Who was Todor Zhivkov?

Todor Zhivkov (7 September 1911 to 5 August 1998) led communist Bulgaria from 1954 until he was pushed out on 10 November 1989, as First Secretary and later General Secretary of the Bulgarian Communist Party, prime minister from 1962 to 1971 and chairman of the State Council from 1971. He was the longest-serving leader in the Eastern Bloc.

Is 7 September 2026 a public holiday in Bulgaria?

Not in its own right. Unification Day (6 September) fell on a Sunday this year, and Bulgaria's usual practice is to carry a weekend public holiday over to the next working day, so check before assuming banks and government offices are open on Monday 7 September.

What was the Belene camp?

A labour camp on Persin, the Belene island in the Danube, which operated officially from 1949 to 1959 and held political opponents and religious figures, reaching 2,323 inmates in 1952. Between 1985 and 1989 the Belene prison was used for Bulgarian Turks who resisted the forced name changes.

On This Day in Bulgaria: Todor Zhivkov Is Born, and Belene Has Its Day (7 September), Shumen.UK

📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Monday 7 September

Well, this is an awkward one for a birthday card. The man who ran Bulgaria for 35 years was born today, and the town celebrating its own day alongside him is the one whose Danube island held his regime's most notorious camp. Bulgaria's calendar does not do subtle.

What happened on this day

Todor Zhivkov was born on 7 September 1911 in the village of Pravets, north-east of Sofia, the eldest child of Hristo and Marutsa Zhivkov, a furrier who wintered in Gabrovo workshops and a mother from a family that kept an inn and tavern on the Sofia to Varna road. Even the date is disputed, and delightfully so: his mother insisted on 20 September, while Zhivkov maintained the priest keeping the parish register was drunk, wrote down the baptism instead of the birth, and that local custom let him back-calculate 13 days to the 7th. He argued the point with her for years. His schooling was interrupted by his father's illness and a spell in a tile factory, then ended by a school strike in Orhanie that got him expelled in 1929 and sent to Sofia, where he trained at the State Printing House's graphic school and waited tables to pay for it.

He joined the communist youth league there, was arrested in 1931 for hitting a police chief over the head with a brick (released, the Bulgarian entry says, for unclear reasons), and joined the party proper in 1932. During the war he helped organise the Chavdar Partisan Brigade around his home village. From 1954 he was First Secretary, from 1962 to 1971 prime minister, and from 1971 chairman of the State Council, holding on until 10 November 1989, when senior colleagues pushed him out. The English entry calls him the longest-serving leader in the whole Eastern Bloc; the Bulgarian one, rather more bluntly, files him under dictator. Bulgarians still call him Bai Tosho or Tato (dad), which tells you the affection and the contempt never quite separated. He died in 1998, having outlived the state he built by nearly a decade.

Towns celebrating today

Belene, on the right bank of the Danube near Svishtov in Pleven province, is a town of two identities. One is Catholic: the Church of the Blessed Virgin Mary went up in 1860 and the town produced Blessed Eugene Bosilkov, the bishop who died in 1952. The other is the island. Persin, the Belene island in the river, held the labour camp that ran officially from 1949 to 1959, with 2,323 inmates at its 1952 peak, and was used again between 1985 and 1989 for Bulgarian Turks who refused the forced name changes. The half-built nuclear plant, suspended in 1991 and shelved again in 2012, is the town's third act and still a live argument.

Radnevo, in the Upper Thracian lowland in Stara Zagora province, is the coal town: the Maritsa Iztok lignite complex sits on its doorstep and the Maritsa Iztok-2 power station is in its far east corner. Its signature is a working one, the open-cast mines that still keep the lights on across the country, and it has a peak in Antarctica named after it, which is more than most British market towns can say.

Why this matters for British expats

If you live in Shumen, this history is not abstract: the region's large Turkish community lived through the name-change campaign, and Belene is where the resisters were sent. The cultural translation is not Thatcher or Wilson but something Britain never had, a single figure who was the state for a generation, so that older Bulgarians date their lives by "under Tato" the way we say "before decimalisation". Practically, keep one thing in mind today: Unification Day fell on Sunday, and Bulgaria's usual practice is to carry a weekend holiday over to Monday, so do not count on the bank, the municipality or the residency desk being open this morning; phone first.

Sources and further reading

The Pravets childhood, the brick, the school strike and the family detail come from the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on Todor Zhivkov, with the birthday dispute and the career dates from the English one. The town notes draw on the English Wikipedia pages for Belene, the Belene labour camp and Radnevo.