Ask a Bulgarian grandmother who Dora Gabe was and there is a decent chance she will recite you a poem from memory. Ask around the British expats of Shumen and you will mostly get blank looks. Which is a pity, because today, 16 August, is her birthday, and one of Bulgaria's best-loved poets spent her school years right here and published her very first poem in this city.
What happened on this day
Dora Gabe was born on 16 August 1885 in the village of Methodievo, in the Dobruja region of north-east Bulgaria. She came into the world as Isidora Peysakh, the daughter of a Jewish family that had emigrated from Ukraine, and her father, Petar Gabe, made a little history of his own: he was the first Jew elected to the Bulgarian National Assembly, and when he was barred from taking his seat he turned to journalism and became a well-known public figure instead.
Worth pausing on that birth year, because it is quietly contested. English Wikipedia manages to offer both 1886 and 1888 on the same page, and the communist state itself marked her 80th birthday in 1968 and her 90th in 1978, arithmetic that only adds up if she arrived in 1888. The Bulgarian record gives 1885, and 1885 is what we are going with. A bureaucracy spending decades celebrating the wrong birthday for its favourite poet is, it seems we are forced to conclude, rather on brand.
The Shumen connection is not a footnote, it is the start of the story. The teenage Dora was a pupil at the city's municipal Nanchova girls' gymnasium, and it was in Shumen, in 1900, that she published her first poem, "Пролет" (Prolet, meaning Spring), in the literary magazine "Младина" (Mladina, meaning Youth). She was about fourteen at the time. From there: the girls' high school in Varna, natural sciences at Sofia University in 1904, French philology in Geneva and Grenoble, then back home to teach French in Dobrich in 1907.
Her first collection, "Теменуги" (Temenugi, Violets), was put together with the literary critic Boyan Penev, whom she married, and the Bulgarian record says it carried the editorial hand of Peyo Yavorov, the great Symbolist poet, to the point of co-authorship. The marriage did not last. They separated for good in 1923, never formally divorced, and she was later blunt about what it had cost her: "I stopped living my own inner life and instead lived his."
On her own, she became considerably more than a poet. She co-founded the Bulgarian-Polish Committee in 1922 and the Bulgarian PEN Club in 1927, serving as its long-time president, edited the Ministry of Education's "Library for the Youngest" series and the children's magazine "Прозорче" (Prozorche, Little Window), and spent 1947 to 1950 as cultural counsellor at the Bulgarian embassy in Warsaw. Her children's books, launched in Alexander Bozhinov's "Golden Book of Our Children" in 1921, became bedside reading for several generations of Bulgarian families, the sort of shared childhood canon Brits would recognise from their own classics. And from 1917 until the end of her life she translated half of Eastern Europe into Bulgarian: Mickiewicz, Sienkiewicz, Karel Čapek, Yiannis Ritsos and dozens more. If a Bulgarian child of the last century read a Polish poem, the odds are decent that Dora Gabe carried it across the language border for them.
Like every Bulgarian writer of her generation she had to reach her accommodation with the regime after 1944, and her 1946 collection "Vela" praised the communist partisans. The state repaid her with honours, whatever year it thought she was born: honorary citizen of Tolbukhin (Dobrich under its communist-era name) in 1968, the Vazov Prize in 1975, Hero of Socialist Labour in 1978. She died in Sofia on 16 November 1983, aged 98, and her poems are still taught with the kind of reverence the British reserve for the classics they grew up on.
Why this matters for British expats
If you live in Shumen, this one is genuinely yours. The city's cultural calendar is full of names that can feel remote, but Dora Gabe sat in a Shumen classroom, and a Shumen magazine gave Bulgarian literature one of its standard-bearers her start. That is the sort of thing worth knowing when a Bulgarian friend mentions her, which, if you have Bulgarian friends of a certain age, they will.
It is also a useful key to the region. Dobrich, the Dobruja city where she had taught French back in 1907, made her an honorary citizen in 1968, and the Dobruja she wrote about so tenderly is the rolling farmland you drive through to reach the north-east coast. Knowing who she was turns a stretch of map into a story, and it explains why her name keeps surfacing on schools, streets and library programmes across this part of Bulgaria. Most Bulgarians under 40 might struggle to place her too, so one informed sentence puts you ahead of the room.
Sources and further reading
The biographical details draw on the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on Dora Gabe, which carries the full honours list and the Dobrich honorary citizenship, and on her English Wikipedia biography, which tells the marriage in her own words. Bulgarian National Television's documentary "The Other Dora Gabe", linked from the Bulgarian entry, is there for anyone who wants more.