📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Wednesday 11 November
On the day Britain falls silent at eleven in the morning, Bulgaria has its own reason for remembrance. At 11.30 that night in 1952, a Catholic bishop was shot in the grounds of a Sofia prison, and it was 23 years before the state confirmed his death.
What happened on this day
Eugene Bossilkov was born Vincent on 16 November 1900 in Belene, on the Danube, into one of the Catholic families of a town where Catholicism goes back to the early 17th century. He joined the Passionist order as a teenager, studied in the Netherlands and Belgium, took the name Eugene, and was ordained in 1926. A doctorate at the Pontifical Oriental Institute in Rome followed in 1931, on Bulgaria's medieval union with Rome. He served as parish priest in Ruse from 1929 to 1934 and in Bardarski Geran, a village of settlers from the Banat, where he sang, played the church organ, and found time for football and hunting. In 1947 he became Bishop of Nicopolis.
The new communist government had other plans for the Church. It expelled the papal delegate, seized Catholic property and suppressed the religious orders. On 16 July 1952 police arrested Bossilkov in Sofia. After beatings and torture he faced a show trial on 3 October, where the evidence included two pistols supposedly found at the Catholic college; they turned out to be part of a museum exhibit. He was sentenced to death and shot on the night of 11 November 1952, his body thrown into a mass grave and never recovered. Only in 1975, when Pope Paul VI asked a visiting Bulgarian minister directly, did the regime confirm he had died. Pope John Paul II beatified him in 1998, and in 2010 Bulgaria's National Assembly rehabilitated him.
Today's name days
Today is the feast of St Mina, the Egyptian soldier-saint the Bulgarian Orthodox Church honours on 11 November, regarded as a wonder-worker. Fittingly for a warrior saint, his day lands on Britain's Armistice Day.
Celebrating today are Mina, Minka, Mincho, Viktor and Viktoria. Our Bulgarian name-days guide explains how the custom works, including why it is the person celebrating who hands round the treats.
By tradition, name-day visitors need no invitation. At work, congratulations and accepting treats are enough; for a home visit, take a small gift, perhaps chocolates, a bottle, or an odd number of flowers. Say честит имен ден (ches-TEET EE-men den), "happy name day", and you will have done the essentials.
Why this matters for British expats
Bossilkov's story is a reminder that Bulgaria's Catholics, a small minority clustered in places like Belene and the Danube villages, carry their own memory of the communist years. His home town later became the site of the country's largest labour camp, built on Persin island in 1949. For Catholic expats, the diocese he led still covers the whole of northern Bulgaria from its seat in Ruse, which takes in Shumen. And on a day when many of us pin on a poppy, it is worth knowing that 11 November carries a second, quieter remembrance here.
Sources and further reading
Bossilkov's Bulgarian Wikipedia biography has the fullest account of his parishes, trial and beatification, and the English entry sets out the charges and the 1975 confirmation. Wikipedia's pages on Belene and on the Diocese of Nicopolis fill in the town and the diocese he served.