📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Friday 14 August
Ask a classical-music lover who Boris Hristov was and they will start humming Boris Godunov. Fair enough: the opera bass of that name filled the world's great stages. But Bulgaria has a second Boris Hristov, born 14 August 1945, who turns 81 today, and he is the one your Bulgarian neighbours actually studied at school. It is the local equivalent of spending your whole career sharing a name with a Beatle.
What happened on this day
Boris Kirilov Hristov was born on 14 August 1945 in Krapets, a village in the Pernik region of Bulgaria's southwest, in what was still formally the Kingdom of Bulgaria. He finished high school in Pernik, read Bulgarian philology at the University of Veliko Tarnovo, graduating in 1970, and spent a couple of years as a schoolteacher back home. A thoroughly ordinary start, which is rather the point: the people who end up on the syllabus rarely begin anywhere grand.
From 1973 to 1981 he earned his living as a journalist and editor at Boyana, the state feature-film studios in Sofia, a film-industry salary quietly underwriting the poetry, which feels like a very Bulgarian arrangement. His first appearance in print was a shared volume, Three Young Poets (1975), alongside Parush Parushev and Ekaterina Tomova. The breakthrough came two years later with Вечерен тромпет (ve-CHER-en trom-PET, 'Evening Trumpet', 1977), then Честен кръст ('Honest Cross', 1982), and the review pages of the late seventies took real notice of both.
Prose and film ran alongside the verse. His novel Бащата на яйцето ('The Father of the Egg', 1987) reached the cinema in 1991 from his own screenplay, and his screen credits run from the feature Death of the Hare (1982) through the animated The Gorgon (1994) to a long tail of documentaries. In 1984 he was a fellow of the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, and he read his work everywhere from Toronto and New York to Hamburg, Athens and Delhi.
Two later episodes tell you most about the man. He has spent years as an anthologist, and in 1997 he republished Веда Словена, the nineteenth-century collection published by Stefan Verković that Bulgarians have argued over ever since: lost national epic or brilliant hoax, roughly their Ossian. He liked the riddle enough to make a documentary about it in 2012. And in May 2010, learning from the media that the government had awarded him the Order of Cyril and Methodius, first degree, for services to culture, he sat down and wrote to refuse it. In a country where honours are usually collected with a smile, declining a state medal by letter is quite literally a poet's gesture.
Since the mid-1990s he has lived in Leshten, a mountain village in the southwest, making almost no public appearances. The books, though, never stopped: Книга на мълчанието ('Book of Silence', 2008), the Vazov Prize for Literature in 2020, and a new collection, Пилигрим от края на света ('Pilgrim from the End of the World'), in 2025.
Why this matters for British expats
Here is the cultural-literacy payoff: Hristov's poems sit in the current 12th-grade literature textbook, so Bulgarians who finished school in the last decade have genuinely read him, the way a British generation met Seamus Heaney on the syllabus. I've been here 13 years and I had no idea about the refused medal until this week, and it is exactly the sort of detail worth keeping in your pocket. If a Bulgarian friend mentions the writer Boris Hristov, you can now skip the opera joke entirely and go straight to the man who said no to the government.
Do not expect any fuss in Shumen today: his stomping ground was always the southwest, Pernik, Sofia and his mountain retreat at Leshten, a good five hours' drive from us, so no street here carries his name. What he offers instead is an entry in the user manual for the Bulgarian cultural calendar: proof that a poet can still matter enough in this country to be set for exams, filmed, argued over and quietly honoured in a village with more slate roofs than people.
Sources and further reading
This piece draws on the Bulgarian Wikipedia biography of Boris Hristov, which carries his full bibliography and filmography, and on his author page at the LiterNet publishing house. Several of his later books appeared in bilingual Bulgarian-English editions, so he is more accessible than most modern Bulgarian poets if your Bulgarian is still a work in progress.