11 August 1990
An Army Construction Corps truck collided with a tractor on Sofia's Ring Road.
The 14 soldiers inside were caught in the conflagration – only one survived. The trial is still dragging on, and the cause remains unknown. One theory is that the truck was shot at – an idea supported by the fact that Ivo Karamanski, allegedly one of Bulgaria's top underworld bosses at the time, was riding in a car directly behind the truck. On the day of the tragedy, the leading news story on national television showed Prime Minister Zhan Videnov dancing the horo with elderly supporters in the provinces.
13 August 1923
Strange as it may sound, there was a time when music stars in Bulgaria sang pop instead of chalga. One of the most famous was born on this date. A native of Dupnitsa, Lea Ivanova grew up in Istanbul, where she studied at Robert College. At the beginning of the 1940s she arrived in Sofia to study at the Art Academy, but instead became a soloist with several jazz bands. In Communist Bulgaria, however, jazz was deemed "decadent" and, therefore, dangerous music. In 1949 Lea was invited on a tour to the United States. Not only did the Communists refuse to let her go, they also sent her to a labour camp. Despite her "compromised" biography, Lea became a star in the late 1950s, singing Bulgarian folklore, chansons and canzonets. During the 1960s and 1970s she even gave a series of concerts and tours in Western Europe, the United States, Canada, South America, and the Middle East. She died in 1986 in Sofia.
17 August 1999
Bulgarian Socialist Party chairman Georgi Parvanov, now president, visited the mausoleum of Bulgaria's first Communist leader, Georgi Dimitrov, for the last time, to inspect the preparations for its demolition. He left with a piece of brick as a memento. A week later, the mausoleum, an emblem of Bulgaria's Communist past, was gone. The idea of pulling it down belongs to Evgeniy Bakardzhiev, a deputy prime minister in Ivan Kostov's government. Symbolically, the empty mausoleum (the embalmed body of Georgi Dimitrov had been removed and buried in 1990) proved a hard nut to crack. Although erected in a mere six days after Dimitrov's death in 1948, the building was so strong that the first controlled detonation only managed to tilt it slightly. It took three attempts to demolish it completely.
21 August 1968
"Let Us Protect Socialism and Help Czechoslovakian Communists in Their Struggle With the Enemies" and "Down With the Counterrevolution" – this is what Bulgarian People's Army servicemen chanted when they entered Czechoslovakia to quash the Prague Spring. Two infantry regiments from Harmanli and Elhovo participated, a total of 2,164 soldiers and 26 T-34 tanks. All Warsaw Pact members except Romania took part in what would go down in history as one of the most ignominious acts of Communist repression in post-war Europe.
26 August 1990
At 9.30 pm a fire broke out in the Party House, when a rally allegedly stormed the building. The protesters wanted the red star, a symbol of Communism, taken down from the top of the building. According to one theory, the Communist Party itself set the building on fire to destroy its own archives. Another claims that the angry crowd got out of control and began vandalising and looting. The fire was extinguished six hours later, but by then it had managed to destroy furniture and documents worth about eight million leva. Nobody was officially charged or punished. The red star was taken down from its pedestal in October 1990 and replaced by the Bulgarian flag. Today the building, a Stalinist monstrosity in central Sofia, is used by the Parliament.
19 September 1903
John B. Jackson took his bowler hat, climbed into the four-in-hand carriage waiting for him and, escorted by a cavalry platoon, arrived at the royal palace, now the National Art Gallery. At the meeting with Prince Ferdinand, he presented his credentials as the first US diplomatic representative to Bulgaria, marking the beginning of bilateral diplomatic relations. These would be mostly uneasy, however. During the First World War both Bulgaria and the United States closed down their embassies. Diplomatic relations were completely severed in 1950–1959, after Communist Bulgaria declared the American Ambassador Donald R. Heath a persona non grata. Being allied to Germany and then to the USSR, Bulgaria had never been an ally of the United States prior to its accession to NATO, in 2002.