They put her in a furnace and left her there for five days, and she walked out unharmed. That, at least, is how the tradition tells it. Today, 24 July, is the feast of St Christina of Tyre, one of the early Church's more stubbornly unkillable martyrs, and the saint behind every Hristina and Kristina you will meet in Bulgaria. Though, as we will get to, when they actually celebrate is a small puzzle worth knowing.
What happened on this day
St Christina the Great Martyr was, by tradition, a third-century girl from Tyre, the daughter of the Roman governor, groomed to become a pagan priestess and shut away with a room full of gold and silver idols to worship. Instead, the story goes, she looked at the stars, decided that lifeless statues could not have made any of it, and smashed the idols to pieces. Given that her own father was the governor, this was not a quiet act of teenage rebellion.
What follows is the standard, grim shape of a martyr's tale, escalating tortures met with escalating survival, including the famous five days in a red-hot furnace, until her executioners fell back on a sword. The Orthodox Church remembers her as a Great Martyr, and her feast is fixed on 24 July. Whatever one makes of the furnace, the historical kernel, a young woman killed for refusing the state religion, is real enough and old enough to have travelled all the way into the modern Bulgarian phone book.
The names, and the small puzzle
Here is the part that trips up even long-term expats. The names in her family, Hristina, Kristina, and the male Hristiyan and Kristiyan, all share a root with Hristos, Christ. And in Bulgaria the big celebration for that whole family of names is not today at all. It falls at Christmas, on 25 December, tied to the Nativity, alongside Hristo and the other Christ-derived names.
So 24 July is genuinely St Christina's own feast, and some calendars do mark it as a name day, but if you wish a Bulgarian Hristina a happy name day today, do not be surprised if she tells you her real one is in December. The polite move is simply to ask which day she keeps. The full spread of variants, Hristina, Hristin, Kristina, Kristin and Kristiyan, lives in our Bulgarian name-days guide.
When the day does come, whichever one it is, the etiquette is the one that always catches Brits out. A Bulgarian name day means open house: people drop in without an invitation, and you never arrive empty-handed. Cake, banitsa, chocolates or wine all work, and flowers for the women in odd numbers, never even.
The obvious Bulgarian bearer to hang the name on is Hristina Morfova (1887 to 1936), the soprano from Stara Zagora who trained in Prague, sang across Europe and became a fixture of the Sofia National Opera before teaching at the Academy of Music. She died far too young, at 47, in a car accident. If you want a face for the name, hers is a good one.
Why this matters for British expats
The real takeaway is not the martyrdom, it is the naming logic. Once you notice that Hristo, Hristina, Hristiyan and Kristina all orbit the same word, Christ, and mostly celebrate together at Christmas, a whole cluster of Bulgarian names suddenly makes sense as a set rather than a random list. It is a small key, but it unlocks a lot of introductions.
There is no St Christina shrine to send you to in Shumen, so this is a day of names rather than places. But the greeting is the same wherever you are, and if you want to get it right when the day comes, our phrasebook has the pronunciation of честит имен ден (chess-TEET ee-MEN den).
Sources and further reading
The saint's life here follows the Orthodox tradition as recorded in the standard church calendars, and the biographical detail on the singer draws on the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on Hristina Morfova. The name-day dates come from the standard Bulgarian name-days calendar.