📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Thursday 21 May
What happened on this day
Revolutionaries rarely get the cinematic deaths their biographies seem to promise. Dimitar Koshtanov spent the first half of his adult life digging a tunnel under an Ottoman bank, plotting anarchist bombings, and running guns as a voivode in the Macedonia-Adrianople highlands. He spent the second half as a building contractor in his hometown, chairing the local chitalishte board. On 21 May 1915, aged 36, he drowned in the Struma River while supervising the construction of a bridge near the village of Pokrovnik.
Born in Gorna Dzhumaya (today's Blagoevgrad) on 18 March 1879, Koshtanov studied engineering in Switzerland but never finished. His anarchist convictions pulled him into the orbit of VMORO (the Internal Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organisation), where he operated as a terrorist attached to the Central Committee. In 1900, he joined the gemidzhii, the bomb-makers and tunnel-diggers. When three comrades (Petar Mandzhukov, Petar Sokolov, and Pavel Shatev) were arrested mid-tunnel, Koshtanov and Aleksandar Kiprov replaced them, continuing to dig under the Ottoman Bank in Constantinople. The Turkish authorities intercepted correspondence between Koshtanov and Hristo Matov in 1901 and sealed the warehouse entrance, ending the plot. Koshtanov escaped, re-surfacing in 1902 as a voivode in the Ahıçelebi region.
After the Young Turk revolution of 1908, Koshtanov pivoted hard. He helped found the People's Federative Party (Bulgarian section) as a delegate from Gorna Dzhumaya, served on the Party Council, and went into the building trade. By 1913, he was the driving force behind the restoration of the local chitalishte, "Saglasie" (Harmony), and served as its chairman. The surviving record offers no detail on what turned a tunnel-digging anarchist into a civic-minded contractor, but the transition was complete. The bridge-building contract that killed him was ordinary municipal infrastructure work, the kind of project a respectable small-town entrepreneur takes on to keep the business running.
The Struma claimed him on an otherwise unremarkable Thursday in May, and the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry preserves no further context around the drowning. His career arc reads less like a revolutionary's tale and more like a post-Ottoman normalisation story: a generation of men who spent their twenties fighting empires and their thirties fixing roads.
Today's name days
Konstantin and Elena are the headline pair, honouring the Roman Emperor Constantine the Great and his mother, Empress Helena, who tradition credits with finding the True Cross in Jerusalem. The day is one of the most name-heavy in the Bulgarian calendar, with 19 variants celebrating. Famous bearers of the name Konstantin include the prime minister Konstantin Stoilov (served 1894–1899, oversaw significant railway expansion) and the conductor Konstantin Iliev (long-time music director of the Sofia Philharmonic). Elena remains one of the most common Bulgarian forenames for women; the coastal resort Sveti Konstantin i Elena (Saints Constantine and Helena), just north of Varna, takes its name from today's feast and becomes a pilgrimage and celebration hub every 21 May.
Around 17 other variants also celebrate today, including Kostadin, Kostadinka, Stanimir, Stanimira, Dinko, Eli, Elin, Elka, Ilona, Koycho, Kosta, Konstanca, Kuncho, Lenko, Stanka, and Trayko. The Bulgarian name-days guide has the full list plus saint origin stories.
The open-house rule
If you're used to British etiquette, where turning up unannounced is a mild social crime, Bulgarian name days operate on a completely different system. On a major name day like Konstantin or Elena, the celebrant keeps an open house. Friends, neighbours, colleagues, extended family, all turn up unannounced throughout the day. No RSVP, no invitation required, the door is simply open.
The golden rule, non-negotiable: never arrive empty-handed. Cake, banitsa, chocolate, wine, or flowers (always an odd number, never even) are the standard offerings. The celebrant provides coffee, rakija, and often a spread of meze. The whole ritual functions as a distributed social audit: who remembered, who brought what, who stayed for two minutes versus two hours. It's the kind of thing that looks chaotic to an outsider and feels intensely meaningful to anyone who grew up with it.
Towns celebrating today
Elena (population around 5,000) sits in the Balkan Mountains, Veliko Tarnovo province, and is one of Bulgaria's best-preserved National Revival towns. The historic centre is a museum of 19th-century Bulgarian architecture: steep cobbled streets, Revival-era stone houses with overhanging upper floors, and the Ilarion Makariopolski House Museum, dedicated to the cleric who campaigned for an independent Bulgarian church. Elena's municipal day coincides with its patron saints, Constantine and Helena, and the town typically holds a procession from the Church of the Assumption to the central square, followed by folk music and a communal meal.
Kostandovo (population around 3,500) is a small town in the Rhodope foothills, Pazardzhik province, named after a local notable called Kostan. It sits on the railway line between Plovdiv and the Greek border, an unremarkable service-town vibe with one claim to modest fame: it's a processing hub for rose oil during the late-May harvest, when petals from nearby fields arrive by the tonne. The municipal day here is quieter than Elena's, often just a mayoral speech and a small fair in the town square.
Pazardzhik (population around 65,000) is the regional capital, a bustling Thracian-plain city an hour east of Sofia on the main motorway to Greece. Its central pedestrian zone, Tsar Boris III Boulevard, is lined with cafés and shops, and the Stanislav Dospevski Art Gallery houses one of Bulgaria's better provincial fine-art collections. Pazardzhik's signature is its market: a sprawling open-air affair every day of the week, selling everything from fresh Thracian vegetables to knock-off jeans. On 21 May, expect a bigger-than-usual crowd in the central square, a church service, and stalls selling grilled meats and sweets.
Why this matters for British expats
It's a working Thursday. The banks are open, the roads into Shumen are clear of festival traffic, and you can go about your week entirely undisturbed. If your colleague's called Konstantin or Elena, today is the day they expect to be remembered.
The practical takeaway is the name-day etiquette. British culture doesn't have a direct equivalent: birthdays are private, Christmas and Easter are fixed, and the idea of an annual celebration tied to your forename rather than your birth date doesn't register. In Bulgaria, major name days like today function as semi-public events. If you work with a Konstantin, a quick "честит имен ден" (chesh-TEET ee-MEN den, "happy name day") and a box of baklava or a packet of good coffee earns you a disproportionate amount of goodwill. Turning up empty-handed, or worse, forgetting entirely, marks you as culturally inattentive.
The phrasebook section on Shumen.UK covers the standard name-day greetings if you need them. The open-house tradition means you won't necessarily get a formal invitation; if you know a Konstantin well enough, you're expected to know the door's open. The bigger the name day, the more this applies. Konstantin and Elena sit near the top of the frequency list, so a significant chunk of the population is celebrating today.
Dimitar Koshtanov's story doesn't land with immediate practical relevance, but it's the kind of thing that earns you quiet respect over coffee if you mention it. Revolutionary-turned-contractor is a common enough post-Ottoman arc, and most Bulgarians know the broad strokes of VMORO history even if the individual voivodes blur together. Knowing one or two of them exist, and that their biographies rarely ended heroically, signals you're engaging with the country's actual history rather than just the tourist highlights. It's the difference between living here and visiting on a long stay.
Sources and further reading
The details on Dimitar Koshtanov's revolutionary career and civic turn draw on the Bulgarian Wikipedia biography. The town profiles come from the standard regional municipal listings. Name-day frequency and etiquette guidance follows the Bulgarian cultural calendar at Nestful.