament), played three matches at the 1974 World Cup, and set the Under-23 scoring record with 31 goals. He finished with two seasons at Nea Salamina in Cyprus, retiring at 34.
Towns celebrating today
Dunavtsi, up in the far northwest near Vidin, marks its city day. The name means, literally, "Danubians", and that is the signature: it sits in a small valley beside the Danube, eight kilometres from Vidin. It is young by Bulgarian standards, created in 1955 by merging the villages of Vidbol and Gurkovo, and granted town status in 1974. If you are passing, the local chitalishte is called Svetlina, "Light".
Why this matters for British expats
Get talking football with a Bulgarian man of a certain age in a kafene, even here in Shumen, a very long way from Nachko's stomping ground, and two things come up sooner or later: Mexico 1968 and the players who never left. Mihaylov is the purest case of the second. Think of Matt Le Tissier staying at Southampton, only with a seven-figure bid from Monte Carlo sitting on the table. Say "легенда" (le-GEN-da, legend) and you will be understood; the rest of the vocabulary is in our Bulgarian phrasebook.
Sources and further reading
The fullest account of his career, from the Kilmarnock goal to the Dynamo Kyiv free kick, is on Bulgarian Wikipedia's page on Atanas Mihaylov, which also notes the street named after him in Sofia's Svoboda district. The English-language Wikipedia entry is shorter but adds his knack for scoring straight from corners, and Wikipedia's pages on Dunavtsi fill in the town's story.