📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Wednesday 28 October
A village schoolteacher wrote verses that Bulgarians still sing as folk songs, then went on to run the country's railways, posts and telegraphs. That is Tsanko Tserkovski, born on 28 October 1869, and I will admit his name meant very little to me until I started reading up on him.
What happened on this day
Tserkovski was born in Byala Cherkva, in the Tarnovo region, and trained as a teacher, finishing at the teachers' school in Silistra in 1891. That same year the magazine Den ("Day") printed his poem "Molepsaniy", which made him plenty of friends and plenty of enemies. He began as a socialist poet, took his material from village life, and wrote so much in the spirit of folk song that poems such as "I Wander Through the Fields" (Iz poleto az se skitam) are now sung as folk songs. His stories are close in theme to those of Mihalaki Georgiev and Todor Vlaykov, he wrote the words of children's songs such as "Prela baba" for the composer Mihail Kochev, and he published under a run of pen names, from plain Selyak (a peasant) to the Turkish-sounding Ibrishim Efendi.
Politics pulled him in just as hard. He joined the Bulgarian Workers' Social Democratic Party in 1898, and on 20 September 1899 he published an appeal to Bulgarian farmers in the paper Selski vestnik ("Village Newspaper"), becoming one of the initiators and first leaders of the Bulgarian Agrarian National Union (BZNS in Bulgarian). He sat in eight National Assemblies between 1901 and 1923. In October 1918 he joined Aleksandar Malinov's coalition, which aimed to take Bulgaria out of the First World War, and stayed on under Teodor Teodorov and then Aleksandar Stamboliyski, holding public works, railways, posts and telegraphs, and education among his portfolios. Picture a Poet Laureate who also ran the railways and the Post Office, and you have the rough shape of his CV. The coup of 9 June 1923 toppled Stamboliyski, and Tserkovski was arrested and sent to prison, where he wrote a novel that appeared only after his death. Freed in January 1925, he was arrested again on 16 April, the day a communist bomb killed more than 200 people in Sofia's St Nedelya Church, and was released on 21 March 1926 after an acquittal. He came out half blind and in broken health, and died on 2 May, six weeks later, aged 56. Five years after his death, Elin Pelin wrote a piece headed simply "Tsanko Tserkovski" for the newspaper Literaturen glas.
Why this matters for British expats
Bulgarian street names do a lot of quiet teaching, and his is a fair test of whether you are listening. A street in Sofia's Lozenets district, another in Blagoevgrad and the 52nd Primary School in the Boyana district all carry his name, and the word to look for on the sign is улица (OO-lee-tsa), which you will also meet in the one-way-street entry of our Bulgarian phrasebook. Shumen cannot claim him: I found nothing in the sources that puts him here, and his home ground was the Tarnovo region to our west. For a British yardstick, think of Robert Burns, the ploughman poet who wrote in the idiom of songs the countryside already knew. Tserkovski did much the same for the Bulgarian village, with one difference: Burns never held a cabinet post.
Sources and further reading
The biography here draws on the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry for Tsanko Tserkovski, with his birth date checked against Wikipedia's page for 28 October. The background on the 1923 coup and the St Nedelya Church bombing comes from the English Wikipedia articles on those two events.