📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Tuesday 15 September
Ask a British expat what confuses them about Bulgaria and Russia and you get a version of the same question: how can one country be this warm and this cold about the same neighbour? There is a one sentence answer, and a cavalry general delivered it in a field in Dobrudja in September 1916. He was born on this date in 1863.
What happened on this day
Ivan Kolev was born on 15 September 1863 in Banovka, a southern Bessarabian village founded by Bulgarian settlers from Thrace, 25 km east of Bolhrad and at that point inside Romania. He left the Bolhrad High School in 1882 wanting nothing grander than to teach in his own village, and the village turned him down. So he clerked in the municipal office, moved to Sofia in 1884 for a desk at the district court, and volunteered for the Student's Legion when Serbia declared war in 1885.
He entered the Military School in Sofia in January 1886, where cadets were streamed by exam results and his were good enough to earn him the artillery. That was the problem. He wanted horses. The Bulgarian record preserves what he said about it: if he was not put in the cavalry he would not serve at all, he would resign. It is a remarkable thing for a 22 year old clerk's son with no money and no connections to say to an army. The army blinked.
He got his horses, took the military academy in Turin, spent a year attached to the Austrian 7th Uhlan Regiment at Pardubice, and came home a colonel in 1908 commanding the monarch's own Life Guard cavalry. By the 1916 campaign in Dobrudja he had the 1st Cavalry Division, and that autumn is the reason anyone remembers him: Kurtbunar taken on 2 September, a Romanian counterattack broken at Kochmar and Karapelit, then Dobrich and on towards the Danube delta. Dobrich is an hour and a half up the road from Shumen, so the campaign that made his name opened across country plenty of us drive through. Field Marshal August von Mackensen pinned an Iron Cross on him that month, telling him everyone had accepted that a cavalry charge against infantry was impossible and he had spent a few days disproving it. He went to Vienna for treatment in May 1917, was promoted lieutenant general on 28 July, and died there the next day, aged 53.
Why this matters for British expats
Back to that sentence. On 4 September 1916, with a Russian cavalry division twice his strength moving towards him, Kolev lined his men up and said, in translation: "Cavalrymen, God is my witness that I am grateful to Russia for freeing us. But what are the Cossacks doing now in our Dobrudja?" Then he attacked. Bulgarians are taught, correctly, that Russian arms ended Ottoman rule here in the 1870s, and that gratitude is genuine and still audible. It has never meant automatic agreement. If a Bulgarian friend has ever left you baffled by being warm about Russian culture, cold about Russian politics, and impatient with anyone assuming the two travel together, you have met the same instinct a century on.
The other thing to know about 15 September has nothing to do with 1916. It is Първи учебен ден (PUR-vi u-CHE-ben den), the opening of the school year, and it is a ceremony rather than a teaching day. Children arrive in their best clothes carrying flowers for the teacher, gladioli by long tradition, a twelfth year pupil walks the new first years in, a bell is rung, and most families are home by lunchtime. Parents new to the Bulgarian school system reliably get this wrong in year one and send a child off in uniform with a full bag and empty hands. Buy the flowers early and expect the streets around any school to be parked solid. Mid September also brings the Plovdiv fair, the country's largest and oldest, and the peak of the pepper harvest, which is why every market is stacked with crates of red peppers at prices worth planning around.
For more of the practical picture, see the Shumen.UK money guide.
Sources and further reading
The Bessarabian childhood, the cadet's ultimatum, the Dobrudja place names, Mackensen's remark and the speech itself come from the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on General Ivan Kolev, a good deal fuller than the English one; the English Wikipedia article supplies his dates and the shape of the 1916 campaign. The first day of school is the standard Bulgarian school calendar.