📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Sunday 23 August
A quiet Sunday in the Bulgarian calendar, and a birthday most of the country would walk straight past. On this day in 1934, in Sofia, a girl was born whose name you will not know, and whose work a generation could quote without ever knowing who wrote it. Today is for the people in the small print.
What happened on this day
Dora Smedovska, born Todorka Petrova Smedovska in Sofia on 23 August 1934, took the least likely route into cinema her era offered: she completed a law degree at Sofia University in 1958, then spent her whole working life nowhere near a courtroom. The Bulgarian record lists her as a screenwriter and director, a first assistant director in the industry's own precise phrasing, and from 1975 to 1986 she worked at the Boyana feature-film studio, the state studio in Sofia. She closed her career at the Sofia Press agency, working as a director there between 1987 and 1990.
It is as an animation screenwriter that her name survives at all. Her credits include Umno selo (Clever Village, 1972), Vreme za obyad (Lunchtime, 1975) and Intsident (Incident, 1979), and the record then adds "and many others" and simply stops. That shrug is doing a lot of work. The surviving public record on Smedovska is thin: a few lines of Bulgarian Wikipedia and an IMDB entry are most of what reached the open web, and pretending otherwise would mean making things up. Most Bulgarians under 40 couldn't put a face to the name either. What survives is the work, which is the quiet fate of nearly everyone who writes animation: the films outlive the credits.
Today's name days
Today belongs to Вълко (VUHL-ko), one of the old Bulgarian protective names built on вълк, the wolf: folk naming logic held that a child carrying a strong animal's name would carry some of its strength too. If you know a Valko, today he keeps open house. In Bulgaria the name-day celebrant hosts rather than being taken out, friends and neighbours are welcome to simply appear at the door, and the one unbreakable rule is that nobody appears with empty hands. Wine, chocolates or a banitsa all pass muster; add честит имен ден (chesh-TEET ee-MEN den) as you hand it over and you have done the day properly. There is a fuller set of greetings in the Shumen.UK phrasebook.
Why this matters for British expats
Cultural literacy, mostly. Every country's childhood has credits nobody reads, and Bulgaria's animated shorts of that era are exactly that: the British can hum their way through Camberwick Green without naming a soul who made it, and Bulgarians of a certain age can do the same with the cartoons Smedovska and her colleagues wrote at Boyana. Knowing the trade existed, and that it ran on people like a law graduate who swapped courtrooms for storyboards, makes Bulgarian television retrospectives and museum programmes suddenly legible. And if there is a Valko anywhere in your Bulgarian life, you now know precisely what to do about him.
Sources and further reading
The biographical details here draw on the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on Dora Smedovska, which also carries her fuller filmography. The name-day listing comes from the standard Bulgarian name-days calendar.