tompsan, bulgaria
It was surprising to find, while travelling in Bulgaria, a village in the NW of the country named after a British soldier. The custom in Bulgaria, as in Serbia and some other countries using the Cyrillic alphabet, is to spell a foreign proper name phonetically and then to transliterate it, letter by letter, back into Latin characters for translation purposes (for instance, on maps, streets signs and so on). In this case, Major William Frank Thompson’s surname became Tompsan or Tompsen when so treated. Similarly, William Gladstone – popular in Bulgaria due to his outspoken denunciation of the Bulgarian Horrors, committed by the Turks, in 1876 – can become Ujljam Gladston on a Sofia street map.
Major Thompson, brother of EP Thompson (the author of the classic The Making of the English Working Class), was a young special operations officer, with communist sympathies, liaising between the British army and the Bulgarian partisans in 1944 when Bulgaria was still a royalist dictatorship uneasily allied to Nazi Germany. He and other commandos came unstuck when, having crossed the river Iskar hoping to meet up with a larger band of partisans, he was betrayed, ambushed, wounded and captured at Batulia. He was interrogated and executed by firing squad in June 1944 at Litakovo, near Botevgrad, to the NE of the capital Sofia.
After the War, the Partisans among the new Communist leadership in Bulgaria honoured Thompson by creating out of the six small settlements of Babul, Lipata, Livage, Malak Babul, Tsarevi Stragi and Zavoya the new community of Tompsan. The village is easily reached by slow train from Sofia, being one of the halts on the regional line north up the scenic Iskar Gorge towards Mezdra. There is a memorial to Major Thompson at the railway station.
EP Thompson subsequently researched and wrote a book called Beyond the Frontier: The Politics of a Failed Mission after studying his brother’s wartime fate and the official British, Bulgarian and Soviet responses to it.