The work of Georgi Zarkin, an anti-communist who was killed by the DS in prison, is being presented in Dobrich

The Dobrich branch of the Union of Independent Writers will present part of the work of the journalist, poet and writer Georgi Zarkin, who was killed by State Security in the Pazardzhik prison in 1977. The literary meeting will take place on Friday, April 26, at 11:00 a.m. in the “Zornitsa” hall of the People’s Community Center “Yordan Yovkov – 1870”. Co-organizers of the premiere are the community center and the Vasil Levski All-Bulgarian Committee.

Tragic is the fate of the extremely talented and uncompromising Georgi Zarkin.
He was born in the village of Beli Iskar, Samokovsko, in 1940. After the coming of the communist power, his father Atanas Zarkin – a stonemason, as well as other villagers and citizens from Samokov were killed without trial and sentence, being thrown into a 130-meter abyss in the area “Black rock” above Borovets.

Georgi Zarkin studied cinematography part-time, then worked as a zoo technician in Samokov and a correspondent for the Samokov Commune newspaper. In 1963, he started working as a photojournalist in the Zemedelsko zname newspaper.

A year later, in 1964, he met Ivan Todorov-Gorunya and was involved in organizing a coup aimed at overthrowing Todor Zhivkov from power. After the revelation of the conspiracy and the death of Gorunya in 1965, Georgi Zarkin distributed appeals calling for armed struggle, signing them on behalf of the defunct Vrachan Revolutionary Organization. For this activity, he was arrested and sentenced to 6 years of imprisonment by the Sofia District Court. He initially served his sentence in the Sofia prison, later he was transferred to Starozagorsk prison, where he received two more internal sentences for writing counter-revolutionary literature. In prison, he builds himself up as a staunch democrat and an opponent of the totalitarian communist regime.”

Zarkin is the only political prisoner in the country who started a hunger strike against the invasion of the Warsaw Pact troops in Czechoslovakia. He spent his hunger strike in the penitentiary in appalling conditions – one board, one toilet bucket and one cell grid on which was placed a metal sheet with holes punched to let in air. He received a second internal sentence for his rebellion.
In 2023, Georgi Zarkin was posthumously awarded the Order of Bravery by the Czech Republic for his sympathy with the people of Czechoslovakia for freedom and democracy, and his rebellion against the crushing of the Prague Spring by the USSR and the Warsaw Pact troops.

Georgi Zarkin spent 11 years and 6 months in prison, where he died a violent death from suffocation with pillows and beating with rubber hoses. During all this time, he remained faithful to both his civic duty and his vocation as a creator.

In prison, the stubborn Zarkin refused both to work and to cooperate with the DS. He uses the time to deal only with his literary works. For this purpose, he writes in notebooks with thick covers. Some of them were later seized as evidence by the prison administration. Other works were written on parchment paper, which was then rolled up and placed in cigarettes instead of tobacco. In this way, Zarkin’s work managed to reach outside the prison walls.

In the prison cell from November 1967 to January 1968, Georgi wrote his novel “Honor”. The work is dedicated to the destruction of a dam wall near Vratsa on May 1, 1966, which led to the death of over 500 people. The accident was then hidden from the media in communist Bulgaria.

On November 10, 2014, President Rosen Plevneliev posthumously awarded Georgi Zarkin with the Order “For Civil Merit – First Class”.