📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Wednesday 1 July
Right, this one is for anyone who has ever climbed into a Bulgarian taxi and been met with a wall of accordion, a thumping beat and a singer hitting notes you did not know the human throat could reach. Anelia, one of the reigning queens of Bulgarian popfolk, was born on the first of July, 1982, in Stara Zagora.
What happened on this day
Anelia, born Aneliya Georgieva Atanasova, came up the hard way and the proper way at once. Her mother's side of the family were professional musicians, and a primary-school teacher, Slavka Ivanova, spotted her in the second grade. By twelve she was singing Thracian folk songs in a children's trio, Glasoviti Trakiycheta, who cut a compilation for the old state label Balkanton in 1994.
Here is the detail that complicates the lazy view of popfolk: Anelia is a trained musician. She entered the prestigious Philip Kutev music school as the top student in her year, with a perfect 100% score on the gadulka, the pear-shaped bowed instrument you will have heard sawing away under half the folk music in the country. A chalga star who can actually play a gadulka properly is not the cliche.
The fame came in 2002 with her second single, "Pogledni me v ochite" (Look Me in the Eyes). After that the hits did not really stop. By the reckoning of her own discography, twenty-three of her singles have gone to number one on the Bulgarian charts, which puts her among the most successful female recording artists the country has produced. In 2012 she took Artist of the Year at the Planeta TV music awards, the closest thing Bulgarian popfolk has to a coronation.
If the word popfolk (or chalga, the rougher nickname) means nothing to you yet, it will. It is Bulgaria's own pop music, folk and Balkan melodies welded to dance beats, run largely out of the Payner label and its Planeta television channel. The cultural establishment has spent decades wrinkling its nose at it. Everyone else has spent those same decades playing it at full volume at every wedding, seaside bar and petrol station between here and the coast.
Today's name days
The first of July is also a name day, and a busy one. Damyan (Дамян) leads it, from Saint Damian the healer; the most famous Bulgarian bearer, Dame Gruev, a founder of the Internal Macedonian-Adrianople Revolutionary Organisation, celebrates today under the short form. Kuzman and Kozma (Кузман, Козма) come from Damian's brother Saint Cosmas, the pair remembered as physicians who treated the sick for free.
Krasimir and Krasimira (Красимир, Красимира) sit apart from the saints: a purely Slavic name from krasen, beautiful, and mir, peace. A handful of other variants mark the day too, including Damyana, Damyanka and Krasina. Our Bulgarian name-days guide has the full list.
The etiquette is the part newcomers trip over. A name-day celebrant in Bulgaria keeps open house: you do not wait for an invitation, you simply turn up. The single rule is that you never arrive empty-handed. Cake, banitsa, a bottle or chocolates all work, and if you bring flowers, make the bunch an odd number. Even numbers are for funerals.
Why this matters for British expats
You do not have to like popfolk to need to know it. It is the genre playing in the marshrutka, the taxi, the corner shop and the beach bar, and Anelia is one of the handful of names that have defined it this century. Recognising one of her songs, or just knowing who she is when it comes up, is a small piece of cultural fluency that puts you on the right side of a conversation. If you want to understand how the genre actually works, and why it is both adored and sneered at, our guide to Bulgarian music lays out the landscape.
Sources and further reading
The account of Anelia's early years, her gadulka training and her run of number ones draws on her Bulgarian Wikipedia biography, which goes well beyond what an English search turns up. There is a shorter English Wikipedia article for the headline facts. The name-day list and the open-house etiquette come from common Bulgarian custom, gathered in our own name-days guide.