📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Saturday 29 August
Bulgaria calls him the patriarch of its army, and he died on this day in 1942, at eighty-nine. If you have ever wondered why this country makes such a fuss of 6 September, the short answer is Danail Nikolaev.
What happened on this day
He was born in 1852 in Bolgrad, then the Russian Empire and now Ukraine, into a Bessarabian Bulgarian family who were refugees from Tarnovo. He finished the Bulgarian school there in 1871 and the infantry cadet school in Odessa in 1875, and when he heard that Serbia was preparing for war he asked to be released from the Russian army to go and fight. His divisional general refused and sent him on leave instead, which he spent fighting anyway. In the war of 1877, the one that ended Ottoman rule here, he commanded a company of the Bulgarian Volunteer Corps and distinguished himself at Shipka and Sheynovo. He became the first colonel the Bulgarian army ever had, and later the first officer to reach General of the Infantry, its highest rank.
The night that made him, though, was 6 September 1885. Military units under his command took control of Plovdiv and removed Gavril Krastevich, the governor-general of Eastern Rumelia, which is how the province tore itself away from the Ottoman Empire and joined the Principality of Bulgaria, flatly against what the Great Powers had decided at Berlin. He then commanded a corps in the war with Serbia that the Unification provoked. He served as war minister, put down the pro-Russian officers' revolts of 1887 and had the mutinous units broken up and their colours burned. My favourite detail is smaller: at the reception for Prince Ferdinand's wedding, someone's vanity meant the order of precedence was not observed, Nikolaev considered his honour slighted, walked out of the palace and resigned.
Today's name days
The day belongs to Anastas and Anastasia, from the Greek anastasis, resurrection, so the name means risen, and to Asen, which is the dynastic name of the medieval Bulgarian tsars and spread widely after Paisiy's history in the eighteenth century. One scholarly reading gives it an Old Bulgarian sense of noble wolf. The famous bearer is Ivan Asen II, who you will meet again two paragraphs down.
Ten names are celebrating: Сийка, Сия, Тана, Анастас, Асен, Сиян, Таско, Анастасия, Ася and Настя. Our Bulgarian name-days guide has the rest of the year. The etiquette runs backwards from ours: the person with the name day feeds you, not the other way round, the door stays open without an invitation, and you never cross it empty-handed.
Towns celebrating today
Криводол (kri-vo-DOL), a town of 2,487 in the north west, has something few places can claim: a whole prehistoric culture named after it, the copper-age Krivodol culture. Nearby at Gradeshnitsa they turned up a clay tablet marked with signs that the Bulgarian record calls a specimen of the first writing in Europe. It sits in the National History Museum.
Кричим (kri-CHEEM) sits where the Rhodope foothills meet the Thracian plain, with the Vacha river running through it. Ivan Asen II took the place in 1230, and a stone survives there inscribed, in translation, "On this stone sat Tsar Asen, when he conquered Krichim". On a day when half the Asens in Bulgaria are celebrating, that is a decent coincidence.
Why this matters for British expats
Today is also Секновение, when the church remembers the beheading of John the Baptist, and the folk calendar treats it as one of the worst days of the year. The rules are specific and people still keep them: no red fruit or vegetables, no red wine, and no new work begun, because the day of the severed head is a day for cuts and wounds. It also marks the end of summer, after which the springs and rivers are held to have turned too cold for swimming, which matches the weather here more closely than you might expect. And in eight days it will be 6 September, the country will be in a good mood about it, and you will know exactly whose night that was.
Sources and further reading
Nikolaev's career comes from his entry on Bulgarian Wikipedia, with the English entry confirming the dates and the rank. The account of the Unification night, the Секновение customs, the two towns and the origins of today's names are drawn from their own Bulgarian Wikipedia articles, and the list of names from the Bulgarian name-day calendar.