📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Wednesday 12 August
Here is a birthday worth raising a coffee to: Stoyan Zaimov, born on this day in 1853. He went to school with Vasil Levski, quite literally handed Georgi Benkovski his famous name, survived a death sentence in a Crusader fortress on the coast of what is now Israel, and then spent his later decades as a mild-mannered librarian and textbook man. His first teaching job in liberated Bulgaria was right here in Shumen, which is why he earns his place on this site.
What happened on this day
Stoyan Zaimov was born on 12 August 1853 in the village of Rupkite, near Chirpan in the Stara Zagora region, a village then called Tyurkmeshlii. His start in life was hard: his father was robbed and killed by bandits on the road back from Constantinople, and the boy was born three months later. He was educated at the class school in Stara Zagora between 1867 and 1869, and it was there, as a teenager, that he met Vasil Levski, the man Bulgaria reveres with the kind of devotion the British reserve for Shakespeare, except that Levski was a hanged revolutionary rather than a playwright. The meeting stuck. Zaimov joined the Secret Central Bulgarian Committee, trained as a teacher in Plovdiv, and took a post at the boys' school in Haskovo, where he promptly helped found the local revolutionary committee. Teaching, for that generation, was rather less about marking homework and rather more about sedition.
In 1873 he assisted Atanas Uzunov in an attempted assassination of Hadji Stavri Primo, a local grandee who was about to inform on them, was caught, and was sentenced to exile in Diyarbakır in Asia Minor. He escaped within about a year and made for Romania, where the Bulgarian revolutionary emigration was thick on the ground: Lyuben Karavelov, Hristo Botev, and from 1875 a young exile then calling himself Gavril Hlatev. Zaimov talked Botev out of having the newcomer shoot Karavelov in a factional quarrel, then supplied the same newcomer with the passport of a Polish emigrant named Anton Benkovski. That, according to the Bulgarian biographical record, is how Georgi Benkovski, the future standard-bearer of the April Uprising, quite literally got his name. On his twenty-second birthday, 12 August 1875, Zaimov was elected to the renewed Bulgarian Revolutionary Central Committee, and was handed the faintly alarming assignment of setting fires across Constantinople to cover a planned rising in Stara Zagora. The plan never came off.
He went on to co-found the Giurgiu Revolutionary Committee with Nikola Obretenov, Hristo Karaminkov and Panayot Volov, the body that organised the April Uprising of 1876, serving as its secretary while Stefan Stambolov chaired the meetings. Zaimov was made chief apostle of the Third, Vratsa, revolutionary district, and here the record gets unusually honest: his contemporaries rated him a gifted agitator but doubted him as a battle leader, and his fellow revolutionary Filip Simidov put it almost exactly like that in a surviving letter. When the uprising erupted prematurely and Zaimov saw with his own eyes what Ottoman troops did to Klisura and Panagyurishte, he refused to raise the Vratsa district. Caught after the suppression, he was sentenced to death, the sentence commuted on appeal to life imprisonment, and he was shipped to the Hospitaller fortress of Saint-Jean-d'Acre, the Acre Prison on the coast of modern Israel. The Treaty of San Stefano in 1878 carried a general amnesty, and he came home.
The second act is quieter and, I would argue, just as impressive. He finished a teaching degree in Moscow in 1882, and his first post back in liberated Bulgaria was in Shumen, where he taught from 1882 to 1884, followed by Varna, then Kyustendil from 1888 to 1895, and finally Sofia. From 1892 he chaired the committee that raised the money for a veterans' home and for what became the Monument to the Tsar Liberator, the great equestrian statue outside the National Assembly in Sofia, built between 1903 and 1907. He founded the journal Училищен преглед (u-chi-LISH-ten PRE-gled, "School Review") in 1896, which ran until 1949, and served as Director of the National Library from 1903 to 1908. He spent his last years in Pleven, where his home is now a museum named for him and his son Vladimir, a prominent general, and he died there on 9 September 1932, aged 79.
Why this matters for British expats
First, the local tie, because this one genuinely is local. When you walk through central Shumen today, you are walking streets that were barely four years past Ottoman rule when Zaimov arrived to teach here in 1882. The city's National Revival tradition of teachers, reading rooms and gymnasiums is exactly the world he helped build: educator first, revolutionary second, or arguably the other way round. Of all the names from the April Uprising generation, his is one of the few with a real Shumen chapter, and it is worth knowing that the man had been sentenced to death before he ever stood at a blackboard here.
Second, the cultural literacy. If you have ever photographed the equestrian statue of Tsar Alexander II outside the National Assembly in Sofia, and most Brits in Bulgaria have, you have photographed Zaimov's committee work. And the whole Levski, Botev and Benkovski circle he moved in is the cast list behind half the street names and school names in the country. Knowing that Zaimov is the connective tissue between them, the man who knew Levski at school and named Benkovski, turns a confusing roll-call of moustachioed portraits into one coherent story.
Sources and further reading
The outline of Zaimov's revolutionary career and his later public roles draw on his English Wikipedia entry, while the richer detail on his Romanian exile years, the Benkovski passport story and the Giurgiu committee comes from his Bulgarian Wikipedia biography. The April Uprising of 1876 entry gives the wider context for the rising that nearly cost him his life.