1 July 1970s
The exact year remains unknown, but in the late 1970s a group of trailblazers gathered on the pier at Varna, on the northern Black Sea coast, to greet the dawn.
They listened to the Beatles, Deep Purple, Whitesnake and Jimi Hendrix, whose music was banned in Communist Bulgaria, and began singing Uriah Heep's song "July Morning," when the first rays of the sun hit the sea. They did not suspect that they had created Dzhulaya, or the July, an underground holiday that was one of the few local echoes of the hippie movement. Thirty years later, the tradition is still alive, although it is devoid of protest elements now and is much more popular and organised. In 2008, over 5,000 people sang the holiday anthem, together with John Lawton and Ken Hensley from Uriah Heep, on the beach in the village of Kamen Bryag, about 10 miles from Shabla.
9 July 2004
Car transporter drivers Georgi Lazov and Krasimir Kepov were kidnapped in Mosul, Iraq by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's wal-Jihad group. The abductors demanded that the US-led occupation forces in Iraq free all detainees in the country, threatening to execute the two Bulgarians. The threat was put into effect and the hostages were killed on 13 and 15 July, despite the fact that Qatar-based TV channel al-Jazeera aired a plea by their wives, and an address by Foreign Minister Solomon Passy, who, with the Qu'ran in hand, appealed for the release of the Bulgarian hostages.
21 July 1997
Former Communist dictator Todor Zhivkov gave a press conference on the publication of his memoirs about his time in power. (Parts of the book are available at vip.portal.bg/ tzhivkov.) Zhivkov had a lot to tell – he had led the country to the "glorious Communist future" with an iron hand from 1954 until 1989, when he was ousted in a coup staged by his own party. In 1992, he was sentenced to seven years imprisonment, which was later changed to house arrest, and a 21 million leva fine. He was not punished for crimes such as the forcible change of the Bulgarian Turks' names or the murder of regime opponents, but for the misuse of funds and flats, which he had given out to his cronies. In 1996, the sentence was revoked. Three more suits were brought against him in court, but the cases were closed after his death in August 1998.
23 July 1981
100,000 people attended the funeral of Communist dictator Todor Zhivkov's daughter, Lyudmila Zhivkova. She had died suddenly in her bathroom two days earlier at the age of 39. The official story is that it was an accident, but speculation about a possible murder was soon voiced. This was not entirely without grounds. Zhivkova, who was the president of the Committee for Arts and Culture and was regarded as the heir apparent to her father's post, was the engine behind the promotion of Bulgarian cultural heritage around the world. These nationalist acts were in sharp contrast to the proletarian internationalism advocated by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Besides, following a car accident in 1973, Zhivkova developed an unconcealed interest in the occult and this cast doubts on her allegiance to Communist ideology. Her death brought most of her initiatives to an end.
27 July 1903
The Church of Sveti Sedmochislenitsi, located in the area enclosed by Tsar Ivan Shishman St, Graf Ignatiev St, Shesti septemvri St and General Parensov St in Sofia, was consecrated. This event would not have been so noteworthy if the reconstructed church had not, in fact, formerly been a mosque. Known as the Black Mosque, because of its black marble-covered minaret and dating from 1528, it was probably designed by Ottoman architect Mimar Sinan. After the Bulgarian Liberation of 1878, it was used as a warehouse. The mosque was converted to a Romanesque-style church in just four years by architects Petko Momchilov and Yurdan Popov and their Russian colleague Aleksandar Pomerantsev. The man behind this transformation, Prime Minister Petko Karavelov, was buried in its grounds in 1903.