📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Sunday 11 October
Britons and their kettles are a famous marriage. Atanas Hranov, born on this day in 1961, titled an exhibition Balthazar's Kettles, after the last king of Babylon. If you know the phrase "the writing on the wall", you already know the story.
What happened on this day
Hranov was born in Plovdiv, where he still lives and works. He studied at the secondary arts school in Kotel, which the entry dates to 1980, and took his woodcarving degree in 1987 in Professor Anton Donchev's class at Sofia's art academy. A Nula32 magazine profile says he applied to art school almost by accident, after spotting a notice for a new school of applied arts, and that his father was not entirely in favour. Today he is a painter and sculptor who often fuses the two, in materials that run from wood and hand-made paper to canvas, bronze, silver and metal frames coated in polymer. He has staged over 60 solo shows, and Sofia's National Art Gallery is among the institutions holding his work.
One of his best-known public projects is the Seventh Hill in Plovdiv, which opened in the early 2010s: a small garden beside the Dzhumaya Mosque and the Roman Stadium, at the edge of the Old Town, paved in concentric cobbles and set with several hundred cast-iron plaques of quotations from Bulgarian writers linked to the city. It followed a project that cast the verses of seven contemporary Plovdiv authors in bronze, and the poet Vesselin Sariev wrote a poem portrait of him in 2000. He sails every year, Wikipedia calls him an avid seafarer, and a 2013 film about him is called Journey to Isla Negra, after the Chilean house where Pablo Neruda kept a collection of ship prows that inspired Hranov's own. In March 2016 Bulgarian National Radio covered his show Balthazar's Kettles. The title points to the feast of Belshazzar, where a hand wrote on the wall, and a review on the Fakel website says the kettle stands for cosy domestic magic and time to dream. Most British kettles only ever announce that the water is ready.
Razlog celebrates today
Razlog (Разлог, raz-LOG) marks its city day today. Bulgarian Wikipedia says the town, then called Mehomia, was freed from Ottoman rule on 11/24 October 1912 by units of the Rhodope Detachment, and the council moved the holiday to 11 October in 2018, so the town follows the Old Style date. It has 11,025 residents (31 December 2025), in a high valley between Rila, Pirin and the Rhodopes with Bansko to the south; Bulgarian Wikipedia puts the coldest month at -1.9 °C and the warmest at 18.9 °C, so my weather guide is worth a read before a winter move. It is known for the New Year carnival Starchevata, in which every neighbourhood sends costumed teams to lampoon famous Bulgarians, roughly Spitting Image on foot. English Wikipedia adds a church in nearby Dobarsko whose murals include a Christ that some observers claim sits in a rocket.
Why this matters for British expats
If you live near Plovdiv, the Seventh Hill is an easy afternoon, with the Roman Stadium and the Old Town beside it. Asked whether Plovdiv is a city of artists, Hranov tells Nula32 it is a city of talented people, which is worth remembering before you tell a local the place must be full of painters. Shumen does not appear in any of the pages I read, so that link is a blank. Sariev's poem, as Nula32 quotes its ending, has a hill that keeps growing and cannot reach its own summit.
Sources and further reading
The biography comes from the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on Atanas Hranov and the English entry, with the Seventh Hill, sailing and Plovdiv details from a Nula32 profile and the kettles from a Fakel review. The Razlog details come from Bulgarian Wikipedia's page on the town and English Wikipedia's Razlog entry.