My father is Vassil Kanev Gadjokov. His family comes from the village of Bolyarsko, twelve kilometers southwest of the city of Yambol. I was born in Yambol - maybe that is why it so relaxing to walk under the trees of the main street there ... He is a now retired - most of his life he was a teacher on internal combusting engines (car engines) in the Transportation Vocational High School in Dobrich.

My father's roots come from the village of Matsa, southeastern Bulgaria. The saying is that a woman who married my great-great-great-grandfather brought this strange family name - Gadjokov. It seems to originate from some russian or causac word, and probably was used as family name for first time around the Crimean War in 1856.
The oldest member of my father's family until 1999 when he passed away - Ivan Gadjokov from Sofia - have told me that our family name before that was Syarov.

A picture of the oldest known member of my father's family - my great-great-grandfather Georgi - is hanging on the wall in my parents home in Dobrich, Bulgaria.

My mother is Valka Ivanova Mitkova. 
Now retired, she has been a medical nurse in a hospital, a clinic and a high school in Tervel and Dobrich.
Her family comes from Tulcea, a city at the Danube's delta in Romania, which used to be populated mainly by Bulgarians for over a century. During the Crimean war in 1856, many Bulgarians from northern Bulgaria fled in Romania escaping the Turkish revenge. 
In 1940, when southern Dobrudja was returned back to Bulgaria after 23 years of Romanian rule, my grandfather's Ivan Mitkov family went south and settled in the village of Bezmer, seven kilometers north of the small city of Tervel, northeastern Bulgaria. Few years later, they moved to live in Tervel. I remember my great-grandfather Georgi in Tervel, sitting on the stairs of the old part of the house, listening to the songs of the birds and the laugh of his great-grandchildren ... 
My grandfather Ivan Mitkov was a carpenter - like it was just today is that I remember the smell of fresh whittled off tree and his passion doing his hobby ...

***

My mother was born in 1941 in Bezmer, near Tervel. My father was born in 1943 in Bolyarsko, near Yambol. Those two villages are almost 300 kilometers apart. 
But apparently my father's mother and my grandmother, Tsona Ivanova (1915 - 2005), was born also in ... Bezmer. But this is another village with the same name, located 7 km west of Yambol and few kilometers from Bolyarsko. Coincidence? There are no coincidences ...

My mother and my father met in Tervel while my father was working as a teacher in a vocational school. In those years, in Bulgaria one didn't have the simple human right to live and work wherever he or she wanted. My father was "assigned" to a position in Tervel. Obviously, he didn't have any other choice but to meet my mother ...
They got married on March 20, 1966 in Bolyarsko.

I was born on May 25, 1967 in Yambol.
Around five years later, I realized I'd like to have a little sister. I wanted this so much ... It was my dream ... I was telling this to my parents every night before going to bed ... My sister Tsonka was born on March 7, 1973. Since 2001, she lives in Sarasota, Florida, USA.

My sister is one of my first fulfilled dreams. After that, I've had plenty of other dreams. And I've had the luck and the bliss to make all them come true ...