📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Tuesday 13 October
If you have ever asked a Bulgarian neighbour "why do you do it like that?", Ivan Hadzhiyski, born on this day in 1907, asked the same question and went looking for the answer on foot and by bicycle. He did not live to see the whole answer in print.
What happened on this day
Hadzhiyski was born on 13 October 1907 in Troyan (Троян, tro-YAN), into a poor artisan family, and was publishing dispatches in a youth magazine by 1919. He graduated from the commercial high school in Svishtov in 1925, studied philosophy at Sofia University from 1927 to 1932, later added law, and worked as a journalist and lawyer. The authorities noticed him early: a suspended one-year sentence in 1925 under the Law for the Defence of the State, party membership from 1929, and three months' strict imprisonment in 1936 after his Communist Party group was exposed. In ten years he wrote four books and more than 20 studies and articles, enough for Bulgarian Wikipedia to count him among the founders of Bulgarian sociology.
From 1936 he toured Bulgaria on foot and by bicycle, and the result was Бит и душевност на нашия народ (beet ee doo-SHEV-nost na NA-shiya na-ROD), roughly "Way of Life and Mentality of Our People", the study of Bulgarian folk psychology that Bulgarian Wikipedia counts among his most important works. Think of J. B. Priestley's English Journey written by a sociologist on a bicycle. Volume one appeared in 1940, and he called it the work of his life: "I have done my duty to literature by writing this study. I can write nothing more. This is my life" (my translation). He was mobilised in 1943 and later joined the war against Germany as a volunteer war correspondent at the headquarters of the Second Bulgarian Army. On 4 October 1944 he was killed in a battle with the SS division Prinz Eugen on Visoka Chuka, near Vlasotince in Serbia. The manuscript of volume three vanished from his publisher's in 1947; his daughter Maria rebuilt part of it from about 200 pages of shorthand notes, and Bulgarian Wikipedia lists a third volume as published in 2002.
Why this matters for British expats
If you want to understand Bulgarians rather than just live among them, his study is a place to start, yet I found no English Wikipedia page on him, so the Bulgarian one is the best guide; my integration guide covers the everyday side. His name is everywhere once you look: schools in Troyan and Sofia, an institute in Sofia, a street in Sofia's Ovcha Kupel district and a national prize from Troyan municipality for work in folk psychology and sociology. Troyan has 16,501 residents (31 December 2025), keeps its own holiday on 14 October, the day of St Petka, its heavenly patron, and holds a plum and plum rakia festival at the end of September; Troyan Monastery, the third biggest in Bulgaria, is 10 km away. Shumen does not appear in any of the pages I read, so that link is a blank. Hadzhiyski was reburied when a football stadium replaced the old town cemetery in the 1960s.
Sources and further reading
The biography and honours come from the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on Ivan Hadzhiyski. The Troyan details come from the town's Bulgarian Wikipedia page.