Film Screening and Discussion: “Nikola Vaptsarov. Five Stories about a Shooting”

Nikola Vaptsarov. Five Stories about a Shooting, 2014

19:00h
“Sofia” Gallery

Special guests: Kostadin Bonev (director), Ivaila Alexandrova (screenwriter)

Nikola Vaptsarov was born in Bansko. Trained as a machine engineer at the Naval Machinery School in Varna, which was later named after him. His first service was on the famous Drazki torpedo boat. In April and May 1932 Vaptsarov visited Istanbul, Famagusta, Alexandria, Beirut, Port Said, and Haifa as a crew member of the Burgas vessel.

Later he went to work in a factory in the village of Kocherinovo – at first as a stoker and eventually as a mechanic. He was elected Chairman of the Association protecting worker rights in the factory. Vaptsarov was devoted to his talent and spent his free time writing and organising amateur theatre pieces. He got fired after a technical failure in 1936. This forced him to move to Sofia, where he worked for the state railway service and the municipal incinerating furnace. He continued writing, and a number of newspapers published poems of his. The “Romatika” poem won him a poetry contest.

With time Vaptsarov absorbed a lot of Communist ideas and started taking an active part in the ideological movement. In 1940 he participated in the so-called “Sobolev action”, gathering signatures for a pact of friendship between Bulgaria and the USSR. The illegal activity earned him an arrest and an internment in the village of Godech. After his release in September 1940, Vaptsarov became a leader of a Central Military Committee of the Bulgarian Communist Party. His task was to organise the supply of guns and documents for the antifascist resistance. He was arrested in March 1942. On July 23, 1942 he was sentenced to death and shot down on the same evening together with 11 other men.