📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Tuesday 29 September
She helped start the women's movement in this country, she co-founded its first socialist journal, and her brother wrote the words of the national anthem. Vela Blagoeva was born on this date in 1859, and almost nobody outside Bulgaria has heard of her.
What happened on this day
She was born Viktoria Atanasova Zhivkova in Tarnovo, the youngest of five children, in a family that turned out to be improbably consequential. One brother, Georgi Zhivkov, served three times as head of the National Assembly. Another, Nikola Zhivkov, founded the first kindergarten in Bulgaria and wrote the lyrics of "Shumi Maritsa", the national anthem from 1886 onwards. Their father died while they were children and the older brothers raised the rest.
She finished the girls' middle school in Tarnovo and the Gabrovo Girls' School in 1871, then taught in Berkovitsa, Istanbul, Tarnovo and Varna. In 1874 she and Nikola spent their summer holiday raising money to build a girls' school and a church in Varna. During the Russo-Turkish war she nursed at the 50th field hospital at Svishtov.
Then Russia. A scholarship from the Slavic Charity Committee of St Petersburg took her to the Mariinsky girls' high school, where she qualified in 1881; she taught in Edirne and Bitola, then went back to St Petersburg from 1882 to 1884 for the Bestuzhev Courses, the closest thing Russian women then had to a university. She was there during the student agitation against the autocracy, and there she met a St Petersburg University student named Dimitar Blagoev, whom she married.
Back in Sofia from 1884 she taught at the Exemplary Girls' School, and in July 1885 she and Dimitar founded the first socialist journal published in Bulgaria. In 1901 she was among the founders of the Bulgarian Women's Union, and in 1903 she organised the first socialist women's organisation and conference the country had seen. She died on 21 July 1921.
Why this matters for British expats
The dates are the interesting part for a British reader. The Bulgarian Women's Union was founded in 1901. Britain's National Union of Women's Suffrage Societies had been founded in 1897; the Women's Social and Political Union, the Pankhursts' organisation, followed in 1903. Bulgarian women were organising in the same years as British women, in a country that had existed for barely two decades and still had an Ottoman border.
That is worth holding on to, because the assumption a British newcomer usually arrives with is that this part of Europe was somehow behind, catching up later. On this particular question it was not. The other thread is educational: this was a family that built schools, opened the first kindergarten and taught for a living, and the seriousness with which Bulgarians still treat schooling has roots that go back to exactly these people.
For more of the practical picture, see the Shumen.UK cultural calendar.
Sources and further reading
The childhood in Tarnovo, the teaching posts, the years in Russia and the founding of the Women's Union come from the English Wikipedia entry on Vela Blagoeva, which is unusually full, with the Bulgarian entry covering her writing and later political work in more detail.