📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Thursday 22 October
Zlatyu Boyadzhiev left his commercial school after a year, wrote court summonses, slipped off to Burgas without telling his family and spent a while as a postman, and still became, in Bulgarian Wikipedia's words, one of the most original Bulgarian artists of the 20th century. It was quite a route to the easel.
What happened on this day
Zlatyu Boyadzhiev was born on 22 October 1903 in the village of Brezovo, today a small town in Plovdiv Province. His father, a comparatively well-off peasant, sent his eldest son to the Commercial High School in Plovdiv, and the boy left after a year because of poor results. Back in Brezovo he worked as an archivist at the district court, writing and delivering summonses, then tired of it and disappeared to Burgas, where he spent a while as a postman. He did eventually finish the school, but never went into trade. Painting arrived in the 1920s, in the studio of the sign-painter Geo Mirchev, where he met Vasil Barakov, and later David Peretz joined them. The three studied at the Academy in Sofia under Professor Tseno Todorov, shared lodgings, and were nicknamed Baratsite by Tsanko Lavrenov. Boyadzhiev graduated in painting in 1932.
His work divides at 1951, when a severe stroke paralysed his right side. After a few years he began painting with his left hand, and the style changed radically: the neoclassical rural scenes of the first period gave way to grotesque imagery, dozens of figures in one composition and expressive colour. If you want a loose British parallel, think of Stanley Spencer and his Cookham, a painter whose home village keeps returning in crowded, slightly strange scenes. Among Boyadzhiev's best-known works are Village of Brezovo, On the Table, Two Weddings, Portrait of My Mother and Family Portrait. He was named a People's Artist and a Hero of Socialist Labour, and he even played a small part as a painter in the film Darvo bez koren. He died in Plovdiv on 2 February 1976.
Why this matters for British expats
This is a painter you can actually go and see. The permanent exhibition in the Old Town of Plovdiv, in the house of Dr Stoyan Chomakov at 18 Saborna Street, holds the largest collection of his work: 74 paintings, mostly from the second period, in a gallery founded in 1984. Bulgarian Wikipedia says his house museum in Brezovo is not open to visitors, so Plovdiv is the place to go, and the Old Town repays the trip anyway. English Wikipedia describes it as an architectural and historical reserve across three hills, on UNESCO's tentative list since 2004, with a Roman theatre that is among the world's best-preserved and still in use. Check opening times before you travel. No Shumen connection turns up in the record, and Plovdiv is well south of us, so treat this one as cultural literacy rather than local pride; our Shumen guide is the better place for that.
Sources and further reading
This piece draws on the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on Zlatyu Boyadzhiev, read alongside the English entry and the pages on the permanent exhibition in Plovdiv, the town of Brezovo and the Old Town of Plovdiv. The Bulgarian page gives his first name as Zlatyu, Zlatyo or Zlati in different places, so I have used the English spelling throughout.