📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Friday 6 November
Andrey Lyapchev (Андрей Ляпчев, an-DRAY LYAP-chev), prime minister of Bulgaria from 1926 to 1931, died at home on Krakra Street in Sofia on 6 November 1933, still owing the bank for the house he had bought on that street. I find that oddly reassuring in a statesman whose career took in signing a surrender, months in Shumen prison and the approval of British Conservatives.
What happened on this day
He was born on 12 December 1866 (30 November in the Old Style calendar) in Resen, then in the Ottoman Empire and today in North Macedonia. As a student in Plovdiv he was sent by a revolutionary committee to Panagyurishte in 1885, was arrested on the way and freed only after the Unification was proclaimed on 6 September. He became finance minister in 1910. In 1918, in Alexander Malinov's cabinet, he led the delegation, with General Ivan Lukov and the diplomat Simeon Radev, that set off for Salonica with the American consul general Dominic Murphy, and on 29 September he signed the armistice with the Allied commander, General Louis Franchet d'Espèrey. Bulgarian Wikipedia counts the cost frankly: no guarantee on the postwar borders and about 100,000 soldiers left in captivity, set against one main aim achieved, keeping Serb and Greek troops out. Two months later he became Bulgaria's first civilian minister of war, an office that would have raised no eyebrows in Britain.
Then the wheel turned. The Agrarian government arrested him in September 1922, and on 1 December the detained former ministers, Lyapchev among the accused, were moved to Shumen prison, where they spent the following months. The special court built to convict them struggled: Murphy, expected to testify that Malinov and Lyapchev had been unwilling to make a separate peace, said exactly the opposite, and the prosecution stopped using him. The Agrarians fell in the coup of 1923, and on 4 January 1926 Lyapchev took over the government, which he led until June 1931. He pushed through an amnesty that freed about 7,000 people, spoke repeatedly against the death penalty, and his government won a refugee loan under League of Nations guarantee, agreed at Geneva on 8 September 1926, to help more than 250,000 Bulgarian refugees. After the 1931 election lung cancer was diagnosed in Berlin, and he died two years later. He left his estate to the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences.
Why this matters for British expats
Britain features more than you might expect. In early 1924 he set off for France and Britain for talks on Bulgaria's financial obligations and in March cancelled his meetings with Prime Minister Ramsay MacDonald to hurry home and hold his party together. As prime minister he steered towards closer ties with the Entente powers, especially Britain, and Bulgarian Wikipedia says British Conservative circles greeted his government with hope and trust. If you live in Shumen, the city's prison is a small, grim footnote in his story. In Sofia a boulevard carries his name, and so does a street in Blagoevgrad; an art institute has occupied his house at 21 Krakra Street since 1948.
Sources and further reading
The biography draws on the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry for Andrey Lyapchev and its English counterpart, with the 1918 armistice from both languages' pages on the Armistice of Salonica and his birthplace from the English page on Resen.