📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Monday 31 August
Bulgaria finished fourth at the 1994 World Cup, the high point of this country's entire sporting history, and the striker who should have led the line spent it being treated for cancer. Lyuboslav Penev was born in Dobrich on this day in 1966, and the year his friends made history was the year he was diagnosed.
What happened on this day
He came through CSKA Sofia and made his first-team debut in 1984 at eighteen, in a dressing room that turned out to be the making of a generation: Trifon Ivanov, Emil Kostadinov and Hristo Stoichkov were all teammates. He won two league titles and three cups with CSKA, was voted Bulgarian Footballer of the Year in 1988, and at twenty-three moved to Valencia. He stayed in Spain a decade, six seasons at Valencia and then Atletico Madrid, where the 1995/96 season gave him the best year of his career: Atletico won the league and the cup, and Penev was the most effective player in the double-winning squad with 22 goals in 44 games. He finished up at Compostela and Celta Vigo, and the Bulgarian record credits him as the only Bulgarian to have scored a hat-trick against Real Madrid.
The gap in that list is 1994. He was diagnosed with testicular cancer at the beginning of the year and could not play in the World Cup where Bulgaria, with his old CSKA teammates in the side, finished fourth. He came back. He played at the 1996 European Championship in England and the 1998 World Cup in France, and won 62 caps in all. Afterwards he ran CSKA as club president, then took over as its manager in 2009 from his uncle Dimitar Penev, won the Bulgarian title with Litex Lovech in 2011, and managed the national side, beating the Netherlands 2-1 in Amsterdam in 2012 and lifting Bulgaria from 96th in the world rankings to 40th inside a year.
Today's name days
A small one today: Гено, Гена and Генчо. If you know one of them, the rules are the usual ones, which are the opposite of ours: the celebrant does the hosting, nobody waits for an invitation, and you do not walk in carrying nothing.
Towns celebrating today
Мелник (MEL-nik) marks its day, and it is a genuine curiosity: the smallest town in Bulgaria, down in the folds of the Pirin, with 181 residents at the last count and 96 of its buildings listed as cultural monuments. It keeps its town status for historical reasons alone. The sand formations that give it its name loom over it as the Melnik earth pyramids, and the Thracian tribe who lived here first were the Medi, the people Spartacus came from.
It has also been making strong wine since at least 1346. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries Melnik shipped it across Europe and above all to England and Austria, and the local Broad Leaved Melnik vine was, so the story goes, a favourite of Winston Churchill's. The vineyards are in revival, so if you want to taste what the fuss is about our guide to Bulgarian wine regions is the place to start.
Why this matters for British expats
Bulgarian men of a certain age will tell you about 1994 the way certain Englishmen tell you about 1966, and Penev is the melancholy footnote to it, the best striker of that generation who was not on the pitch for the tournament that defined them. Knowing that is worth more in a conversation than any number of statistics. And Melnik is the other half of today's practical advice: if you are ever driving to the far south west, it is a very small place with a very long memory, and the wine your countrymen were drinking two centuries ago is still being made there.
Sources and further reading
Penev's playing and managing career comes from his entries on Bulgarian Wikipedia and the English one, which is fuller on the illness and on his years in Spain. Melnik's population, its monuments and its wine trade with England are drawn from the town's own Wikipedia articles in both languages, and today's names from the Bulgarian name-day calendar.