📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Monday 19 October
19 October pairs two very different stories: the feast of St John of Rila, which three towns treat as their own holiday, and the birthday of the man who shot a king in Marseille. Neither is a cake-and-candles occasion, so I will keep the tone measured.
What happened on this day
Vlado Chernozemski was born Velichko Dimitrov Kerin on 19 October 1897 in the village of Kamenitsa, now a quarter of Velingrad. He worked as a driver and watchmaker and joined the Internal Macedonian Revolutionary Organization (IMRO) in 1922. The nickname "Vlado the Chauffeur" stuck, and Bulgarian Wikipedia links it to a short stint driving for the tobacco warehouses in Dupnitsa, one of today's celebrating towns. On orders from IMRO's leadership he killed the communist MP Dimo Hadzhidimov in 1924 and, in 1930, Naum Tomalevski and his bodyguard.
On 9 October 1934, in Marseille, he shot King Alexander I of Yugoslavia as the royal motorcade passed. The French foreign minister, Louis Barthou, died too: English Wikipedia says a stray police bullet killed him, and Bulgarian Wikipedia adds that a ballistics report, not made public until 1974, found the fatal bullet was of a calibre then used by French police. Chernozemski died that evening without giving anything away, leaving only a skull-and-crossbones tattoo with IMRO's initials, and his identity came out days later. Opinion on him is still split: English Wikipedia says he is considered a hero in Bulgaria and a controversial figure to North Macedonia's official historians, while Bulgarian Wikipedia calls him a terrorist of IMRO. I will admit this is not a birthday I would raise a glass to.
Towns celebrating today
All three towns keep the feast of St John of Rila (Иван Рилски, ee-VAN REEL-skee; for more Bulgarian words see our phrasebook), whom Bulgarian Wikipedia calls the greatest Bulgarian saint and hermit and the founder of Rila Monastery. His life stories place his birth in the village of Skrino in the Dupnitsa basin, and 19 October is his main feast in the Orthodox calendar.
Dupnitsa sits in the middle of that basin, at the foot of the Rila mountains, and has used the saint's day as its town holiday since 1998. Its listed events include the South-West International Folklore Festival, "Peace of the Balkans".
Kresna's municipality takes in the Struma valley and the Kresna Gorge, and holds its holiday on 19 October; a church of St John of Rila went up there in 1941. The Tisata reserve nearby is described as the Balkan peninsula's largest site of tree-like juniper.
Pernik is known for its Surva masquerade festival, held on the last weekend of January, which made it a European carnival capital in 2009. Its town day has been 19 October since the 1980s, and its Mining Church, consecrated on the miners' holiday, 19 October 1920, carries a mosaic of St John, patron of the mine, above the door. Pernik even appears in his life story, where the hermit settles on rocky ground near the Struma.
Why this matters for British expats
Streets in Blagoevgrad and Velingrad carry Chernozemski's name, and, as noted above, he is seen very differently in Bulgaria and in North Macedonia, so it pays to know the outline before a neighbour raises it. The saint is the gentler lesson: if you are in Dupnitsa, Kresna or Pernik today, it is the town's own holiday. No Shumen connection turns up in the record, and Velingrad is a long way from us, so treat this one as cultural literacy rather than local pride; our Shumen guide is the better place for that.
Sources and further reading
This piece draws on the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on Vlado Chernozemski, read alongside the English entry and the Bulgarian pages on St John of Rila, Dupnitsa, Kresna and Pernik. The two Chernozemski pages differ in places, as noted above, so treat the details as a starting point.