📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Tuesday 10 November
The tenth of November carries two very different endings. One belongs to a schoolteacher turned guerrilla commander whom most Brits will never have heard of. The other belongs to the man who ran communist Bulgaria for 35 years, and it came the day after the Berlin Wall fell.
What happened on this day
Lazar Madzharov was born in 1872 in the village of Negovan (today Xylopoli, in Greece), the son of Archimandrite Ivan Madzharov, a senior Bulgarian cleric in Thessaloniki. After graduating from the city's Bulgarian men's high school in 1892 he moved to Bulgaria and taught, first in Zheravna, then in Rila. In 1897 the Bulgarian Exarchate made him chief teacher of the Bulgarian schools in Lozengrad, and there the classroom gave way rather quickly to the committee room: he joined the revolutionary organisation IMRO and took charge of its local committee.
In 1899 he went underground. He travelled with Gotse Delchev around the Adrianople region in 1900, rebuilt the committee network after the Keremidchioglu affair had broken it, and in April 1902 was elected voivode, the armed leader, of the Lozengrad district. During the Preobrazhenie Uprising of 1903 he led a band in the Strandzha mountains, where rebels held a provisional "Strandzha Republic" for 26 days. He is counted the second most important figure in the Adrianople revolutionary district after Mihail Gerdzhikov. On 10 November 1907 he was killed in a clash with an Ottoman detachment near the village of Ladzhakoy, in the Dedeagach area, together with four comrades.
The other 10 November
On 10 November 1989, the day after the Berlin Wall came down, Todor Zhivkov resigned under pressure from senior colleagues. He had led the Communist Party since 1954 and was the longest-serving leader in the Eastern Bloc. The plot was quiet and careful. Foreign Minister Petar Mladenov, Prime Minister Georgi Atanasov and Finance Minister Andrey Lukanov had wanted him gone for some time, and the beating of Ecoglasnost environmental activists during a Sofia summit that October, on Zhivkov's orders, persuaded them to act. Defence Minister Dobri Dzhurov told Zhivkov he was expected to resign, and the next day he did, officially on grounds of age and health. Within a month communist rule had effectively ended, and within a year the People's Republic of Bulgaria no longer existed.
Why this matters for British expats
Most of us can say where we were when the Wall came down; far fewer Brits know that Bulgaria's own turning point came the very next day. If you have Bulgarian neighbours old enough to remember it, ask about November 1989 rather than about Zhivkov himself, and expect a range of answers. Madzharov's story is further away, both in time and on the map: his war was fought in Thrace and the Strandzha hills, a long drive south of us here in Shumen. But the Preobrazhenie rising takes its name from the Feast of the Transfiguration, the day on which it began, and our cultural calendar is a good place to start untangling which anniversaries matter to whom.
Sources and further reading
Madzharov's Bulgarian Wikipedia biography is the fullest account of his teaching posts and congresses, and the English entry adds the detail of his final clash. For 1989, Wikipedia's pages on Todor Zhivkov and on the fall of the Berlin Wall set out how the two events sat a day apart.