📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Saturday 19 September
There is a Bulgarian television comedy about an Englishman who retires to a village here, buys a tractor because nobody else will plough his yard, and slowly drives his neighbours to distraction by being relentlessly competent. If you have moved to a Bulgarian village yourself, you may want to watch it from behind a cushion. The man who directed it was born on this date in 1956.
What happened on this day
Docho Nikolov Bodzhakov was born on 19 September 1956 and went to school in Troyan. He took film directing at the VITIZ academy in Sofia, graduating in 1981 from the class of the director Vulo Radev, and went straight into the Boyana feature-film studio, the vast state production complex that is now Nu Boyana. He spent a decade there working up from assistant director, which was more or less the only route into Bulgarian cinema at the time.
His own films arrived through the eighties and nineties: "Pamet" in 1985, "Brachni shegi" in 1989, then "Ti, koito si na nebeto" in 1990, which took both the Sofia prize and the filmmakers' union award for best film. "Kladenetsat" followed in 1991 and "Kogato grum udari" in 1995, which won him a directing prize at the Zlatnata Rakla television festival. Most of it was shot with the same cinematographer, Ivan Varimezov, a partnership that has outlasted most Bulgarian marriages in the industry. He joined the management board of Bulgarian National Television in 1999 and now teaches at the NATFIZ academy.
Why this matters for British expats
Then there is "The English Neighbour", his four-part BNT series from 2011, adapted from Mihail Veshim's bestselling novel and filmed in the village of Negushevo. The hero is John Stewart Jones, a retired chemical-industry man from Manchester who moves out with his wife, having picked Bulgaria after a holiday on the coast and a Bulgarian language course. He wants quiet and clean air. He intends to work his own land.
His neighbours decide he is variously a womaniser, a treasure hunter, an enemy and a spy.
The part was written for Ben Cross, who was too busy and suggested Leslie Grantham instead; Grantham, a face no British viewer of a certain age needs introducing, called it one of the hardest jobs of his career. Veshim got the idea from a real story about an Englishman near Kamchia who bought a tractor because the village tractor driver was drunk by lunchtime, then hired himself out to the same villagers who sat in the pub calling him a capitalist.
It is a comedy, and it is affectionate, but it is also the sharpest thing anyone has made about what happens when a British village-house dream meets an actual Bulgarian village. Anyone thinking about settling into a small community here will recognise more of it than is entirely comfortable.
Follow-on reading: the Shumen.UK guides hub.
Sources and further reading
The training under Vulo Radev, the Boyana years, the filmography and the award list come from the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on Docho Bodzhakov. The casting story, the plot and Veshim's account of where the idea came from are set out on the Bulgarian entry for the series itself.