All love stories are great, but some are greater than others.

This was confirmed by the results of a vote on Bulgarian National Television (BNT) in January. Over several days, Bulgarians were asked to choose the greatest love story of their country as part of BNT’s campaign to identify the main Bulgarian events  of the 20th century in a number of categories. After choosing the greatest political, sport, scientific, cultural and military events, it was time for Bulgarians to pick Bulgaria’s greatest love story.

When the result was announced on January 22, Bulgarians’ choice turned out to be the romance that poet Nikola Vaptsarov shared with his wife Boika Vaptsarova. Their story won 31.67 per cent of the votes, beating the other nine entries. Indeed, the story of Nikola Vaptsarov is worth being immortalised in a film, as it contains not just great affection and romance, but also great suffering, separation, prison and death by firing squad. Add to this the fact that Vaptsarov has long been recognised as one of Bulgaria’s greatest poets whose final words to his wife, while waiting for the firing squad, make up probably the best-known Bulgarian love poem, and the outcome of the vote was little surprise.  
  
From the moment the couple met in 1932, until Vaptsarov’s death on July 23 1942,  the couple went through heavy losses and challenges, including the loss of their seven-month-old son. For all this, their love grew stronger.   

The fact that Vaptsarov was sentenced to death as a communist also contributed to his fame in the times when Bulgaria was a communist state as his work and life were made part of the school curriculum.

His story starts in 1909, the year he was born in the small mountain town of Bansko (now Bulgaria’s most famous ski resort). Today the house Vaptsarov grew up in is a museum and is a landmark on Bansko’s main square.

His mother was Protestant, which became an important factor in Vaptsarov’s relationship with his future wife Boika. When they decided to get married in 1934, he had to convert to Orthodox  Christianity, because at the time the only institution which could legally marry people was the Bulgarian Orthodox Church. As a young man, Vaptsarov worked in a number of factories after graduating as a machine engineer from the Naval Machinery School in Varna (which was in 1949 named after him). After his graduation, Vaptsarov’s wish was to pursue a career in literature, but the poor financial state of his family left him no option but to be a proletarian factory worker.

After losing his job because of his proletarian ideas, Vaptsarov and his wife were faced with hunger and privation, and it was at this time that their young child died. Conditions in the flour mill factory where he had found a job were so appalling that several workers, including one of Vaptsarov’s close friends, died of tuberculosis, before Vaptsarov himself fell ill and was forced to leave his job.

In 1940 he published his only book of poems, called Motoring Verses,  which did not attract much attention, mainly because of the political tension at a time when Bulgaria had sided with Nazi Germany. Politics was the reason for Vaptsarov’s first arrest in 1940, when he spent a year in custody because he had been gathering signatures in support of the Soviet Union’s offer to Bulgaria to sign a pact of friendship.

After being released in September 1941, Vaptsarov’s political activity intensified,  sealing his doom. In March 1942, he was arrested on charges of underground communist activities and actions against the then government of King Boris III and against the German troops stationed in Bulgaria. On July 23 1942, Vaptsarov was sentenced to death by firing squad, and was shot the very same night. This left him time only to write a short poem on a piece of paper, addressed to his wife, which became his most famous work.

In a way Vaptsarov’s fate is reminiscent of the life of another of Bulgaria’s great poets, 19th revolutionary Hristo Botev, who also sacrificed his life and love for his wife for his beliefs. In fact, one of Vaptsarov’s poems is called Botev, and is dedicated to his brave fight against all kinds of tyranny and oppression. This, according to BNT viewers, was enough to pronounce the Vaptsarovi love story as the greatest Bulgarian story of its kind in the 20th century.