📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Saturday 30 May
On 30 May 2023, in Sofia, Boris Lukanov died at the age of 86. Most British expats in Bulgaria wouldn't recognise the name, which is a shame, because Lukanov spent six decades playing the kind of historical figures whose names are on street signs, statues, and school textbooks across the country. If you've walked past a monument to Stefan Stambolov or seen a coin with Tsar Boris I on it, Lukanov brought those men to the screen.
What happened on this day
Boris Lukanov Tsonev was born on 15 June 1936 in Lovech, a town in north-central Bulgaria about 150km from Sofia. He started acting in his school's amateur theatre group, performing Boris Lavrenov's play Razlom (The Breakdown) at the local chitalishte (the community cultural centre that still anchors Bulgarian towns today). His teacher, Trifon Hinov, directed. The role was Leopold Shuber, and Lukanov was hooked.
He graduated from the Krastyo Sarafov Theatre Institute in Sofia in 1959, studying under Professor Stefan Sŭrchadzhiev. His professional career began in Tolbukhin (now Dobrich) in 1960, moved to Varna's Municipal Theatre in 1961, and then to the Ivan Vazov National Theatre in Sofia in 1982, where he stayed until 2000. After that, he worked as a freelance actor in Varna and Sofia, still taking roles into his eighties.
Lukanov specialised in playing Bulgaria's political and intellectual heavyweights across different historical eras. He was Yovan Ristich in Legend of Paisius (1963), Professor Aleksandar Tsankov in Following the Tracks of Those Who Disappeared Without Trace (1979), Dr Aleksandar Peev in Alone Among Wolves (1979, a role that won him best male actor awards from both the Union of Bulgarian Artists and the Bulgarian Film Professionals Union), General-Lieutenant Ivan Marinov in The Strike (1981), Kavkhan Etkh in Boris I (1985), and Stefan Stambolov in The Dreamers (1987). He also played Salvador Dalí's father in the 1991 film Dali, partnering with Michael Quinn and Christophe Lambert in a Spanish-French co-production.
The recurring pattern across his 48 Bulgarian films is authority: generals, doctors, professors, statesmen, the kind of men whose decisions shaped the country. He had the build and the voice for it. He also had the discipline, working with Bulgaria's best directors including Stancho Stanchev, Oleg Efremov, Asen Shopov, Vili Tsankov, and Aleksandar Morfov.
He was named Honoured Artist in 1977, awarded the Order of Saints Cyril and Methodius (3rd class), and made an Honorary Citizen of Lovech in 1983. In 2016, he received the Askeer Award for lifetime achievement in theatre. In 2017, aged 81, he appeared in The Omnipresent, his final film credit.
Today's name days
Emilia (em-EE-lee-a) and Emil (eh-MEEL) celebrate today, alongside the shorter variants Ema and Emo. The names derive from the Latin Aemilia, a prominent Roman family name, and entered Bulgarian via Christian saints including Saint Emilian (several martyrs and hermits across early church history). The feminine form Emilia is the more common of the two in Bulgaria, though Emil has held steady since the National Revival period.
Famous Bulgarian bearers include Emil Dimitrov, the pop singer whose ballads defined Bulgarian radio in the 1970s and 80s, and Emilia Maslarova, the folk singer and ethnomusicologist who collected rural songs before they vanished. If your colleague's called Emil or Emilia, today is the day they expect a greeting and a pastry.
The etiquette rule is the same as any name day in Bulgaria: never arrive empty-handed. On a major name day like Konstantin or Georgi, the celebrant keeps an open house (friends, neighbours, colleagues turn up unannounced, which startles British expats used to waiting for an invitation). Emil and Emilia aren't quite in that league, but if you're invited, bring cake, banitsa, chocolate, or flowers in odd numbers. Even numbers are for funerals.
The Bulgarian name-days guide has the full calendar plus saint origins if you want to prep for the bigger days ahead.
Towns celebrating today
Kozloduy (population roughly 13,000) holds its municipal day on 30 May. The town sits on the Danube in Vratsa oblast, northwest Bulgaria, about 200km from Sofia. Most Bulgarians associate Kozloduy with one thing: the Kozloduy Nuclear Power Plant, which generates nearly 35% of the country's electricity and sits just outside the town.
The power station has six reactors, four of which were decommissioned as part of Bulgaria's EU accession conditions in 2007. The remaining two (units 5 and 6) are both VVER-1000 Soviet-designed pressurised water reactors and are expected to run until at least 2027 and 2037 respectively. A seventh reactor (Kozloduy 7) has been proposed and delayed repeatedly since the 1980s; whether it ever gets built is anyone's guess.
For British expats, Kozloduy is not a tourist destination. It's an industrial town on a working stretch of the Danube, with a port, a few socialist-era apartment blocks, and a power station that lights your flat in Shumen when you turn the kettle on. The municipal day celebration is mostly for locals, though the power station occasionally opens for guided tours if you book ahead.
Why this matters for British expats
30 May 2026 is a Saturday. The banks are shut, the roads into Shumen are clear, and unless you're planning a trip to Kozloduy (which, let's be honest, you're not), the municipal day won't touch your weekend.
The value of knowing about Boris Lukanov is purely cultural literacy. Bulgarian cinema from the 1960s to the 1990s is intensely historical, with films about the National Revival, the wars of liberation, the anti-Ottoman struggle, and the early communist years. Lukanov was in nearly all of them, playing the figures whose names are now on your street signs. If you've ever wondered why Bulgarians reference film characters when discussing historical events, it's because those films, and actors like Lukanov, are how the national story was told to several generations.
The Ivan Vazov National Theatre in Sofia, where Lukanov spent 18 years, sits in the city centre on Dyakon Ignatiy Street, just off the parliament square. If you're ever in Sofia on a Sunday and wondering what to do, the theatre runs matinee performances and the building itself is worth seeing, a grand Revival-style structure with a colonnade and a fountain out front. The productions are in Bulgarian, but the spectacle translates.
Knowing one or two of Bulgaria's character actors exist, even if you never watch their films, signals you're engaging with the country beyond the cheap property and the sunshine. Lukanov's filmography is a crash course in Bulgarian 20th-century history, and the historical figures he played (Stambolov, Boris I, Tsankov) are the ones whose decisions still shape the political conversations locals have over coffee.
Sources and further reading
The biographical detail for Boris Lukanov draws on the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on the actor, which lists his full theatre and film credits, his awards, and his career arc from Lovech to the National Theatre. The Kozloduy municipal day date comes the official municipal calendars. Name-day saints and variant spellings are from the standard Bulgarian name-days calendar.