📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Friday 4 September
Bulgaria has produced exactly one person who has competed at both a Winter Olympics and a World Cup, and he was born on this day in 1941. Aleksandar Shalamanov skied the slalom for his country and then spent a decade being, by most Bulgarian reckonings, the finest right back it ever had.
What happened on this day
The skiing came first. He went to the 1960 Winter Olympics at Squaw Valley in the American alpine team, won national titles in both slalom and giant slalom, and did not give the sport up until 1965, by which point he had been an international footballer for years. There was a third string too: he was carried as a reserve for the volleyball squad at the 1964 Summer Olympics, though he never got on court. Most athletes would settle for one of those careers.
The football is the part with the trophies. He started at CSKA, won a championship there, and moved to Slavia Sofia in the early sixties, where he stayed until he retired in 1974. Three Bulgarian cups, a Cup Winners' Cup semi-final in 1967, best Bulgarian footballer in 1963 and again in 1966, best Bulgarian sportsman in 1967 and 1973. He won 42 caps and played at two World Cups, England in 1966 and Mexico in 1970. The 1966 tournament is the one that made his name outside Bulgaria: he was picked in the all-star selection for the competition at right back, and named in the World XI that World Soccer put together that year. He died in 2021, and the day after, Slavia announced that its stadium would carry his name. His son Stefan became an alpine skier too, and raced for Bulgaria at the Calgary Olympics in 1988.
Towns celebrating today
Nine places mark their town day on 4 September, which is a lot for one date: Алфатар, Ветово, Вълчи дол, Гулянци, Гурково, Лозница, Неделино, Славяново and Якоруда. Most are small, and one of them tells the story of the Bulgarian countryside on its own. Алфатар (al-fa-TAR), down near Silistra, had about 1,395 people at the last count given, against a peak of 4,358 shortly after the Second World War. It has lost roughly two thirds of itself in eighty years.
Неделино in the Rhodopes was called Uzundere until 1934, a Turkish name meaning long creek, which is a fair description of where it sits. Якоруда, further west along the Mesta, was only officially promoted from village to town in 1964. If you are weighing up where to live out here, that is the useful context: a Bulgarian town can be smaller than an English village and still have a mayor, a municipality and a day of its own.
Why this matters for British expats
There is a decent chance you watched the 1966 World Cup, or have heard about it at length from someone who did. Shalamanov was on the pitch at that tournament, and when the organisers and the football press picked their best eleven of it, a Bulgarian right back was on the list. That is not how the English telling of 1966 usually goes. It is worth having, because sport is the fastest route into a conversation here, and because the man himself is the sort of figure the British game stopped producing decades ago: an Olympic skier who played top-flight football, in an era before either sport asked you to choose at fifteen.
Sources and further reading
Shalamanov's playing record, his skiing titles and the honours come from his entries on Bulgarian Wikipedia and the English one, which carries the stadium renaming and his son's Olympic appearance. The figures for the celebrating towns come from their own Wikipedia articles.