📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Wednesday 9 September
Being born on 9 September in Bulgaria used to come with a free national holiday attached. Stanislav Stratiev, born in Sofia on that date in 1941, spent his working life quietly taking the mickey out of the state that celebrated it, and got away with it in a way British satirists, who never had to, might find hard to credit. No name days today, no town days: this one is his alone.
What happened on this day
Stanislav Stratiev was born Stanko Stratiev Miladinov in Sofia on 9 September 1941, three years to the day before the Fatherland Front coup of 1944 that overthrew the Kingdom's government and gave his birthday four decades of parades. He first appeared in print in 1958 in a school newspaper, read Bulgarian philology at Sofia University (graduating in 1968), and served his apprenticeship in the two places a Bulgarian humorist could: the youth paper Narodna Mladezh and then, from 1968 to 1975, the satirical weekly Starshel, "The Hornet". His prose debut, The Lonely Windmills (1969), was, the Bulgarian entry says, greeted rapturously by the critics. From 1975 until his death he was literary director of the Satirical Theatre in Sofia, which is where the real story starts.
In 1974 the theatre staged his first play, The Roman Bath, directed by Neycho Popov, and it ran for more than ten consecutive seasons to full houses, which for a state-subsidised satire under Zhivkov is rather remarkable. The Suede Jacket (1976) and Bus (1980), both directed by Mladen Kiselov, followed, then The Maximalist, Balkan Syndrome and Mammoth. He wrote for the screen too: A Band With No Name (1982), directed by Lyudmil Kirkov, about a small band chancing its luck along the Black Sea coast, took first prize at the Gabrovo humour festival in 1983 and was voted the best Bulgarian film of all time by readers of 24 Chasa in 2005; Balance had won a silver medal in Moscow in 1983. The prizes tell their own story about who was watching: the state's Dimitrov Prize in 1986, then, once the wall came down, first prize at Maubeuge in 1990 for It's a Short Life and runner-up in the BBC World Service playwriting competition in 1993 for On the Other Side, which the BBC then broadcast. Through the 1990s he kept a column in the daily Standart, and in 1991 published a collection called, with a straight face, The Bulgarian Model. He died in Sofia on 20 September 2000, eleven days after his 59th birthday.
Why this matters for British expats
The nearest British equivalent is a hybrid: the theatrical reach of Alan Ayckbourn with the target of Yes Minister, except that Stratiev's ministry could actually put you in a camp, which sharpens a joke considerably. If a Bulgarian friend describes some absurd encounter with the municipality as "pure Stratiev", or "a suede jacket" (сако от велур, sa-KO ot ve-LOOR), that is what they mean: officialdom that follows its own logic to a conclusion nobody sane would reach. It is, in theory, a Zhivkov-era reference; in practice it is timeless, as anyone who has tried to register a car here will confirm. Living with Bulgarian bureaucracy is a good deal easier once you know the locals have been laughing at it since 1974, and our guide to bureaucratic etiquette is, in that sense, a footnote to his plays. No Shumen tie-in that I can find; he was a Sofia man from first page to last.
Sources and further reading
The career dates, the Starshel years and the full run of plays and premieres come from the Bulgarian Wikipedia entry on Stanislav Stratiev, with the international prizes and the ten-season run of The Roman Bath from the English entry. The film detail draws on the English Wikipedia page for A Band With No Name and the coup context on its page for the 1944 coup.