Here is a line that will buy you an hour of conversation with almost any Bulgarian man over sixty. In the early 1980s, CSKA Sofia knocked the reigning European champions out of the European Cup in two consecutive seasons. First Nottingham Forest, then Liverpool. The manager who did it was born on this date in 1945.
What happened on this day
Asparuh Nikodimov, known to everyone as Paro, was born on 21 August 1945 in the village of Bogyovtsi, west of Sofia. He started out at a neighbourhood side in the Gevgeliyski quarter of the capital, moved on to Septemvri Sofia as a teenager, and in 1964 signed for CSKA, where he stayed for eleven seasons.
As a player he was a defensive midfielder, and his numbers are the unglamorous sort that tell you a man was picked every single week: 296 league matches and 58 goals between 1964 and 1975, six Bulgarian titles, five cups. He won 25 caps, went to two World Cups, and took a silver medal at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico.
One goal is worth singling out, and British readers will enjoy it for slightly the wrong reasons. At the 1970 World Cup, also in Mexico, Nikodimov scored the opening goal against West Germany. Bulgaria then lost the match by five goals to two, which is the sort of afternoon that gets remembered fondly anyway.
The management is where this turns into a British story. Nikodimov took over at CSKA in 1979 and won four league titles in a row. In the 1980-81 European Cup, CSKA drew Nottingham Forest in the first round. Forest were the holders, and had won the competition twice. CSKA put them out. The next season CSKA drew Liverpool in the quarter-finals. Liverpool were the holders too, and three-time winners of the thing. CSKA put them out as well, and went on to the semi-final.
Knocking out the reigning champions once is a giant-killing that a club dines on for a decade. Doing it twice in a row, against two different English sides, each of them the defending champion at the moment CSKA eliminated them, is a different order of achievement altogether. The Bulgarian record is blunt about it: this was the most remarkable run of results in the club's European history. Most British expats have never heard of Paro Nikodimov. Most Bulgarians over fifty would be astonished that anyone needed telling.
He was pushed out at CSKA in the spring of 1983, worked at Dunav in Ruse and in Tunisia, came back in 1990 and won the title again in 1992, and returned for a third spell in 2001 before being replaced by Luigi Simoni. In 2003 he took Beroe up into the top flight.
Towns celebrating today
Samokov keeps its town day today for Saint Simeon of Samokov, its patron, who was hanged in Sofia on this very date in 1737 for leading a conspiracy against Ottoman rule. He had been metropolitan since 1734, running the diocese from Dupnitsa because Samokov had nothing larger than the small medieval Belyova church to serve in.
What the town is really known for came later: it produced its own school of icon painters, and Zahari Zograf is buried there. It sits at 950 metres between Rila, Plana and Sredna Gora, 60 km from Sofia and 10 km from Borovets, which is how most Brits meet it, as the last town before the ski lifts. The name is industrial rather than devotional: a самоков was the primitive works where mined iron was beaten out into bars. Population 23,741, and its town day is a fair excuse to stop rather than drive through.
Why this matters for British expats
Football is the shortest route into a conversation here, and this is the one that pays a dividend. Mention that CSKA knocked out Forest and then Liverpool, both of them holders, and you have handed a Bulgarian man in his sixties something he has waited years for a foreigner to raise. His answer will also tell you where his family stood, because the cup Nikodimov lifted five times as a player was then called the Cup of the Soviet Army, which tells you most of what you need to know about the era, and because CSKA against Levski is still the line that runs through Bulgarian sport.
There is no Shumen chapter in this one. Nikodimov's life ran between Sofia and the CSKA bench, and the nearest he came to us was a spell coaching Dunav up on the Danube at Ruse. The argument in the cafes of Shumen, though, is exactly the same argument.
Sources and further reading
The career, the caps and the goal against West Germany come from Nikodimov's Bulgarian Wikipedia entry, with the shorter English biography covering the honours. The two European ties are set out on the English pages for the 1980-81 and 1981-82 European Cups, both of which record the English club as the defending champion when CSKA eliminated it.