On This Day in Bulgaria: Ljuba Welitsch, Found in Shumen (1 September)
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.
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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.
Industrial production rose 0.4% in June, yet remained about 2.5% lower than a year earlier. The more useful story for British workers and businesses is the sharp divide between manufacturing and mining.
Two officially neutral countries, one secret treaty, signed in Sofia on this day in 1914. The Ottoman-Bulgarian alliance was the quiet first step towards Bulgaria joining the First World War, and Kula celebrates its town day too.
Born in Sofia on 18 August 1962, Elena Rusalieva went from puppet theatre to becoming the Bulgarian voice of ER, Lost and Desperate Housewives. She turns 64 today, and three Bulgarian towns are celebrating too.
Born in Razgrad on 17 August 1968, Nikolay Antonov ran the 200m in 20.20 seconds, a Bulgarian record that still stands, and once beat Carl Lewis indoors. He turns 58 today.
Born on 16 August 1885, Dora Gabe went from a Shumen school bench to co-founding the Bulgarian PEN Club, and even the encyclopaedias cannot agree on her birth year. The state once celebrated the wrong birthday.
The regional development minister arrives in Shumen on Tuesday to talk about water and roads, days after figures put barely a fifth of the municipality's republican network in good condition. Also: a birthing pool at the maternity ward, and a library teaching children to use a quill.
The Ministry of Economy has revived a procedure to give strategic status to the two companies behind a proposed gunpowder plant in Shumen province, two years after the same procedure collapsed. It grants no permission to build, and it lands while the state's own billion-euro gunpowder project has no joint venture behind it.
Stiliana Nikolova finished second in the all-around at the Rhythmic Gymnastics World Championships in Frankfurt, holding off Italy's Sofia Raffaeli by five hundredths of a point and securing Bulgaria a quota place for the 2028 Olympics.
The busiest date in the Bulgarian calendar: the country's biggest women's name day, seven town celebrations led by Varna, and the anniversary of a 25-year-old schoolteacher killed in the Ilinden Uprising.
Bulgaria has two famous Boris Hristovs. Today's birthday belongs to the one who did not sing: a Pernik village poet who edited films at Boyana, reached the school textbooks, and once wrote to the government to refuse a state honour.
A rebuilt children's ward at the regional hospital, a fatal crash that closed the E-70, the death of a former justice minister who began on the Shumen bench, and a painter's second show at the library.
Deputy PM Alexander Poulev says the extended UK licence for Lukoil's Bulgarian companies averts a fuel price spike and keeps the refinery open. The dates underneath that reassurance are worth reading: the crude is secured to September, the licence to 29 October, and the American one is still being negotiated.
The EBU and BNT have confirmed Burgas as host of the 71st Eurovision Song Contest, with the final on 15 May 2027. For Brits on the Black Sea coast, the interesting part is the date: mid-May, when the flights and the resorts are barely awake.
Born on 31 July 1914 by the old Julian calendar, which is 13 August by ours, writer Kamen Kalchev went from a Gabrovo village and a prison dock to running Bulgaria's biggest publishing house. Today is, in every sense, his second birthday.
The new regulation applies generally from 12 August 2026, bringing an immediate PFAS limit and new business duties. Most of the changes shoppers will actually notice arrive later.
Born on this day in 1853, Stoyan Zaimov knew Levski at school, gave Benkovski his name, and survived a death sentence, before becoming a librarian whose first teaching post in free Bulgaria was in Shumen.
The case surfaced only because investigators on the Georgi Kuzev murder found video on a seized phone. The investigation says the two men were picked out for looking foreign; the charge sheet says hooliganism, and Bulgaria has been criticised for exactly that gap before.
Checks by Sega found the "Basket with Care" signs largely gone from the big chains two months after launch, while the price controls around it were quietly extended for another year, with penalties on companies now reaching 100,000 euros.
In 1791 a Russian admiral sailed straight between an anchored Ottoman fleet and the Bulgarian shore, under the guns on the cape. Seven years later Nelson used the same idea at the Nile.
Dr Petar Kalaidzhiev wants a questionnaire added to the professional driver's medical. Bulgaria already has one of Europe's strictest written thresholds for the condition, and a health fund that pays for neither the test nor the treatment.
Born on this day in 1964, he wrote a song about a mother and her son that a University of Chicago study found had stopped belonging to him. Bulgarians had simply absorbed it as their own.
The device came down a kilometre from a Trans-Balkan pipeline compressor station on 8 August, with accounts differing on how far inside the border. No one was hurt, the Defence Ministry says nothing suggests it was deliberate, and Sofia has summoned Ukraine's ambassador for Monday.
The one-year dual-pricing period ended on 8 August, so the euro is now the only price a shop must display. The rule against currency-driven price rises stays, and if you still have lev cash the central bank remains free and open-ended.
In the small hours of 9 August 1886, pro-Russian officers seized Prince Alexander of Battenberg in his Sofia palace and shipped him down the Danube on his own yacht. The deposed prince was, awkwardly for the plotters, Prince Philip's great-uncle.
Six name-day variants celebrate today, and because it falls on a Saturday this year, expect houses to be open and tables to be laid. Here is the etiquette Brits get wrong, and a quiet anniversary alongside it.
Trucks over 12 tonnes are barred from the Trakia and Struma motorways and the Kresna Gorge road during the Friday and Sunday afternoon peaks, 7 and 9 August. Cars are unaffected, and the agency's aim is a smoother run to the coast and the Greek border.
Born near Ruse on 7 August 1936, playwright Stefan Tsanev turns 90 today. The censors banned his first play; the world staged his later ones in more than 200 theatres.
He was a carpenter from a poor Strandzha family who ended up leading an uprising. Wounded storming an Ottoman barracks, he asked his own men to shoot him. They drew lots for who would do it.
Italian media say a group of young neo-Nazis tried to force their way into a Bansko hotel housing Italian Jewish teenagers on 2 August. The Interior Ministry calls it a verbal dispute with no physical confrontation. Bulgaria's Jewish community, which chose the resort for a children's camp precisely because Bulgaria felt safe, is demanding the investigation settle which account is true.
An immunologist at the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences has warned that longer, hotter summers are putting dangerous stress on the heart, the immune system and anyone with a chronic condition, as a heat alert covered most of the country on Wednesday.
Born on this day in 1952, Georgi Mamalev has been at the Ivan Vazov National Theatre since 1977 and on Bulgarian screens for just as long. Most British expats have seen him without ever learning his name.
The regional governor is about to ban fireworks across Shumen province, and the numbers behind that decision are quietly the better story: grass and scrub fires have fallen from 204 in 2023 to 19 so far in 2026. Elsewhere there is a free harp concert in the Vladigerov museum courtyard, fifteen children let loose in the city art gallery, a heat wave sitting at 35 degrees, and a 78-year-old with an inventive hiding place for a stolen phone. If you have a garden, a strimmer and a plot of dry grass, the fire rules are the item worth reading twice.
Most entries in this series have to work to find the British angle. This one doesn't: Great Britain helped broker the treaty signed on this day in 1791 in a house that still stands in the Bulgarian town of Svishtov, ending a war Austria was, on paper, actually winning.
Most British expats will never have heard of Konstantin Konstantinov, born on this day in 1890, and that says more about which stories cross language borders than about him: he spent decades as a working judge while quietly becoming one of Bulgaria's most translated literary voices, then fell foul of the new communist government over a novel he'd written under the old one.
Only Serbia records more road deaths per million people, according to a summer driving study, though Bulgaria's ten-year improvement is the part of the table the headline skips.
Three Bulgarian towns mark their city day today, one of them tied directly to the 1903 Ilinden Uprising, and back in 2020 Lokomotiv Plovdiv snatched the Bulgarian Supercup with a goal in the 89th minute. A genuinely crowded calendar, so let's take it in order.
Bulgaria Air opens online check-in 24 hours before departure, but four different deadlines follow. Here is how the service works, who is excluded, what the LIGHT fare leaves out, and how the EU Entry/Exit System changes when British expats should arrive.
The precise day of the 1087 Battle of Dristra was never recorded, only the month, so treat this as a look back at August 1087 rather than an exact anniversary: a Byzantine campaign against the Pechenegs collapsed at a fortress an hour or two from where you're probably reading this.
Sofia is Bulgaria's capital and largest city, and in a highly centralised state that fact shapes more of an expat's daily life than a simple geography answer suggests.
On 31 July 1877, Ottoman forces overran Stara Zagora during the war that eventually freed Bulgaria, burning the city and killing thousands of civilians, but not before a handful of Bulgarian volunteers died protecting a flag stitched by nuns in Russia that Bulgaria still keeps as a national relic.
Figures released under Bulgaria's access-to-information law show the Interior Ministry paid just under €3.77 million in salaries to an internal unit for sidelined officials, and the ministry's two explanations for it do not match.
Parliament rushed through emergency amendments on Wednesday keeping the state's special administrator in charge of every major Lukoil operation in the country, and added the aviation and marine fuel businesses to his remit. For British expats, the important dates are 13 August and October, when the sanctions waivers keeping the whole arrangement legal run out.
Parliament has fixed Bulgaria's presidential election for Sunday 25 October, with a runoff on 1 November if needed. Two candidates are confirmed, bigger names are still deciding, and no contender has ever won the job in the first round.
The most reliable date on record for the Battle of Pliska is actually 26 July 811, four days before this piece runs, but Khan Krum's destruction of a Byzantine army, and his skull-cup revenge, unfolded right on Shumen's doorstep and is worth telling regardless.