📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Saturday 31 October
The British would call Georgi Partsalev a national treasure, and a 2018 Bulgarian biography calls him the whole nation's favourite. He died on 31 October 1989, aged 64, and I will admit that until I read up on him I only had the comedy half of the picture.
What happened on this day
Partsalev was born in Levski, Pleven Province, on 16 June 1925, finished school in Pleven and went on to study medicine at Sofia University, which is not the usual route to a comedy career. After two stints in theatres attached to the labour service and the construction troops, he joined the Satirical Theatre in Sofia in 1956 and made his first film, Lyubimets 13, in 1958. Bulgarian Wikipedia calls him the living legend of Bulgarian comedy, and the English page names the films behind that, among them Whale (1970), Indian Summer (1973), Farsighted for Two Diopters (1976) and the earlier The Tied Up Balloon (1967). On stage he played Osip in Gogol's The Government Inspector (1966) and the Actor in Brecht's The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui (1961), and he took a prize for a male role for Indian Summer at a festival in Czechoslovakia in 1974. The part he wanted most, Don Quixote, never came; one biography is titled The Tear of Don Quixote.
In July 1964 he was one of 26 men arrested in a crackdown on homosexuality, among them the singer Emil Dimitrov. English Wikipedia's article on LGBT rights in Bulgaria quotes experts calling the case a masquerade for the public, and Bulgarian Wikipedia says the then "people's power" staged a show trial whose outcome was considered decided in advance. None of the pages I read says what happened to him afterwards. Homosexual acts were decriminalised on 1 May 1968 with the revised Penal Code; his English page says the trial "resulted in" that change, but both pages on the law tie it to a decision reported in 1966, so I would not repeat the causal claim. Bulgarian Wikipedia says he was gay but never spoke publicly about it. He died in Sofia of leukaemia.
Why this matters for British expats
Partsalev's home town of Levski, in Pleven Province, keeps his memory in ways a visitor can find: a house museum with his belongings and icons donated by his sister, a community centre, the local chitalishte, that carries his name, and a festival of the arts held each June since 2005. Sofia has named a street after him as well, in the Dragalevtsi district. A 2020 documentary, Dossier of Laughter, is described on its director's page as an account of how State Security agents followed him. I searched the Bulgarian and English pages for a Shumen connection and found none, so I will not invent one.
Sources and further reading
The biography draws on the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry for Georgi Partsalev and its English counterpart, which differ on the 1964 case. The legal history comes from the English and Bulgarian Wikipedia pages on LGBT rights in Bulgaria, and the hometown details from the page on Levski.