📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Thursday 8 October
Paint some of Plovdiv's wealthy men among the damned in a Last Judgement, dress them in the clothes people actually wore, and put your own face on the wall with your name and the word "Bulgarian". That was Zahari Zograf (Захарий Зограф, za-HA-riy zo-GRAF), born on this day in 1810, and the people of Plovdiv were not amused.
What happened on this day
Reference data puts his birth on 8 October 1810 in Samokov (Самоков, SA-mo-kov), about 60 km from Sofia and a long way from Shumen. The Wikipedia entries I worked from give only the year, and Revival-era dates were often kept in the old calendar, so hold the day lightly. His full name was Zahariy Hristovich Dimitrov; "zograf" is the trade, the old word for a church painter, and his father Hristo Dimitrov was in it too. His brother Dimitar taught him, they worked together until around 1832, and his earliest signed icon dates from 1829, when he was nineteen. In 1841 he married Katerina Hadzhigyurova in Samokov, and in June 1853 typhus killed him, still in his early forties.
Between those dates he painted his way across Bulgaria's monasteries: St Nicholas at Bachkovo Monastery (1840), part of the main church at Rila Monastery (1844), Troyan Monastery (1847–1848) and the Transfiguration Monastery near Veliko Tarnovo (from 1849), plus seventeen months on Mount Athos in 1851–1852. At Bachkovo the Last Judgement included some of Plovdiv's rich among the sinners, and a visitor, Nikola Tondzhorov, wrote to Zograf's former teacher Neofit Rilski in April 1843 that Plovdiv people were angry about several figures shown in eternal torment in the clothes men and women wore. That was his method. He is often called the founder of Bulgarian secular painting because he let everyday detail into church art, and he painted himself into the walls too, in murals of 1840, 1848 and 1849, which was regarded as controversial at the time. Think of a Hitchcock cameo, except on monastery walls, where some people minded.
Why this matters for British expats
If you have visitors coming, this is your monastery weekend. Bulgarian Wikipedia calls Bachkovo Bulgaria's second-biggest monastery after Rila and Troyan its third, and Zograf's hand is in all three; my driving guide covers the road side. At Bachkovo, look for the self-portrait in the upper corner of the church's front wall, beside the abbots, signed "Bulgarian". At Troyan, look for the Wheel of Life composition on the north outer wall, but note that the same Bulgarian Wikipedia page says the church was repainted in the early twentieth century by Petko Ganin of Kazanlak, so ask what is original. I went looking for a Shumen link and none of the pages I read names a church or icon of his in the city; the nearest tribute I found is a street in Sofia's Dragalevtsi district.
Sources and further reading
The biography and the list of works come from the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on Zahari Zograf, checked against the English entry. The monastery details are drawn from Bulgarian Wikipedia's pages on Bachkovo, Troyan and the Transfiguration Monastery, and the Samokov distance from its own page.