📅 ON THIS DAY IN BULGARIA, Monday 29 June
Some dates in the Bulgarian calendar are quiet. This is not one of them. The 29th of June is Petrovden, the feast of Saints Peter and Paul and one of the biggest name days of the year, and it is also the day, in 2023, that the country lost one of its most remarkable cultural figures. Two very different reasons to mark it.
Petrovden, and the start of the harvest
Petrovden is a top-six name day, which in Bulgaria means a serious number of people are celebrating. The roll-call today includes Petar, Pavel, Petya, Pepa, Polina, Penka, Pencho, Petrana, Pavlina, Kremena and Kamen, among others. If your address book here is any size at all, at least one of those names is in it.
It is also a marker in the farming year. By old tradition Petrovden signals the start of the harvest, and in some regions there is a lovely specific custom that you do not eat the season's first watermelon until after this day. You can see why it became a town day too: at least five towns hold their municipal celebration today, among them Belogradchik, famous for its rock formations, Etropole, Lyaskovets, Pavlikeni and Svoge.
The etiquette, if a Bulgarian friend is celebrating, is the same as any name day: you do not wait to be asked, you drop by, you bring something small, and you wish them "Chestit praznik" or "Chestit imen den".
Angel Wagenstein, 1922 to 2023
The other reason to remember today is Angel Wagenstein, who died on 29 June 2023 at the age of 100. Even a short version of his life is extraordinary. Born in Plovdiv in 1922 into a Jewish family whose leftist politics sent them into exile in France, he came back to Bulgaria under an amnesty, joined an anti-fascist group as a student, and was interned in a labour camp for Jews in Macedonia, from which he escaped. Arrested again, he was condemned to death in 1944. The sentence was first delayed when Anglo-American bombing of Sofia wrecked part of the prison, and then never carried out, overtaken by the anti-fascist takeover and the arrival of the Red Army. He was 21.
What he did with the rest of that improbably spared life is the point. Wagenstein wrote more than fifty screenplays, and his 1959 film Stars won the Special Jury Prize at Cannes. Late in life he turned novelist, and a fine one: Far from Toledo took a Sorbonne prize in 2002, and Farewell Shanghai won the Jean Monnet Prize for European literature in 2004. He was made a chevalier of the French Order of Merit and given Bulgaria's highest honour, the Stara Planina Order, and in 2017 an American documentary about him took the apt title Art Is a Weapon.
Why this matters for British expats
Petrovden is the practical, sociable half: if you know a Petar or a Petya, today is the day to send the message, and the watermelon custom is the sort of small thing that makes the season here feel properly local.
Wagenstein is the half worth a quieter look. He is one of those Bulgarian figures whose work actually crossed borders, and his novels exist in English, so Farewell Shanghai or Far from Toledo is a genuine way for a British reader to meet twentieth-century Bulgaria on its own terms rather than through a guidebook. A man who was sentenced to death at 21 and was still writing prize-winning novels in his eighties is good company for an evening.
Worth a look if you haven't already: the Bulgarian name-days guide.