📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Monday 14 September
The headline Radio Free Europe's Bulgarian service put over her obituary is the best summary of a life I have read in a while: the director who did not notice censorship. Malina Petrova died on this date in 2023, and the phrase was not a compliment about her eyesight. She simply went on filming the things the state preferred forgotten.
What happened on this day
Malina Petrova was born in Burgas on 3 September 1950 and graduated in 1978 from the theatre and film academy in Sofia, then named for the actor Krastyo Sarafov, with a degree in film directing. She made two feature films early on, Journey in 1980 and The Son of Maria in 1983, and appeared as an actress in the television series Mera spored mera in 1981. Then she found the work that took the rest of her life.
The documentary titles read like an index of things Bulgaria has struggled to say out loud. No One Is Guilty in 1986 and The Pantheon in 1987, both made while the regime was still standing. The Heart Dies Last in 1991, on the 1949 show trial of Traicho Kostov, written with Velislava Dareva. Balkan History Lessons in 1999, The Children of Mary Magdalene in 2000, Closed by Statute of Limitations in 2009, and Erasure in 2012. In 2006 she became the first person to receive the Panitsa award for civic courage, given by the foundation that Dimi Panitza, the Bulgarian-born American who ran Reader's Digest across Europe, the Middle East and Africa, set up with his wife Yvonne in 1991. She died on 14 September 2023.
Today's name days
It is Кръстовден (KRUS-tov-den), the Exaltation of the Cross, one of the twelve great feasts of the Orthodox year, marking the finding of the True Cross by Saint Helena and its recovery from the Persians in 628. So today belongs to Кръстьо (KRUS-tyo) and Кръстина (kruss-TEE-na), from кръст, the cross, and to Ставри, which is the same idea arriving through Greek, where the word is stauros. One Кръстьо you have already met today is the actor Krastyo Sarafov, whose name is on the academy Malina Petrova walked out of in 1978, which is a neater piece of calendar work than anyone planned.
Eight more variants celebrate: Кръстил, Кръстила, Кръстилена, Кръстена, Кръстан, Кръстана, Къна and Кънчо. The Bulgarian name-days guide has the whole list. The usual rule applies, that you turn up without being asked and never empty-handed, but today comes with a complication most guides skip: 14 September is a strict fast in the church calendar, with meat, dairy and fish all off the table. Worth knowing before you arrive holding a cream cake.
Towns celebrating today
Silistra takes the feast as its city day. It sits on the southern bank of the lower Danube at the point where the Romanian border stops following the river, and it has been there a long while: the Romans built a fort on the site in the year 29 and kept the earlier name, Durostorum. The Ottoman Medjidi Tabia fortress looks out over it, and the Srebarna nature reserve is on the doorstep.
Byala Slatina, over in Vratsa province in the north-west, also celebrates. It is the smaller of the two by some distance, and its formal existence is surprisingly recent: it was declared a town by decree of King Ferdinand on 27 June 1914.
Why this matters for British expats
If you only learn one thing today, make it the fast, because it is the sort of detail that turns a well-meant visit awkward. If you learn two, make the second one Malina Petrova. Britain has never really needed a genre of film whose job is to establish what the state did to people within living memory, and Bulgaria has needed it badly, which is why a documentary director can end up receiving a prize for courage rather than for direction. Her films are on her own channel, free to watch, and several of them explain more about why older Bulgarians answer certain questions carefully than any guide to the country will.
Sources and further reading
The life, the filmography and the Panitsa award come from the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on Malina Petrova, which also points to the obituary quoted at the top. The feast and its fasting rules are from Wikipedia's article on the Feast of the Cross, the two towns from their own English entries, and the note on Dimi Panitza from his Bulgarian one.