The emptiest of our days is the one
in which we have not laughed once.
Dear friends of "Photo moments", welcome to Turia - the native village of Chudomir!
Turiya village, Pavel Banya municipality, Stara Zagora region, is a beautiful Bulgarian village with a thousand-year-old and rich history.
In this village, on March 25, 1890, Dimitar Hristov Chorbadzhiyski was born - an artist and writer, best known by his pseudonym - Chudomir.
Dimitar is the seventh of a total of eight children in the family of Hadji Hristo Georgiev Chorbadzhiyski and Maria Doncheva.
In 1901, 11-year-old Mitko completed his primary education in his native village of Turia.
There is a funny story that as a child he walked for hours on his hands and walked upside down around the area. The grandmothers looked at him and said to each other that a new miracle had appeared in the world - and from there, later, Chudomir.
Three years later, he graduated from junior high school in Kazanlak. The father's intentions are for the son to become an officer or a merchant, while Chudomir's mother supports him in his desire to pursue painting.
Until the age of 16, Dimitar studied at the "Ivan Vazov" high school in Stara Zagora.
His first appearances in the press date back to 1907, when his cartoons, sketches and rhyming gossip were published in Mihalaki Georgiev's daily newspaper "Balkanska tribuna". The following are his first stories, feuilletons and epigrams, published in a number of magazines "Baraban", "Vrtokashnik", "Zhilo", "Osten", as well as in the newspapers "Zora", "Iskra" and "Slovo".
In 1913, he completed the four courses of the State Art School in the capital, but because he was mobilized during the war, he graduated only in 1919.
In Sofia, he met Georgi Mashev, Dimcho Debelyanov and Lyudmil Stoyanov.
Although recognized under many pseudonyms - Bray, Fanfan, Twice Fan, Deli Dimo, Er malaks, Э, Oscar Boom, Pilot, Maria Vasileva, Maxim Gladniy, Sagittarius, Fanko Ftichka, Chanka-Chunga, Sechko-Bechko, Shluk and Yau , Yau, Ch. and Chud, the most famous among them all remains Chudomir, which he received during his teenage years.
In 1921, he married his colleague, the artist Mara Nonova, the daughter of a well-known family from Tryavna. The first Mara in Chudomir's life persistently pursued him for seven years and eventually managed to marry him.
After the end of the First World War, Chudomir settled in Kazanlak and held his first solo exhibition of drawings and cartoons.
His second solo exhibition took place again in Kazanlak - in 1926.
Many of his drawings on political and social themes have been published in the daily "Zora", to which he is a regular contributor.
At the end of 20 years of the 20th century, he went to Paris for a specialization in order to get acquainted with the methodology and propaedeutics of painting in the Parisian schools.
He worked as a high school teacher in Kazanlak, but due to the law in force at the time, according to which one of the family teacher couples had to leave the state job, in 1932 Chudomir had to leave his teaching position.
He was invited to maintain the humorous page of the newspaper "Zora". This activity was expressed in the sending of several stories and cartoons per month and continued until 1940, when Chudomir wrote a letter to the editor-in-chief of the newspaper announcing his resignation:
A period of reassessment of values has come.
I do not agree with the policy of "Zora" village.
I am not satisfied with what has been achieved.
In general, the citizen Dimitar Chorbadzhiyski can no longer tolerate the artist Chudomir.
He presented his most famous works of art in the last years of his life. The series of paintings is called "Nashentsi" and includes mostly watercolors painted between 1932 and 1960.
His third solo exhibition includes works from this cycle - it was presented in 1965 in Stara Zagora, Kazanlak and Gabrovo, and in 1967 - in Plovdiv.
He left a legacy of more than 1,000 drawings and watercolors, as well as countless feuilletons and short humorous stories.
On December 26, 1967, Chudomir ended his life by himself in the Government Hospital, as a result of a serious illness.
Today, the community center in his native village bears his name.
I am a down-to-earth person, alien to any fantasies, a person who does not think that his life is a debt….
If there is sorrow, it is that I could not repay him properly, that I could not give him what I felt capable of...