📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Friday 11 September
Ask a Briton over fifty about Bulgaria and there is a fair chance the first thing they produce is an umbrella. The man at the other end of that story died on this date in 1978, in a hospital in Balham, and he deserves better than to be remembered as a piece of spy trivia.
What happened on this day
Georgi Markov was born in Knyazhevo, on the edge of Sofia, in 1929, the son of an army sergeant-major who was invalided out with tuberculosis and ended up selling newspapers from a kiosk by the stop. Georgi caught the same disease at nineteen and spent more than a decade in and out of hospitals, making his first attempts at writing in a sanatorium at Vladaya. He trained as a chemical engineer, graduated from the Sofia polytechnic in 1953, taught at the technical college of ceramics and glass, and was retired on health grounds at thirty. Then the other career took over. His novel Men won the Writers' Union annual prize in 1962, which brought membership and with it the right to write for a living, and the collections A Portrait of My Double (1966) and The Women of Warsaw (1968) made him one of the most admired young writers in the country. He co-wrote the popular television series Every Kilometer. Zhivkov's people tried to bring him inside.
It did not hold. Censors pulled play after play, three of them by 1969, and his novel The Roof was stopped in mid-printing because it described, in allegory, a real collapse of the roof at the Lenin steel mill. That year he left for Bologna meaning to sit things out until his standing improved, and never came back. From London he broadcast for the BBC World Service, Radio Free Europe and Deutsche Welle, and wrote Задочни репортажи за България (za-DOCH-ni re-por-TA-zhi), the In Absentia Reports, which made him one of the best-known Bulgarian dissidents abroad. He was the man who wrote that Zhivkov "served the Soviet Union more ardently than the Soviet leaders themselves did". From the mid-1970s two separate directorates of State Security kept files on him, sixteen volumes between them; the one codenamed Скитник, the Wanderer, was destroyed in January 1990, and the second has also gone missing. On 7 September 1978, which was also Todor Zhivkov's sixty-seventh birthday, Markov crossed Waterloo Bridge and waited for a bus. He was hit in the thigh by a pellet 1.70 mm across, ninety per cent platinum and ten per cent iridium, which may have carried ricin. He was admitted to St James' Hospital in Balham and died four days later, on 11 September 1978, aged 49. Nobody has ever been charged, and the Bulgarian investigation was closed in 2013 when the time limit ran out.
Why this matters for British expats
This is the one piece of history where the two countries touch directly: a Bulgarian writer killed on a British bridge in an attack most accounts lay at his own state's door, treated in a British hospital, working for the BBC. It is also why "the Bulgarian umbrella" is a phrase in English at all, and here is the part most people never hear. His widow Annabel Markov told the BBC's Panorama in April 1979 that her husband's own account did not match the newspapers: "I got the impression as he told the story that the jab hadn't been inflicted by the umbrella but that the man had dropped the umbrella as cover to hide his face." The most famous prop of the Cold War in Britain may simply have been a distraction. Mention Markov to a Bulgarian over about fifty and you will not need to explain who he is, which is not always true the other way round, and if you are far enough along with the language the reports are still the sharpest thing written about what that period did to ordinary people. No Shumen link today: this is a Sofia boy who died in south London.
Sources and further reading
The childhood, the banned plays and the State Security files come from the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on Georgi Markov, with the bridge, the pellet, the hospital and his widow's account taken from the English entry. Zhivkov's date of birth is from his own Wikipedia page.