📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Thursday 5 November
Boris Borozanov, who died on 5 November 1951, was the sort of theatre man who did everything at once: more than 100 roles at the National Theatre in Sofia, close to ten films as director, an opera libretto and a children's theatre he helped build. I expected the film to be the headline, and the children's plays turn out to be the thread running through the whole career.
What happened on this day
He was born on 8 October 1897 in Kratovo, then in the Ottoman Empire and today in North Macedonia. After his mother's death he moved with his father to Bulgaria and settled in Sofia, where he studied at the First Men's Gymnasium and fell for literature and theatre. In 1918 he entered the Drama School of the National Theatre (Народен театър, na-RO-den te-A-tur), won the theatre's competition for actors and was made a permanent artist in 1920, debuting as the Guard in Maeterlinck's "The Miracle of Saint Anthony". Between 1920 and 1951 he played more than 100 roles there, and his page lists parts such as Osip in Gogol's "Revizor", Chrysalde in Molière's "School for Wives" and Zvonov in Gorky's "Yegor Bulychov". In 1929 he set up the children's theatre attached to the National Theatre, with a repertoire that was almost entirely Bulgarian plays.
He wrote plays himself, dramatised fairy tales and directed, staging children's versions of the Brothers Grimm, Andersen and Hauff in the 1930s. In 1940 he directed a stage version of Dickens's "David Copperfield", and the same year the Sofia National Opera premiered "Саламбо", an opera with his libretto after Flaubert and music by Veselin Stoyanov; it reached the Bratislava Opera in 1942. Add a film career that began on screen in 1922 with "Под старото небе" ("Under the Old Sky") and later covered scripts and nearly ten films as director, and I make that a very full diary. His last film, "Калин Орелът" ("Kalin the Eagle", 1950), is set in 1893 and follows an April Uprising veteran in a convict quarry; his page calls it the first state film, says more than two million people saw it and that it premiered in Sofia, Stockholm and Moscow, and says it won an award at the Karlovy Vary festival in 1950. The same page lists the Dimitrov Prize and the title of Honoured Artist, and it gives only the year of his death: the date comes from Bulgarian Wikipedia's pages for 5 November and for 1951.
Why this matters for British expats
Borozanov directed Dickens in 1940, so the British connection is real if brief, and the children's theatre he set up has a familiar shape: the nearest British habit is the Christmas children's show, except that this was a permanent part of the national stage. If you live in Shumen, the thread is closer than it looks. Bulgarian Wikipedia says the chronicle of Bulgarian theatre starts in your city with the first performance, on 15 August 1856, of "Михал Мишкоед" by Sava Dobroplodni, staged in a café rather than a theatre. Today the Vasil Drumev Drama and Puppet Theatre carries that history and co-organises the annual New Bulgarian Drama festival; it took its present form in 2000, when the city's drama theatre merged with the Patilancho puppet theatre.
Sources and further reading
The biography draws on the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry for Boris Borozanov, with his last film from Bulgarian Wikipedia's page on Калин Орелът and his birthplace from its page on Kratovo. The date of death comes from its pages for 5 November and 1951, and the Shumen theatre history from its page on the Vasil Drumev Drama and Puppet Theatre.