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On 2 October 1916 Dimcho Debelyanov, a poet whose work remains popular in Bulgaria, was killed on the Macedonian front in a battle with British troops. He had volunteered, and predicted he would not return.
Twenty years ago today Bulgaria lost Atanas Mihaylov, the Lokomotiv Sofia forward who scored five against Monaco, was compared to Puskás, and turned down a fortune to stay at home. Plus Dunavtsi's city day on the Danube.
The Regional Development Ministry has proposed regrouping Bulgaria's provinces from 1 January 2027 to match a new EU classification. No province or municipality boundary moves, but Shumen province would swap Targovishte for Burgas, Sliven and Yambol, and Sofia would stand alone.
Milko Bobotsov was born on this date in 1931 and became the first Bulgarian grandmaster in 1961. He drew with Tal, Spassky, Petrosian and Smyslov while working as a gymnastics instructor, until a stroke ended it at forty.
Vela Blagoeva was born on this date in 1859. Teacher, war nurse, journalist, she helped found the Bulgarian Women's Union in 1901, between the founding of Britain's two great suffrage organisations.
Only Hungary saw a steeper food price rise in the EU since 2021. Minimum-wage earners can still buy more than before, but the figures hide where the squeeze has moved.
Stefan Avramov died on this date in 1953. Teacher, guerrilla courier, communist, editor, he proposed in 1944 that Gotse Delchev's remains be given to the new Macedonian republic, and two years later they went.
The children's writer Kina Kadreva was born on this date in 1931. She edited Leka nosht, detsa!, the nightly slot that ended the day for a whole Bulgarian generation, and her tales are still in the primary school books.
Eurostat ranks Bulgaria last in the EU for road freight over 2021 to 2025, with a 28% drop in dangerous goods in 2025. But national figures show last year was flat, and the statistic counts Bulgarian lorries, not traffic on Bulgarian roads.
Andrey Lukanov was born on this date in 1938. He helped remove Todor Zhivkov, led Bulgaria through its first democratic election since 1931, and was shot dead outside his Sofia flat in 1996 in a case that remains unsolved.
The chess grandmaster Nino Kirov died on this date in 2008. Twice Bulgarian champion, nine times a Balkaniad player, he was a product of a sporting system Britain never had.
Radko Dimitriev was born on this date in 1859. He ran the Bulgarian General Staff, won the opening battles of the First Balkan War, then commanded a Russian army against Bulgaria's own allies and was shot by the Bolsheviks in 1918.
Fuel prices in Bulgaria were 34.5% higher in August than a year earlier, the sharpest rise in the EU. The government's €300 million relief package offers LPG users and farmers help, but almost nothing for the average petrol or diesel driver.
The actor Cagatay Ulusoy was born on this date in 1990, to a father whose family left Bulgaria for Turkey as children. In 2025 he took Bulgarian citizenship, by a route plenty of people here have looked into.
Morning lows of zero to four degrees are forecast for Thursday 24 September in valleys and near the mountains, bringing the season's first frost. The cold is sharp, brief, and nowhere near enough to trigger the heating season.
Bulgaria declared full independence from the Ottoman Empire on 22 September 1908, after a week of ship meetings and train journeys. It is a public holiday, so almost everything official is shut today.
Georgi Benkovski was born on this date in 1843. He led the Fourth Revolutionary District of the April Uprising under a name taken from a Polish exile's passport, and the British reaction to what followed helped make Bulgaria a country.
The satirist Stanislav Stratiev died on this date in 2000. He spent twenty-five years as playwright of Sofia's Satirical Theatre, and in 1993 the BBC World Service broadcast one of his plays.
A €300 million package presented on Friday pays an automatic €50 to more than 550,000 people on social assistance, abolishes excise on LPG until the end of the year and hands farmers 44 cents a litre. Petrol and diesel get nothing, the opposition calls it election-season money, and the rules against unjustified price rises now run to August 2027.
The director Docho Bodzhakov was born on this date in 1956. Among his films is a BNT comedy about a retired Englishman from Manchester who moves to a Bulgarian village and buys a tractor, which may be the most useful thing on Bulgarian television for British expats.
Bulgaria's tax authority regulates gambling, licensed the advertising industry in August, and runs none of the British safety nets. What that means for Brits who assumed their UK self-exclusion followed them out.
The actor Rousy Chanev was born in Burgas on this date in 1945. He has been on Bulgarian screens since 1965, and last year his home city finally made him an honorary citizen.
Shumen's mayor opens his diary to the public on 28 September, sixteen villages lost power for an afternoon, the police talked phone scams with pensioners, the ballet school came home from Serbia with medals, Novi Pazar hangs a new exhibition, and the warm spell has an end date.
Sofia is already at €1.97 a litre and the national average is a cent higher every few days. The government has promised a package but not a number, the unions expect one by 15 October, and the spring €20 scheme is the template to check yourself against.
The poet Hristo Smirnenski was born on this date in 1898 and was dead at twenty-four. It is also Vyara, Nadezhda, Lyubov i Sofia, one of the biggest name days of the year, and the city day for Sofia itself.
Pavel Panov was born on this date in 1950. In one UEFA Cup run he scored twice against Ajax and twice against Barcelona, and he is still the third highest Bulgarian scorer in European club football. It is also the name day for Lyudmila.
The father of the Bulgarian cavalry was born in a Bessarabian village on this date in 1863. It is also the first day of the school year, which catches out British expat parents more reliably than anything else on the calendar.
Delyan Dobrev says agreements cover three Bulgarian battery projects. Lower electricity bills are the promise, but households need more than a company name to budget on.
Investigators report no evidence of outside involvement in the six deaths, while forensic and institutional inquiries continue. Here is what remains unresolved and where families can raise child-protection concerns.
She filmed the show trials, the erasures and the things nobody wanted said, and became the first winner of a Bulgarian prize for civic courage. She died on this date in 2023, on a feast day that is also a strict fast.
Born in Odessa in 1879, he fled the Russian Civil War and took a chair at Sofia University from a man who had just been allowed to go the other way. Twenty-four years and 27 monographs later, Bulgaria dismissed him as a bourgeois specialist.
He stopped a Soviet boxer in Moscow in front of a Soviet crowd, at nineteen, and Bulgaria has not had a younger Olympic champion since. On the way to the final he beat a flyweight from Belfast who went home and became a press photographer.
The dissident writer jabbed on Waterloo Bridge with a poisoned pellet died on this date in 1978, aged 49. Nobody was ever charged, and his widow's account suggests the umbrella everyone remembers was not the weapon at all.
The percussionist who took Bulgaria to fifth place in Helsinki with nothing but a folk singer and a drum was born today in 1966. His instrument is the one you hear at every village wedding, and it is worth knowing its name.
Bulgaria's sharpest satirist was born in Sofia on 9 September 1941, three years to the day before the coup that made his birthday a state holiday. He spent the next decades mocking the result from inside a state theatre, and packing it out.
Bulgaria's most influential composer grew up in Shumen, conquered Berlin, and used his Party credit to pull musicians out of Belene. He died today in 1978. Plus Bogdan's name day and five towns marking the Virgin's birthday.
Bulgaria's longest-serving communist leader was born in Pravets today in 1911, on a date his own mother disputed. Belene, whose Danube island held his regime's most notorious camp, celebrates its town day alongside coal-town Radnevo.
On 6 September 1885 Plovdiv rose, its governor was marched through the streets, and Eastern Rumelia joined the Principality of Bulgaria in a single day. It is a Sunday and a public holiday, so this one changes your plans.
Bulgaria's Sydney 2000 triple jump champion was born in Pleven today, into a house where sport was banned. Add a pair of biblical name days and five town celebrations, and it is a fuller Saturday than it looks.
Aleksandar Shalamanov was born on this day in 1941. He is the only Bulgarian to have competed at both a Winter Olympics and a World Cup, and was named in the all-star team of 1966.
Major General Nikolay Rusev says the pilot count reaches 15 by April 2027, yet the jets lack their self-protection system and the second batch of eight has slipped towards 2030. Three different readiness dates are now on the public record, and the MiG-29s are still flying the alert over the coast.
Vasil Gendov died on this day in 1970. He made the first Bulgarian film in 1915, watched it burn in the bombing of Sofia, and spent his last decades building the archive that saved everyone else's.
The prime minister says the European Commission has approved Bulgaria's latest recovery-plan payments in recognition of its anti-corruption push, days after the EU deadline passed. The same cabinet meeting cut the recycling levy on fridges and washing machines by about four times and named three motorways as priorities. Here is what is documented, where the outlets disagree, and what a Brit here will notice.
Elitsa Todorova was born in Varna on this day in 1977. Her drums and folk voice took Bulgaria to fifth in Helsinki in 2007, still the country's best Eurovision result.
Ljuba Welitsch died on this day in 1996. She ran away to school in Shumen, was coached in Salome by Richard Strauss himself, and made her name at Covent Garden in 1947.
Lyuboslav Penev was born on this day in 1966. He won a Spanish double with Atletico Madrid, but cancer kept him out of the 1994 World Cup, the tournament that made his teammates immortal here.
Svetoslav Todorov was born on this day in 1978. He scored 26 goals to take Portsmouth into the Premier League, then wrecked his knee days before they got there.
Danail Nikolaev died on this day in 1942. He led the night that united Bulgaria in 1885, became its first general of the infantry, and once resigned over a seating plan.
Tsar Boris III died in Sofia on this day in 1943, at forty-nine, shortly after a meeting with Hitler. The cause has never been settled, and neither has the argument about what he did in the war.
Ivan Ivanov was born in Shumen on this day in 1971, learned to lift at the sports school here, and set an Olympic record to win gold in Barcelona. Galabovo and Dalgopol are also celebrating.
Shumen's own Todor Kolev, the funniest man in Bulgaria for half a century, was born on this day in 1939. It is also the name day of every Adrian and Natalia in the country, so there is quite a lot going on.
Ten league titles, an Olympic bronze and 58 caps, yet most Brits here have never heard the name. On this day in 2006 Bulgaria lost Kiril Rakarov, the CSKA right back whose career maps an entire era of the game.
Antoaneta Frenkeva turns 55 today. At seventeen, the swimmer from Smolyan came home from Seoul with two Olympic medals, a first for a Bulgarian woman in the pool. Here is why her name is worth knowing.
The president has refused to call the National Security Advisory Council over the US aircraft at Bezmer, saying the parties demanding it are playing politics before the 25 October election. Meanwhile the Navy is clearing drone parts off the beach between Albena and Kranevo.
The National Audit Office has put more than 16,000 asset declarations online, from a minister with 400,000 euros in cash to a party leader with a 8.9 million euro dividend. The same free register covers the mayors and officials British expats actually deal with.
Born in Sofia on this day in 1934, Dora Smedovska took a law degree into a career writing animated films. Almost nobody remembers her name, which is exactly why she is worth five minutes of your Sunday. Plus: what to do if you know a Valko.
Three reference works give three different dates for his death, and three different nationalities for the man himself. What they agree on is a burned village, an ambush in the ruins, and the summer that Macedonia rose.
Asparuh Nikodimov was born on this day in 1945. He scored against West Germany at the 1970 World Cup, then managed CSKA Sofia past the reigning European champions in two consecutive seasons: Nottingham Forest, then Liverpool.
Only one name celebrates today, but it carries the last great tsar of the First Bulgarian Empire, a father with ties to the court at Preslav, and a village out towards Razgrad that took his name in 1934.
Eurostat's final July figures put Bulgaria's annual inflation at 4.4%, down from 5.2% in June but still joint third-highest in the EU. For British expats, the useful question is what that national average says about an actual household budget.