📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Sunday 25 October
Zdravko Milev was born 41 km west of Shumen, in Targovishte, was a chemical engineer by profession and played at six chess Olympiads. He would have turned 97 today.
What happened on this day
Zdravko Milev was born in Targovishte on 25 October 1929. The city, called Eski Dzhumaya until 1934, lies in north-eastern Bulgaria, 41 km west of Shumen. He came up through the Ruse chess school, was a chemical engineer by profession and wrote for the magazine Shakhmatna misal, which Aleksandar Tsvetkov and Mihail Kantardzhiev founded in 1947. Bulgarian Wikipedia calls him the first Bulgarian to win first place at an international tournament, in Bucharest in 1951. In 1952 he became an International Master, the second Bulgarian to do so after Tsvetkov, who had held the title since 1950, and he won the national championship that year and again in 1960 and 1961.
At six chess Olympiads Milev played 78 games, with 28 wins, 36 draws and 14 losses, and took two individual medals: bronze on board six at the 1956 Olympiad in Moscow and silver on board five at the 1964 Olympiad in Tel Aviv. Moscow ran from 31 August to 25 September 1956 with 34 teams entered; in the preliminaries Bulgaria finished in the top three of group 1 behind the Soviet hosts, and the top three of each group went through to Final A. Tel Aviv ran from 2 to 25 November 1964 with 50 teams, and the English page notes it was the first Olympiad with all six continents represented; the Soviet team, led by the world champion Petrosian, took its seventh consecutive gold. The British parallel would be a chemical engineer picked for the national team at six Olympiads. He ended his competitive career in 1965, and a 1961 Sofia book of chess combinations credits him as one of its three authors. He died on 1 January 1984, aged 54.
Why this matters for British expats
If you live in Shumen, Milev's birthplace is practically next door: Targovishte, which Bulgarian Wikipedia puts at 32,524 inhabitants at the end of 2025, is 41 km away, and the trains between Gorna Oryahovitsa and Shumen pass through it, on railway line 2 between Sofia and Varna, in a section built in 1899. Bulgarian Wikipedia's list of the city's sports clubs includes a chess club, Misionis Targovishte, which is worth a question if you play. Tsvetkov's own story is worth knowing: he grew up in an orphanage, won the national title six times, played at four Olympiads, beat Alexander Alekhine, a world champion, in a game at a simultaneous display in Sofia in April 1936 and later coached the Bulgarian women's team that won bronze at Medellin in 1974. Our Shumen guide covers the city 41 km east of Targovishte.
Sources and further reading
This piece draws on the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on Zdravko Milev, read alongside the English entry, the Bulgarian pages on Targovishte and Aleksandar Tsvetkov, and the English pages on the 1956 and 1964 Chess Olympiads. Milev's own pages are short, so the Olympiad venues and the Targovishte details come from those neighbouring pages.