📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Wednesday 2 September
If you watched Eurovision in 2007 you have heard today's birthday girl, whether you remember it or not. Elitsa Todorova was born in Varna on this day in 1977, and the drumming and the folk wail that took Bulgaria to fifth place in Helsinki were hers.
What happened on this day
She trained twice over, which is the thing to understand about her. She took percussion at the Dobri Hristov music school in Varna, then folk singing at the Philip Koutev school in Kotel, the place that has supplied Bulgarian folk ensembles with voices for generations, and then percussion again at the state academy in Sofia. That combination, a trained folk voice attached to a trained pair of hands, is unusual anywhere. In 2003 she started working with the percussionist Stoyan Yankoulov, and the duo they became has spent two decades pushing traditional instruments somewhere they were not designed to go, mixing authentic folk with jazz and drum and bass.
The famous part came in 2007, when their song Water won the national selection and went to Helsinki. It came through the semi-final, which no Bulgarian entry had ever managed, and finished fifth, which no Bulgarian entry has beaten. They went back to Eurovision in 2013 in Malmo with a different song. Alongside the performing she designs and builds drums, and has a patent in her own name for one of them, the Cosmic Tree, which she premiered in front of a couple of thousand Bulgarians in folk costume at the Olympic Stadium in Berlin in 2011. She has an illustrated autobiography out too, published in 2021.
Towns celebrating today
Белица (BEH-lee-tsa), a town of under three thousand in the south west between Rila and the Rhodopes, has one of the more affecting places in the country just outside it: a sanctuary for former dancing bears, run as part of the work of the Four Paws foundation. The practice of taking bears round the villages on a chain is gone, and the animals that survived it live out their lives there. If you have any interest in animal welfare in Bulgaria, it is the place the story ends well.
Димитровград (dee-MEE-trov-grad) marks today for the plainest possible reason: it is the day it was invented. Construction started in May 1947, most of the work done by youth volunteers who came from all over the country, and on 2 September 1947 Georgi Dimitrov formally announced that the place existed. Three villages were merged to make it. It was designed from nothing as a socialist model city and an industrial centre, it carries the name of the country's first communist leader, and today it has getting on for thirty thousand people in it.
Why this matters for British expats
Eurovision is one of the few cultural events the whole of Europe watches at once, which makes it rare common ground. Bulgarians remember 2007 the way they remember few things, because it was the first time the country got out of a semi-final at all, and the woman who did it was born on this date. It is a genuinely useful thing to have in your pocket. And the two towns give you the country's range in one day: a bear sanctuary in the mountains cleaning up after a cruelty that is now illegal, and a city that exists because a communist leader announced it into being on a Tuesday in 1947. Both are worth the drive, for very different reasons.
Sources and further reading
Todorova's training, her work with Yankoulov and the drums she has patented come from her entries on Bulgarian Wikipedia and the English one, which carries the Eurovision placings. Belitsa's bear sanctuary and Dimitrovgrad's founding are drawn from those towns' own Wikipedia articles in both languages.