📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Tuesday 8 September
For once the Shumen tie-in is not something I have to work for. The composer usually called the most influential Bulgaria has produced, the man who taught practically the whole next generation, grew up in this city and wrote a piano miniature called, simply, "Shumen". He died on this day in 1978, and if you have walked past his name without knowing why, today is the day to find out.
What happened on this day
Pancho Vladigerov was born in Zürich in 1899 to a Bulgarian lawyer father, Haralan, and a Russian-Jewish mother, Dr Eliza Pasternak, and spent his early childhood in Shumen. His grandfather Leon Pasternak, a mathematician who played the violin with Pancho and his twin brother Lyuben, mattered most; the Jewish tune he taught the boys became, decades later, the Jewish Poem of 1951, which won the Dimitrov Prize and drew from Shostakovich the line that a work like it is written once in a hundred years. The family moved to Sofia in 1910, where Pancho studied with Dobri Hristov, and in 1912 his mother talked the state into a scholarship that sent both twins to Berlin.
Berlin made him. He won the academy's Mendelssohn Prize twice (1918 and 1920), the first time for the Piano Concerto No. 1, which the Bulgarian entry notes was later the graduation piece of a young conductor called Herbert von Karajan. He then spent eleven years writing music for Max Reinhardt's productions at the Deutsches Theater, and wrote the rhapsody Vardar, the first Bulgarian orchestral work to travel. In 1932, after (the English entry says) much hesitation, he came home to a professorship at the State Academy of Music, which now carries his name, and wrote Tsar Kaloyan in 1936, the first Bulgarian opera staged abroad. The less comfortable chapter is that after 1944 he wrote party pieces too, and the Bulgarian page is candid about why: he used the credit to get musicians such as Trifon Silyanovski and Sasho Sladura out of the Belene camp, and tried and failed to save his wife's brother, Anton Zhekov, an officer from the Shumen garrison. His pupils include Alexis Weissenberg and the jazz pianist Milcho Leviev. He was given the Herder Prize in 1969 and died in Sofia on 8 September 1978.
Today's name days
Bogdan (Богдан, bog-DAN) and Bogdana lead, with Bogomil and Bozhanka alongside, because 8 September is the Nativity of the Theotokos, the feast of the Virgin Mary's birth, which Bulgarians call Malka Bogoroditsa, the "little" Lady Day. The names all carry the root bog, God: Bogdan is "God-given", the Slavic cousin of Theodore, and Bogomil is "dear to God". Four names is a short list, so no guide needed, but the etiquette is the same as ever: if you know a Bogdan, drop round without waiting to be asked, bring something, and keep the flowers to an odd number.
Towns celebrating today
Five towns take the Nativity as their day. Haskovo, down near the Greek and Turkish borders, does it biggest: a 32-metre statue of the Virgin and Child has stood on its Hill of Youth since 2003, listed by Guinness as the tallest monument to the Mother of God in the world, and the city's holiday falls on the feast. Pavel Banya, 22 km west of Kazanlak in the Rose Valley, is a spa with nine hot springs at around 50 degrees. Berkovitsa below Kom Peak has an Ivan Vazov house-museum, Polski Trambesh sits by the Yantra, and Simitli straddles the Struma near the Kresna Gorge rapids.
Why this matters for British expats
If you live in Shumen, Vladigerov is the local you can be proud of with no asterisk: the nearest British equivalent is Elgar, a composer who folded the folk idiom of his home into the European concert tradition and whom the country adopted as its sound. Put Vardar on while you make coffee, and next time a Bulgarian friend mentions "Панчо" (PAN-cho) you will know they mean the man from our own city.
Sources and further reading
The Berlin years, the Karajan footnote and the post-war rescues come from the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on Pancho Vladigerov, with the family background, prizes and dates from the English entry. Town notes draw on the English Wikipedia pages for Haskovo, Berkovitsa, Pavel Banya, Polski Trambesh and Simitli.