📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Sunday 21 June
Ask a Bulgarian of a certain age what a free election is actually worth, and you'll often get a longer, more careful answer than you expected. The reason is buried in today's date. On 21 June 1931, Bulgarians went to the polls in a genuinely competitive vote, and then didn't get to do it properly again for another 59 years.
What happened on this day
The 1931 election filled the seats of the XXIII Ordinary National Assembly, and the winners were the Popular Bloc, a coalition stitched together from the Democratic Party, BZNS 'Vrabcha 1', the National Liberal Party, the Radical Party and BZNS 'Stara Zagora'. Turnout was a striking 85%, the kind of number most modern democracies can only dream about.
Coalitions built from five squabbling partners rarely age well, and this one was no exception. Aleksandar Malinov of the Democratic Party took the prime minister's chair, even though the agrarian wing had actually won the larger share of the coalition's seats. That awkwardness set the tone. Within months Malinov had stepped sideways to chair parliament and handed the premiership to Nikola Mushanov, who spent the next three years refereeing the power struggle between the two big blocs while the global economic crisis bit hard.
Here is where the story stops being a parliamentary soap opera and turns genuinely grim. In May 1934 a circle of army officers and the political group known as Zveno staged a coup, dissolved the National Assembly, banned the political parties outright and began governing by royal decree under Tsar Boris III. The 1931 vote, it turned out, had been the last fully free, openly partisan election the country would hold. The next election Bulgarians would recognise as genuinely free did not arrive until 1990, with a world war and decades of communist rule in between.
It is a sobering thing to sit with on a quiet Sunday. The democratic habit that Britain has practised more or less without a break for centuries was switched off here, and only switched back on within living memory.
Today's name days
Two names mark their day today: Yavor (явор, the sycamore or plane tree) and Yasen (ясен, the ash tree). Both belong to the cheerful modern crop of Bulgarian nature-names rather than the long roster of saints' days, so they don't carry a centuries-old church feast behind them, just a pair of solid, woody, very Bulgarian forenames.
The etiquette still applies, though. If you know a Yavor or a Yasen, today is when they expect to be remembered, and the golden rule of any Bulgarian name day holds firm: never turn up empty-handed. A cake, a banitsa or a bottle of something covers it, and a cheerful "честит имен ден" (chess-TEET ee-MEN den, "happy name day") seals the deal. Our phrasebook has the rest of the greetings if you want to go a step further.
Why this matters for British expats
None of this changes your Sunday in any practical sense, but it does explain something you will feel if you live here long enough. Bulgarians who remember 1990 know exactly what it meant to queue for a ballot that finally counted, and that memory still shapes how they talk about politics, with a mixture of cynicism and stubborn investment that can seem contradictory until you know the history behind it. If you live in Shumen, you'll have seen the modern version of that re-start: the polling stations that appear in school halls and community centres on election weekends, and the party posters going up on the lampposts.
There is a quieter wrinkle for us, too. As a British expat you can follow every Bulgarian election, argue about it in the café, despair at the coalition arithmetic, and still not have a vote in it, unless you take Bulgarian citizenship. Permanent residence does not come with a national ballot paper. It is one of the less-discussed realities of building a life here: you put down real roots in a democracy you don't formally get a say in. Knowing that 1931 was the hinge, and 1990 the reopening, at least lets you follow the conversation with the right weight.
File alongside this in your expat mental map: the Bulgarian name-days guide.
Sources and further reading
The account of the vote and the slide that followed it draws on the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on the 1931 parliamentary election, with the fuller political aftermath set out on the English Wikipedia article for the same vote. The two tree-names celebrating today come from the standard Bulgarian name-days calendar.