In the Footsteps of Bulgarians Who Left Their Mark on Spanish Culture
On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the death of Dimitar Dimov (1909-1966), the Bulgarian Ambassador to Spain, Kostadin Kodzhabashev, laid flowers at the memorial to the writer in Madrid.
The initiative to honour the memory of the writer came from the first Bulgarian Sunday School "St. Ivan Rilski "in the city of Madrid, run by the "Balkan" Association, chaired by Petya Tsaneva. The event marks the beginning of a long term project titled "In the Footsteps of Bulgarians Who Left Their Mark on Spanish Culture," as students and teachers have chosen to follow the path of the heroes of the novel "Doomed Souls". In June it will visit the town of Peñaranda de Bracamonte in the province of Salamanca, where there was a camp for people stricken with typhus, as described in the novel, and then Granada.
At the event, held on June 5, the invited guest of honour the Spanish writer Felicidad Orkin, wife of Juan Eduardo Zuniga (b. 1929), the Spanish writer and translator who, because of his advanced age, was unable to present. A specialist in Slavonic languages, he worked together with Todor Neykov on a translation into Spanish of the novel "The Reaper" by Yordan Yovkov (pub. 1944) and the novel "Under the Yoke" of Ivan Vazov, first published in Spain in 1949, and later translated the poetry of Iavorov (1983) and others. A friend of Dimov, Zuniga said that during their frequent and long walks in postwar Madrid, in 1943-1944, he observed increasing interest in the then still young Bulgarian writer in the recently-ended civil war and its aftermath.
The plaque to Dimitar Dimov was placed in 1987 on the initiative of the Bulgarian state on the facade of the building where the writer lived in Madrid and which is located on the elegant square Plaza de la Lealtad 2, close to the Prado and Thyssen museums.