📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Thursday 13 August
Here is a calendar curiosity to go with the morning coffee.... On 13 August 1914, at least by the calendar we use today, Bulgaria gained one of the most decorated state writers of the post-war era, born down in the Gabrovo hills under the distinctly unglamorous name of Petar Mitev Kalchev. You know him, if you know him at all, as Kamen Kalchev.
What happened on this day
The date needs a small footnote, and it is the most interesting thing about today. Kalchev was born in the village of Kereka, in the Dryanovo municipality of the Gabrovo district, on 31 July 1914 by the Julian calendar Bulgaria still used at the time. Bulgaria only switched to the Gregorian calendar in 1916, and by then the two systems ran thirteen days apart, which converts his birthday to 13 August on the modern reckoning. Bulgarian sources print 31 July; several international reference files print 13 August. Both are right, which rather handily gives the man two birthdays. I've been here 13 years and the old-calendar wrinkle still catches me out, usually when a church feast or an "Old New Year" gathering lands a fortnight later than my British brain expects.
His own life was anything but quiet. He finished secondary school in Sofia in 1934, joined VMRO (united), and was arrested in the summer of 1935, spending time in Sofia's central prison before being tried under the Law for the Protection of the State. At the July 1936 trial of the organisation's leading figures he was acquitted for lack of evidence, a genuinely rare outcome for the era. That same restless stretch produced his first published short story, "Кучешки живот" (A Dog's Life), printed in the 1935 collection "Сигнали". He went on to study administration and finance at Sofia's Free University of Political and Economic Sciences, the forerunner of today's University of National and World Economy, and worked as an accountant for the Petrol company. An accountant writing fiction after hours is quite literally a British kind of literary biography: Trollope ran Post Office surveys by day and wrote the Barsetshire novels by night, and Kalchev was cut from similar cloth.
After the communist takeover of 9 September 1944 he became one of the regime's most trusted men of letters, and the state did not stint on the honours. He edited the newspaper "Септемврийче" and the magazines "Пламъче" and "Септември", ran the "Български писател" publishing house, and chaired the Union of Bulgarian Writers from 1962 to 1964. Along the way he published more than 30 books: the early novella "Пътник от планината" (Traveller from the Mountain, 1938), the novel "В края на лятото" (At the End of Summer, 1945), a youth novella about Vasil Levski (1949), "Син на работническата класа" (Son of the Working Class, 1949), a fictionalised biography of Georgi Dimitrov, and "Въстанието" (The Uprising, 1975), his novel of the June 1923 events. The awards run to the Dimitrov Prize in 1950 and the title Hero of Socialist Labour, awarded twice. He died in Sofia on 14 January 1988 and is buried in the Central Sofia Cemetery.
Why this matters for British expats
Two reasons, the first very practical. The two-birthdays puzzle is the single most useful piece of date literacy a Brit in Bulgaria can have. When a Bulgarian source gives you a historical date that disagrees with an English one by roughly a fortnight, neither is wrong: the country ran on the Julian calendar until 1916, and pre-1916 dates often exist in both versions. It explains the "Old New Year" gatherings in mid-January, and it will save you from confidently "correcting" a Bulgarian neighbour who is, in fact, right. The Bulgarian cultural calendar is full of these little conversion traps, and it is worth learning the pattern once rather than being surprised by it every year.
Second, Kalchev is a window into how Bulgaria made its national heroes. His Levski novella for young readers came out in 1949, when the state was busy turning the Apostle of Freedom into the secular saint of every classroom, and it worked: to this day Levski is taught with the kind of reverence the British reserve for Shakespeare, and almost every Bulgarian town has a street or a school carrying his name. Nothing in Shumen is named for Kalchev himself, I should be honest: his ground was Gabrovo and then Sofia, a good two and a half hours west of us here in Shumen. But the next time a Bulgarian friend mentions a writer with two birthdays, you will know exactly why, and you can raise a glass to Kamen Kalchev on either date. He earned both.
Sources and further reading
Today's details draw on the Bulgarian Wikipedia biography of Kamen Kalchev, which carries the full bibliography and the honours list, and on the shorter German Wikipedia entry for a Western-language summary. The Dictionary of Bulgarian Literature's catalogue of his books lists the plays, stories and novels in order of publication.