1st February

This is the Day of Remembrance and Respect to Victims of the Communist Regime. It’s not a public holiday, but it’s observed every year with ceremonies and wreath laying and, as the name suggests, it commemorates those who were killed or wrongfully imprisoned during the communist years between 1944 and 1989. It’s the 1st February due to the date in 1945 when the new regime consolidated their power by purging their political and ideological rivals (as well as anyone else who was inconvenient) by executing cabinet ministers, members of parliament, generals, colonels, and bankers after trial at a ‘People’s Court’.

Birthdays

Although the birthday song is exactly the same - and sung in English, interestingly - if it’s your birthday and you go out for a meal, you’re the one who’ll be paying. Similarly, instead of your work colleagues getting you a cake, you will have to bring in treats for them. Shops are well-equipped with boxes of individually wrapped small chocolates exactly for this purpose: Ferrero Roche or Toffifee or Lindor or, most commonly, Merci. You ceremoniously present this small chocolate to someone and they will respond by giving you a wish which will be something that includes health, happiness and success.

Slippers

Bulgarians think that British homes all have two taps - one for cold water, one for hot - that our windows always open outwards instead of inwards, and that we don’t remove our shoes when we come in from outside. All of these are considered odd, but especially the shoes. In Bulgaria you always take your shoes off when you enter someone’s home. Instead of padding around in your socks, you’ll be given slippers to wear - usually the kind you find in hotel rooms. There’ll probably be a little cupboard near the door where a supply is kept for use by guests.

Day of Wine & Roses

This is 14 February so the roses come from Valentine’s Day. While it’s always fun to see Bulgarians carrying flowers and nice that the reds on the traffic lights at the bottom of Vitoshka change into little hearts, Valentine’s is an imported festival. In Bulgaria, 14 February is traditionally about wine. This is the day when people begin trimming back last year’s vines in preparation for the coming season and, as well as being a name day for any girl called Grozdana (Grozdi is Bulgarian for grapes) it’s also the day of ‘Trifon the Pruner’, the patron saint of vineyards.

Forgiveness Day

Like Lent, this is linked to Easter (seven weeks before) so the date changes every year. The tradition is that families get together around a meal of cheese and egg and the younger members ask forgiveness from the older ones. The fact that Bulgarians need a special day to remind them to say sorry says quite a bit about their general attitude. If you’re in a village out of the city, you’ll probably also see lots of fires on this day. People leap over them for health but, more normally, they’re used as a good excuse for a social gathering. 

Martenitsi

These are bracelets made of red and white thread that you give to everyone you know on the first of March. Everyone does it as it’s a tradition that everyone can get involved with regardless of age, nationality, background or beliefs. A couple of weeks before Baba Marta, temporary stalls pop up everywhere – particularly around public transport stops or anywhere with a lot of footfall – all of them selling countless varieties of martenitsi. You wear them until the first time you see a stork when you then take them off and hang them on the branch of a blossoming tree.

Baba Marta

A day for the coming of spring. Baba means Grandma, Marta is March. It’s celebrated on the first of March and the weather throughout the month is said to reflect Baba Marta’s mercurial temperament: sunny and warm when she’s happy, cold and snowy when she’s not. Along with the martenitsi, there are two small dolls which are similar to corn dollies, but made out of red and white wool. The white one is male and called Pizho, the red is female and called Penda. You’ll see these decorating buildings and rooms everywhere as well as being worn as pendants.

Christmas Meal

This happens on Christmas Eve evening – there’s no particular food-related tradition for Christmas Day, other than to eat lots of it. The Christmas meal is vegan (as is the whole of Christmas Eve) and will include dishes like roasted peppers, a big pot of beans, winter salad, different kinds of dips, sarmi, a bread made without milk or yeast and a special compot made from figs and other dried fruit. It’s very important that there’s an odd number of these dishes and, after the meal, they should be left on the table overnight so that departed relatives can eat too.

St. Nikola’s Day

Nikola is a boy’s name – the stress is on the ‘o’ – so this is St. Nicholas’s Day. It takes place on 6th December and is one of the big name days where gifts are given to the namee, families gather together for a meal, and there’s a specific type of food. Because St. Nikola is the patron saint of fishermen, the food in this instance is fish; usually carp. Walk through any residential district in the early evening of St. Nikola’s Day and the stench of cooking carp seeps from windows and hangs over the street like a toxic mist.

Bai Ganyo

Most countries have their equivalent of the Englishman, Irishman, Scotsman joke and I know that in Europe, it’s usually the Belgians who serve as the butt of them. Bulgaria is different. They tell jokes involving an American, a German and a Bulgarian - and it’s the Bulgarian who features as the punchline as a kind of Bai Ganyo figure. Bai Ganyo is probably the country’s most famous literary character and is often used as a reference for how Bulgarians imagine they’re perceived by the rest of the world: poor, uneducated, opportunistic, egotistical, and completely out of step with everywhere else.

Necrologs

Obituaries. Because people may not have access to the internet or newspapers, necrologs are printed A4 sheets that are pasted by loved ones around the neighbourhood where the departed lived – on lampposts, doors, foyers of apartment blocks and church noticeboards. The necrolog contains a name, details of the funeral, a message, and a photo. The photos are usually of the deceased as they were younger and, because their younger selves were living under Communism, their photos are usually stern, unsmiling, and formal. On first impression (and without knowing the language) you’d be forgiven for thinking that necrologs are wanted posters.

Mehana

In Cyrillic: механа. You’ll see this, usually carved on wooden signs, outside many restaurants but it doesn’t mean that Mexican food is especially popular. A mehana is an eating place that serves traditional Bulgarian food. It will probably have low ceilings, bare floors, wooden panels on the walls, tables with benches and lots of coarse woollen fabrics woven with red, white and black patterns. A mehana may also be a room in someone’s house – an area devoted to entertaining guests which is often outside or on a lower level, somewhere that’s away from the main living area of the home.

Hora

These are traditional dances that mainly involve the feet and legs in sequences of steps, pauses, skips and waggles – the arms are used to hold on to the people next to you, either in a circle or a snaking conga line. The type of horo will depend on the specific type of event or song – each region also has its own horo - and dancing will break out at any kind of celebration or whenever there’s drinking and a live band. There’s no stigma attached to hora and usually the most ‘manly’ men will be the ones leading the dance.

Head Shaking

The actions are reversed: shaking the head means yes, nodding means no. The origins of this are sketchy and smothered in urban myths involving the Ottoman occupation, much like the British V sign that has nothing to do with archers at the Battle of Agincourt but makes a colourful story. A lot is made of this head shaking but it’s not as confusing as you might think. It looks similar to the Indian head-wobble and is mainly used by older, non-English speaking Bulgarians. The younger generations tend to adopt the more universally accepted head movements, especially when speaking to foreigners.

July Morning

The tradition is that you get up - or, more likely - stay up to watch the sunrise on the first of July. It’s a celebration of the summer, a kind of hippie thing that takes its name from the 1971 Uriah Heep song which became popular here in the 80s, possibly as a protest by young people against Communism. It happens everywhere but is mainly focused on the Black Sea coast which is the most eastern part of Bulgaria. There are concerts, parties, camping and beach events but nothing officially organised or commercialised, it’s very much a people’s thing.

Easter Eggs

Instead of gorging on chocolate, you colour hard boiled eggs. The shops are full of paints and dyes and your Facebook feed fills up with photos of elaborate designs and advice about techniques. You decorate them on the Thursday or Saturday before Easter Sunday and make sure that the first one is always red. This egg is saved for a year. On the day itself, you ‘battle’ by holding an egg in your fist and hitting it against an opponent’s - first the top, then the bottom. You win if yours doesn’t crack. You then eat egg salad until June.

Easter

There’s a televised event held at Alexander Nevsky Cathedral at midnight and, if you’re in the centre at around this time, you’ll see lots of people carrying candles home from it. Like Christmas though, the main tradition at Easter is for families to get together for a big home cooked meal and the city empties as people travel back to their home towns and villages. The meal they eat consists of rice mixed with chunks of lung, and lamb. Lamb isn’t commonly eaten here - only on special occasions such as Easter or St George’s Day which follows soon afterwards.

Giving Flowers

As well as people selling flowers on pavements, you’ll find at least one flower shop on every shopping street and in most metro stations. It’s always a joy to see stern commuters furtively carrying bunches upside down on their way home. Flowers are given on numerous occasions: to teachers at the beginning and end of the school year, to female relatives of people who have birthdays, and on ‘days’ such as Flowers Day and Ladies’ Day. To avoid bad luck, it’s crucial to give an odd number of flowers - florists won’t even sell them to you in even numbers.

Name Days

Bulgarians love designated celebratory ‘days’ and they punctuate the year wonderfully. There’s Baba Marta, Flowers Day, Wine Day – there are even phrases for ‘happy first snow day’ and ‘happy new haircut day’. Most Christian names have a specific day and, as with birthdays, you give chocolates to your friends and colleagues when it’s yours. Some have additional foods or gifts associated with them such as carp on St Nikola’s day as he’s the patron saint of fishermen, or St George’s day – which is on a different date here - when you eat lamb because he’s the patron saint of shepherds.

Elections

These are held on a Sunday, either because it doesn’t interfere with people’s work or because of a government conspiracy, depending on who you speak to. I picked up a communist leaflet that had pictures of all their candidates and they look exactly how you’d expect them to. It seems murderous stares and chiaroscuro lighting are still popular with voters. There were also a quite a few friendly uncle types that work as ‘security consultants’ and several who had arrived directly from the 70s: totalitarian moustaches, helmet haircuts and brightly patterned jackets with lapels that you could go hang-gliding with.