📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Thursday 10 September
Every spring, British Eurovision fans go through the same ritual of hope and quiet disappointment. Bulgaria's breakthrough night at that contest came from a woman singing folk and a man hitting a drum, and the drummer was born on this date in 1966. If you have been to a village wedding here, you have heard his instrument, though probably not played that well.
What happened on this day
Stoyan Yankulov, known to everyone as Stundzhi (Стунджи, STOON-jee), was born on 10 September 1966 in Elin Pelin, a small town in Sofia province that is itself a nice piece of trivia: it was called Novoseltsi until 1950, when it was renamed in honour of the writer Elin Pelin, who came from the nearby village of Bailovo. The town is named after a pen name. Yankulov started piano at eight, went through the Lyubomir Pipkov music school in Sofia and then the state music academy on percussion, and was taken into the Big Band of Bulgarian National Radio. Since then he has played with more or less everybody worth playing with: Teodosii Spasov, Ivo Papazov, Milcho Leviev, the Turkish percussionist Okay Temiz, and projects with Bobby McFerrin. His own entry makes the point, rather proudly, that listeners often assume there is more than one percussionist on the stage.
Then 2007. He and the singer Elitsa Todorova took a song called Water to the Eurovision final in Helsinki, went on twenty-first, and finished fifth of 24 with 157 points. Two things are worth knowing about that. It was Bulgaria's first qualification to a final since the country debuted in 2005, and it stayed the national record until 2016. And it was done with the least Eurovision-shaped material imaginable: no key change, no wind machine, just a folk voice and a man behind a kit and a тъпан (TUH-pan). The pair went back in 2013 with "Samo shampioni", chosen after their first song was pulled over copyright, and did not escape the semi-final, which is a fairly Bulgarian ending. Elsewhere he has done better: a Crystal Lyre award for jazz in 2004, albums including Drumboy (2004) and Water (2010), the album NORMAS, credited to Snow Owl, which took a Latin Grammy nomination in 2014, and recent work with the Colombian bassist Juan García-Herreros.
Why this matters for British expats
The тъпан is the thing to take away. It is a large double-headed drum played with two different sticks: a thick pipe-like beater, about 440 mm long, for the accented beats on one head, and a thin switch on the other for everything in between. One description calls it irreplaceable at Bulgarian village festivities, meaning weddings and the patron-saint celebrations of houses and villages. If you live anywhere rural, that is the sound arriving from three streets away on a Saturday afternoon and not stopping, and once you can name it in Bulgarian and know that the player's two hands are doing two completely different jobs, it stops being noise and starts being a technique. The Eurovision half is simpler: 2007 is the single most reliable conversation opener you have with a Bulgarian of a certain age, and unlike most of our shared cultural references, this one they won. The closest I can get him to our own city is his diploma, since the academy that trained him carries the name of Pancho Vladigerov, who lived in Shumen.
Sources and further reading
The life, the collaborators and the awards come from the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on Stoyan Yankulov, with the Eurovision detail from the English pages on the duo and on Bulgaria's 2007 entry. The drum description draws on Wikipedia's article on the davul, and the town's renaming on its own entry.