Most British expats have walked past the name Samuil without it registering: a village signpost on the road west, a street name, a bloke at the builders' merchant. Today the name belongs to all of them. 20 August is the name day for everyone in Bulgaria called Самуил, and the man standing behind it held what was left of this country together for seventeen years while the most effective soldier in Europe tried to take it off him.
What happened on this day
The open record for 20 August in Bulgaria is thinner than most days. There is a 1997 World Cup qualifier, Bulgaria against Israel in Sofia, sitting in the football databases without even a Wikipedia page to its name, and I am not going to pretend I know how it finished: the surviving entry gives the fixture and the date and stops there. So the day goes to the name it actually belongs to.
Tsar Samuil ruled the First Bulgarian Empire from 997 until his death on 6 October 1014, having run its armies for two decades before that. He was the first ruler of the Cometopuli, a nickname the Byzantine chroniclers hung on the family that translates, rather bluntly, as the sons of the count. The count was his father, a provincial governor the Byzantine sources call Nicholas, and here is the part that ought to interest anyone living in this province: Nicholas had close ties to the royal court at Preslav, twenty kilometres down the road from Shumen. The family story starts in our back garden, and only moves southwest after the Byzantines took Preslav in 971.
What Samuil did with the wreckage is why the name still carries weight. He moved his capital to Ohrid and made it the seat of the Bulgarian Patriarchate, which is not the housekeeping of a man who expects to lose. On 17 August 986 he caught the emperor Basil II in the mountains at the Trajan's Gates pass and routed him.
The ending is the part every Bulgarian schoolchild can recite. After the battle of Kleidion in 1014, Basil II had the captured Bulgarian soldiers blinded, leaving one man in every hundred with a single eye to lead the rest home, then sent them back to their tsar. Samuil is said to have had a heart attack at the sight of them and died on 6 October 1014, two months after the battle. Most Bulgarians under 40 could not date the Trajan's Gates ambush for you. Every one of them knows about the blinded army.
Today's name days
Only one name is out today, and it is not a small one. Самуил (sah-moo-EEL) celebrates. The saint behind it is the prophet Samuel, the last of the Judges of Israel and the man who anointed both Saul and David; the Catholic, Orthodox and Lutheran calendars all keep his feast on 20 August, which is why the Bulgarian name lands here and not somewhere else in the year.
If you know one, the line is честит имен ден (chesh-TEET ee-MEN den), and the rest of the celebration vocabulary is in our Bulgarian phrasebook.
Here is the bit that catches Brits out, every single time. In the UK you wait to be invited. On a Bulgarian name day the celebrant keeps an open house, and friends, neighbours and colleagues simply turn up unannounced through the day. That is the correct behaviour, not an imposition. The one rule that genuinely matters is that you never arrive empty-handed: cake, banitsa, chocolate or a bottle of wine all work perfectly well. Flowers are welcome too, in odd numbers only. Even numbers are for funerals.
Why this matters for British expats
The payoff is that the map starts to read. Cross the provincial line west of Shumen into Razgrad province and you reach Samuil, a village up on the Ludogorie plateau that is the administrative centre of its own municipality and a genuine railway junction, with lines running towards Ruse, Varna and Silistra. It was called Ashiklar until a ministerial order published on 14 August 1934 renamed it after the tsar, and there is a statue of him in the middle of the village, near the station. Its municipality runs straight up against the Shumen provincial boundary.
If you do go, the village fair falls in the first week of September and market day is Saturday, worth knowing before you drive out expecting either of them today.
The wider point is that Bulgarian place names, street names and name days are one connected system, and once you can read one you can read the rest. Preslav, just down the road, was the capital Samuil's family served. The village out west carries the name of the man who inherited what was left of the country after Preslav fell. Learn one Bulgarian name day and you have not picked up a piece of trivia, you have picked up a working key to the map you drive across every week.
Sources and further reading
The account of the reign, the ambush at the Trajan's Gates and the aftermath of Kleidion draw on the Bulgarian Wikipedia biography of the tsar and the fuller English Wikipedia entry. The village, its 1934 renaming and its statue come from the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry for Samuil, and the feast date from the standard Orthodox calendar for 20 August.