📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Tuesday 25 August
Ten league titles. An Olympic medal. Fifty-eight caps for the national side. Say the name Kiril Rakarov to most British expats here, though, and you will get a polite blank. Today is the day to fix that: on 25 August 2006 Bulgarian football lost one of its steadiest servants, and his career reads like a short history of an entire era.
What happened on this day
Rakarov died in Sofia on this day in 2006. He was born in Gotse Delchev in 1932, down in Bulgaria's far southwest, about as far from Shumen as you can get without crossing a border, and he began at a small-town side in Pavlikeni gloriously named Cherveno Zname, Red Banner, which tells you the decade before any date does. CSKA Sofia signed him in 1951 and kept him until 1964: 190 league appearances, 17 goals from right back, and a trophy haul that reads like a misprint. Ten national championships between 1952 and 1962. Three cups, won in the years when the trophy carried the name of the Soviet Army. A run to the last eight of the European Cup in 1957, part of 18 appearances and two goals in that competition all told. The Bulgarian record describes a defender with a ferocious, accurate strike and an unflappable game, and the state agreed, naming him a Merited Master of Sport in 1961.
The international ledger is just as full. Fifty-eight caps and a single goal between 1953 and 1962, two appearances at the World Cup in Chile in 1962, and, the entry older fans reach for first, a bronze medal from the Melbourne Olympics of 1956. When the boots came off he moved to the dugout, assisting Manol Manolov at CSKA in the mid-seventies and taking charge of Cherno More in Varna during the 1976/77 season. Sofia and Pavlikeni both made him an honorary citizen, and he spent his later years chairing CSKA's veterans' club: the elder statesman of the армейците (ar-MEY-tsi-te), the army men, as the club's faithful are known.
Why this matters for British expats
Football remains one of the quickest ways into a real conversation in Bulgaria, and the CSKA of Rakarov's years is the reference point older men reach for. The useful thing to know is that CSKA was the army's team, in a system where the big institutions ran the big clubs; that single fact decodes a remarkable share of the football arguments you will overhear. In 13 years here I have learned that recognising one name from the old sides gets you further than encyclopaedic knowledge of the English game, and if your Bulgarian needs work before you wade into the argument itself, our Bulgarian phrasebook will at least get you to the final whistle. Next time you pass a table of pensioners dissecting the weekend's results over coffee, you now know the name to drop.
Sources and further reading
The career above is drawn from Rakarov's entry on Bulgarian Wikipedia, which records the matches, the medals and the years with the loving precision Bulgarian football history tends to attract. The shorter English Wikipedia entry confirms the honours, and both are worth a few minutes if today has put you in the mood for the black-and-white era of the Bulgarian game.