📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Friday 2 October
A Bulgarian poet who volunteered for a war he was not obliged to fight, said he would not come back, and was killed in a battle with British troops. Of all the On This Day stories, this is the one that ought to stop a British expat mid-coffee.
What happened on this day
Dimcho Debelyanov, a sub-lieutenant commanding a company, was killed at around ten in the morning on 2 October 1916, near Gorno Karadzhovo on the Macedonian front (today Monoklisia, in northern Greece). He was 29 years and six months old. On the night of 30 September his company, handed to him only a few days earlier, had gone into action against the British; English Wikipedia is more specific and names an Irish division. He was buried the next day in the yard of the Bulgarian church at Demir Hisar (Valovishta, now Sidirokastro) and was later awarded the Order for Bravery, fourth class, posthumously.
Nobody made him go. He was not liable for mobilisation, yet he pressed to be sent to the front, and on 29 January 1916 left as a volunteer with a line that reads rather like his own epitaph: "I am going to do my patriotic duty and I know I will not return; I will flash like a star and go out." He was born Dincho, in Koprivshtitsa on 28 March 1887, the sixth and last child of an abadzhiya, a tailor who worked in aba, a coarse woollen cloth. His father's death in 1896 took the family to Plovdiv, which he later called "the sorrowful city", and then to Sofia. His first published poems, in the magazine Savremennost in 1906, came out signed Dimcho, whether by design or a typesetter's slip, and the misprint became his name. Pencho Slaveykov was his idol; he translated Baudelaire, Verlaine and even Shakespeare, and wrote satire under pen names such as Taft and Sulbatyor. At the front his style moved from dreamy symbolism towards plain realism, and friends gathered the poems into a two-volume collection, Stihotvoreniya, in 1920.
Why this matters for British expats
We have our own war poets, and Debelyanov belongs on the same shelf as Wilfred Owen, with one uncomfortable difference: the men across the line from him were ours. That makes him a surprisingly good way into how Bulgarians remember the First World War, which is quietly and with a lot of feeling (our guide to Bulgarian funerals and remembrance explains the customs). In 1931 the literary circle Zhivo Slovo brought his bones home to Koprivshtitsa, and in 1934 Ivan Lazarov's statue "Mother" was placed on the grave: a village woman sitting on her doorstep, head in hand, first inspired by Lila Paraleeva, who had lost a husband and a son to the wars. When she died, another grandmother, Lala Dushkova, sat for it instead. Koprivshtitsa is a long drive west of us in Shumen, but it is the grave to find, and the Dimcho Debelyanov Memorial House is in the same town. Go in August and you will catch the days held in his honour, when the national literary prize carrying his name is awarded. Learn one line before you go: "Помниш ли, помниш ли" (POM-neesh lee, POM-neesh lee), "Do you remember, do you remember", the opening of one of his elegies.
Sources and further reading
Bulgarian Wikipedia's entry on Dimcho Debelyanov tells the story of his last months and his grave in the most detail, down to the two grandmothers behind the statue. The English-language Wikipedia page adds the Irish division and the Antarctic headland, Debelyanov Point on Robert Island, that now carries his name, while Wikipedia's pages on Koprivshtitsa cover the memorial house and the August commemorations.