site.btaBTA to Put Up Memorial Plaque for Dalchev Brothers in Thessaloniki

A plaque commemorating the Dalchev brothers will be placed at the Bulgarian Consulate General in Thessaloniki by September 15, the start of the school year in Bulgaria, BTA Director General Kiril Valchev said on Thursday, presenting the June issue of the national news agency's LIK magazine at the BTA head office in Sofia.

The issue is dedicated to the most renowned of the Dalchev brothers, poet and translator Atanas Dalchev (1904-1978), officially eulogized at the time of his death as "one of the greatest masters of the Bulgarian written word". His elder brother, Lyubomir, was a famous sculptor, and his younger brother, Boris, was a well-known architect.

At first, the idea was to put up the memorial plaque at the family's former house in Thessaloniki on Atanas Dalchev's birthday, June 12, but it turned out that the house no longer exists, Valchev said. "We will place it at the Bulgarian Consulate General, which is in the same district in Thessaloniki," he said. The plaque has not been made yet due to a procedural delay. After talks, BTA received the green light from Bulgarian Foreign Ministry Permanent Secretary Svetlan Stoev and Consul General Anton Markov.

After the event in Sofia on June 27, LIK's Dalchev issue will be presented twice more, at the Apollonia Festival of Arts in the Bulgarian seaside resort of Sozopol and in Thessaloniki in September.

Valchev said that a similar memorial plaque should perhaps be installed in Istanbul, another city associated with the Dalchevs. He recalled that BTA has already put up a memorial for author Aleko Konstantinov at the University of Odessa in Ukraine, where the great 19th-century satirist studied law.

"In this way we are saying something important. Memory is not only about time, it is also about place," the BTA chief said. He sees a connection with BTA's ongoing series of conferences called "Europe in the Balkans: A Common Future". "What better way to celebrate the common future of the Balkans than to create memorial signs connecting three Dalchev places: Thessaloniki, Constantinople and Sofia?"

Atanas Dalchev was born 120 years ago on June 12. He is among the best known and most widely read Bulgarian poets. In addition to his original work, he also translated a large amount of fiction and poetry.

Dalchev was born in Thessaloniki, then part of the Ottoman Empire. The family moved to Sofia in 1913. He studied philosophy and teacher studies at Sofia University. He spent years abroad: in Italy, France (Paris and Toulouse), London and Istanbul. He was fluent in several languages.

Atanas Dalchev was among the leading Bulgarian poets of the 1920s and 1930s. After the Communist takeover in 1944, he was among the first writers to be attacked by the new establishment. While he did not aggressively reject the social order under Communism, he was too detached from the world he was forced to live in. His aesthetic platform had little to do with Socialist Realism, a concept that dominated Bulgarian literature and art at that time. He maintained poetic silence for years, but was able to establish himself as a prominent translator of poetry and fiction from French, Spanish, English, German and Russian.

Even though they frowned upon his poetry, his critics could not cross him out or consign him to oblivion. He had carved out a niche of his own, and even the Communist establishment accepted that fact.