Most British expats meet the Bulgarian sense of humour before they ever meet its comedians: dry, deadpan, quietly subversive. Vasil Tsonev spent half a century supplying it, and he died in Sofia on this date in 2002. Today is also a name day, so there is a second reason to keep reading.
What happened on this day
Vasil Tsonev was born in Sofia in 1925, trained as an architect, and then spent his working life doing something far more useful to the national mood: making Bulgarians laugh at their rulers. He wrote, by one count, more than 2,500 humorous stories and feuilletons, many of them under the pen name Don Bazilio, borrowed from the slander-peddling schemer in The Barber of Seville, which is a fairly pointed name for a satirist to pick for himself.
For nine years, from 1959, he edited Стършел (Starshel, 'The Hornet'), the satirical weekly that has stung Bulgarian politicians of every colour for decades and is about the closest thing the country has to Private Eye. Under communism a feuilleton in the Hornet could say things a newspaper leader column never could, and readers understood the code perfectly. Alongside the journalism he turned out radio plays by the dozen and scripts for animated and feature films, including the 1977 film Adios, muchachos, written with the poet Valeri Petrov.
His best-remembered work is probably Лека нощ, възрастни!.. (Good Night, Adults!), a satirical television series that ran from 1972 into the 1980s, on which he was writer, director and performer at once. If the surname rings a bell, that is because his younger brother was the actor Kosta Tsonev, one of the most recognisable faces in Bulgarian cinema. Vasil Tsonev died on 11 July 2002, aged 77.
Today's name days
Today is also the name day for anyone called Olga, Olya (its everyday short form) or Oleg. The names are not originally Bulgarian at all: they come from the Old Norse Helga and Helgi, meaning 'holy', carried east by the Varangians, and the day belongs to St Olga of Kiev, the tenth-century princess who was the first ruler of the Rus to accept Christianity. If you know an Olga, today is her day.
Here is the bit that catches Brits out. A Bulgarian name day is not a private affair you wait to be invited to. On a significant name day the person celebrating keeps an open house: friends, neighbours and colleagues simply drop in, often unannounced, and the one rule you must not break is that you never arrive empty-handed. A cake, a box of chocolates, a bottle of wine, or flowers in an odd number (never an even number, even numbers are for funerals) will all do the job. Say честит имен ден (chesh-TEET ee-MEN den), 'happy name day', and you have done it right.
Why this matters for British expats
Two different things are happening today, and both are small lessons in how the place works. Tsonev is a way into the Bulgarian relationship with satire, which is older, sharper and more politically load-bearing than the British version, and knowing that the Hornet is not just a magazine but an institution helps you read a lot of the country's public arguments. The Olga name day, meanwhile, is a live piece of etiquette you may actually need this weekend. If a Bulgarian colleague called Olga mentions she is 'at home' today, that is not small talk, it is an invitation, and turning up with a cake will earn you more goodwill than a month of correct paperwork.
There is no direct Shumen angle to Tsonev, who was a thoroughly Sofia figure. But the name day lands everywhere, including in Shumen's churches, where an Olga might light a candle on her saint's day before the open house begins at home.
Sources and further reading
The details of Tsonev's life and work here draw on his Bulgarian Wikipedia biography, which lists the films, the radio plays and the long years at the Hornet. The name-day tradition and the feast of St Olga follow the standard Bulgarian Orthodox calendar.