The endless line of silent people with sad faces could hardly fit in the huge space of the basilica "Saint Sophia" - hour after hour. I had seen so many people in church only on Easter - and then only in the "Alexander Nevsky" temple. Among the thousands of people - hundreds of familiar faces from every class, gender and occupation: from the heavy Sofia bourgeoisie, wearing suits for the fourth or fifth generation, to long-haired and shaggy rock musicians, plus dozens of politicians, mostly from the civilized spectrum.
Hundreds, maybe thousands knew Kircho Marichkov personally, because he had time for everyone. Like the true greats, he was considerate, respectful and really listened to everyone. And I myself never heard him say a bad word about anyone, even proven scoundrels.
The Perfect Gentlemen
I want to communicate directly and without hints. Two men saved the spirit of Bulgarians in the late 1960s and early 1970s and thus saved Bulgaria: Georgi Asparuhov-Gundy and Kiril Marichkov.
The football that Gundy played was elegant in a particularly European way, in contrast to the lumbering game of most of his Bulgarian colleagues, who also constantly kicked him in the knees and ankles because otherwise they couldn't take the ball away from him at all. Gundy demonstrated that even in our country, in the midst of the dominating beret simplicity of the communist elite, it is possible to live like a European.
Marichkov's songs, in turn, opened windows to a colorful, joyful and human world, also in everything opposed to the humiliating everyday life of a cap. I was 10 when I heard "The Two Beatniks Sing", "The Little Bright Window", "The Bell". The year before, in third grade, the blurry black-and-white clip of "White Silence" had left me speechless.
Before I saw the world unfolding before me in these compositions, my life was like that of any pioneer: partisans heroically attack dairies, Mitko Palauzov shoots at gendarmes, the shepherd Kalitko hides in a cave, Todor Zhivkov cuts ribbons, wearing a white cap and slipped into a ridiculous Soviet costume. And suddenly I hear that somewhere out there is another, big and beautiful world. And I understand that cap gray is not the only possible way of living.
Both Gundy and Marichkov also demonstrated something else very important. They were the perfect gentlemen in a country where being a rough peasant ("of the people") was considered the highest achievement. Both in their professional and personal conduct they upheld the standards of the European civilization from which we had been forcibly torn a generation earlier.
And people - hundreds of thousands, millions - recognized them as their heroes, as the exponents of the real "I" of the Bulgarian people.
It is no coincidence that Gundy's funeral in 1971 turned into a huge protest march against the communist regime, and he fell into a real panic for at least one day.
And later, every time the People's Militia cut off the electricity at a Cricket concert, the audience marched around Sofia shouting "Freedom!".
The real heroes
The criteria set by Gundi and Kircho, which became the criteria of the awake part of the Bulgarian people, made it so that in 1989, when the time came to choose who we were, we chose to be part of the European civilization, whose representatives they were. Our neighboring nations did not have figures like Kiril Marichkov - or, if they did, they did not recognize them as their heroes and chose either to slaughter each other or to sink into some dusty oriental provincialism, which they still consider true patriotism.< /p>
Bulgarians are constantly entangled in many delusions. But they unerringly choose their true heroes. And that saves them. Every time.