The best known books set in each country: Bulgaria

Bulgaria is in southeastern Europe, south of Romania, north of Greece, east of Serbia and North Macedonia and west of the Black Sea.

It’s a country that I know relatively well – I first visited for a week at the age of 8 for a family holiday in the Golden Sands beach resort near Varna, and have gone back reasonably frequently since 2000. My many Bulgarian friends and colleagues include half a dozen of its former foreign ministers. (In fact I introduced one of them to his wife.)

Me speaking on Bulgarian TV in February 2020, just before the pandemic. My name is spelt “*Никълас Уайт*» in Bulgarian Cyrillic, and the caption describes me as “*инфлуенсър*”, an influencer. On a good day, perhaps.

Bulgaria became de facto independent from the Ottoman Empire in 1878, though the reduction by Western European diplomacy of its originally large assigned territory caused resentment for decades. In 1885 it annexed the neighbouring Ottoman province of Eastern Rumelia, and fought off a punitive attack from Serbia (we’ll hear more about that).

Having defeated the Ottomans in alliance with Serbia and Greece in 1912, Bulgaria then lost to Bulgaria, Greece and Romania in the next war in 1913, and after the first world war lost some more territory and settled down to a period of political instability. Bulgaria allied with Germany during the second world war, and by the end was occupied by the Soviets who installed a Communist government which lasted until 1989.

Since then, power alternated between the ex-Communist Bulgarian Socialist Party and centrist or right-wing alternatives, notably the former king Simeon, who had been forced to abdicate at the age of 9 in 1946 and returned as prime minister from 2001 to 2005, and more recently the GERB party founded by Boyko Borisov, which has been in power for the majority of the time since 2009. In this year’s elections, a new leftish political party founded by former president Rumen Radev won and took power.

The Bulgarian language is a Slavic language, related to Russian, more closely to Serbian and Croatian, and even more closely to Macedonian. If you know the basic Cyrillic alphabet, you can always spot Bulgarian by the fact that it uses the letter ъ as a vowel – the ‘u’ in ‘Bulgaria’, in fact, or the middle letter of the Bulgarian spelling of my own first name; its use as a vowel is unique to Bulgarian – in Russian, ъ does not have a sound but separates hard consonants from soft vowels; in Tajik, ъ is a consonant (the glo’’al stop); and other currently used versions of the Cyrillic alphabet just don’t have it. Also, unlike other Slavic languages (apart from Macedonian), Bulgarian doesn’t do evil things to its nouns, and translates ‘the’ as a suffix.

See here for the methodology of these posts, though NB that I am now also using numbers from StoryGraph. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in the current boundaries of Bulgaria.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	GR raters	LT owners	SG reviews
What Belongs to You	Garth Greenwell	15,898	857	3,443
The Shadow Land	Elizabeth Kostova	16,240	1,128	2,392
Cleanness	Garth Greenwell	10,333	494	2,696
Arms and the Man	George Bernard Shaw	11,475	1,243	924
The Elusive Mrs. Pollifax	Dorothy Gilman	10,092	1066	984
The Physics of Sorrow	Georgi Gospodinov	13,720	415	1,070
Death and the Gardener	Georgi Gospodinov	15,325	158	751
The Balkan Escape	Steve Berry	4,864	247	417

This is the biggest shift I have yet seen from when I did this analysis for Bulgaria back in 2015. Then, the top book by far was Arms and the Man, George Bernard Shaw’s play set during and immediately after the 1885 war, in which the protagonist Bluntschli famously declares, “My rank is the highest known in Switzerland: I’m a free citizen.” It’s still ahead, if not by much, on LibraryThing, but behind on Goodreads and way behind on StoryGraph. Basically a lot of new Bulgarian-set novels, or novels newly available in translation, have appeared in the intervening years.

Garth Greenwell is an American writer who has worked as a teacher in Bulgaria. His two novels here, What Belongs To You, which is the StoryGraph and overall winner this week, and Cleanness are about an American teacher facing the challenges of gay romance with Bulgarians while working there.

Elizabeth Kostova has a Bulgarian surname, but it is her husband’s; she was originally Elizabeth Johnson from Tennessee. I really didn’t much like her runaway hit, The Historian, but The Shadow Land, this week’s Goodreads winner, sounds like it’s much more under control and restricts its setting to Bulgaria.

The Elusive Mrs Pollifax is the third in the series of novels about an unlikely CIA agent (the first two are set in Albania and Turkey). It was the runner-up when I did this analysis in 2015.

With reluctance I had to disqualify Georgi Gospodinov’s International Booker Prize-winning science fiction novel Time Shelter, which would otherwise have been this week’s winner. I actually went to the lengths of buying it and doing a swift page count, but strictly speaking more of it is set in Switzerland than in Bulgaria. On the other hand his next two novels, The Physics of Sorrow and Death and the Gardener, are much more firmly set there. (Maybe the latter more firmly than the former.)

Finally The Balkan Escape is a YA fantasy adventure story, the first in a series (though none of the others seems to be set in Bulgaria). It came third when I counted in 2015.

Regrettably the StoryGraph numbers knocked The Broken Road by Patrick Leigh Fermor off the list. Ivan Vazov’s classic Under the Yoke was next after that (did very well on Goodreads, worse on the other two). Next would have been the top book by a Bulgarian woman writer, Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, by Kapka Kassabova.

On my own shelves, apart from Arms and the Man, The Broken Road and Under the Yoke, I don’t have a lot of books with Bulgarian content. My grandmother’s boyfriend Alan Bott managed to reunite with the Allies there after escaping Turkish captivity at the end of the First World War. I once had, but seem to have lost, Richard Crampton’s excellent history of the country. I also commend the writing of Bulgarian thinker Ivan Krastev, who I collaborated with a couple of times, more than twenty years ago now, and whose pessimism about the political future comes from a place of love and liberalism.

Next up is Bulgaria’s neighbour Serbia; then the Republic of Congo (Brazzaville), El Salvador and back to Europe for Denmark.

From the Heart of Europe

Books, politics, languages and life

The best known books set in each country: Bulgaria

Related

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Share this:

Related

Leave a Reply Cancel reply