A man, Nikola Vaptsarov was sentenced to death on 23 July 1942 by a field court marshal of the then Bulgarian puppet government. Surprisingly enough, the then Communist leaders in charge of Vaptsarov's activities and tried by the same court, got off with lighter sentences and in the wake of the upheaval of 1944 stood at the helm of this country. A decade later, the world got to know that the man executed in the hot summer of 1942 was the greatest of all the Bulgarian poets born in the twentieth century. And his nearest and dearest took to cashing in on his popularity.
