Festivals and Holidays in Bulgaria

Bulgaria's festival year runs from masked kukeri in January to fire-dancing on embers in June and free jazz in a Sofia park in July, and the Orthodox calendar sets the big family holidays. This guide goes month by month through the festivals worth planning around, the ones you can reach from Sofia, and the public holidays when offices and banks close.

Bulgarian festivals by month

Most Bulgarian festivals keep the same season every year and move their exact dates, and the religious ones follow the Orthodox calendar.

Winter festivals in Bulgaria

Surva and the kukeri in January

Winter belongs to the kukeri, masked dancers in goat and sheep hides with belts of heavy bells, who leap through the villages to drive out evil and the old year. Razlog sends its kukeri out on New Year's Day, and the villages around Pernik come out around the old New Year, on 13 and 14 January.

The big event is Surva, the International Festival of Masquerade Games in Pernik, held since 1966 and listed by UNESCO in 2015. It usually runs from the last Friday to the last Sunday of January, with around 10,000 performers, and over 12,000 in both 2024 and 2025. In 2026 it ran from 16 to 25 January over two weekends. Entry is free, and Pernik is about an hour from Sofia by train.

Trifon Zarezan, the wine growers' day

Trifon Zarezan falls on 14 February, and some places mark it on 1 February instead. It is the day of St Trifon, patron saint of wine growers, and it marks the start of the year's vine pruning, so growers go out to the vineyards to make the first cuts. It is also the name day of every Trifon.

Valentine's Day falls on the same date. If you are in Bulgaria on 14 February, I'd mark it with a glass of Mavrud, the local red grape that Bulgarian wine is best known for.

Spring festivals and holidays

Baba Marta and the martenitsa on 1 March

On 1 March, Baba Marta Day, Bulgarians tie red and white threads called martenitsi on each other's wrists as a wish for health. You wear the martenitsa until you see a stork, a swallow or a tree in blossom, then tie it to a blossoming tree, so by late March the trees in every town are hung with red and white.

Two days later, on 3 March, comes Liberation Day, the national holiday. It marks the Treaty of San Stefano, signed on 3 March 1878, which ended nearly five centuries of Ottoman rule and recognized a Bulgarian state, a turning point of Bulgarian history. It is a day off for offices and schools across the country.

Orthodox Easter

Easter, Velikden, is the biggest religious holiday of the year. Bulgaria follows the Orthodox calendar, so Easter often falls on a different Sunday from Western Easter: in 2027 it is on 2 May. Good Friday, Easter Sunday and Easter Monday are public holidays.

Eggs are dyed red on the Thursday before, and on Easter Sunday people knock eggs together to see whose survives. Families eat roast lamb and kozunak, the sweet braided bread. The emotional peak of Easter in Bulgaria is the midnight service on Holy Saturday, when people carry lit candles out of the churches and try to get them home without letting the flame go out.

St George's Day and 24 May

Gergiovden on 6 May is St George's Day, Bulgaria's Armed Forces Day and the name day of every Georgi and Gergana. On 24 May the country celebrates the Cyrillic alphabet, education and culture. Pupils, students and teachers march through central Sofia with flowers, past Sofia University and the National Library, and in 2026 the procession ended at Alexander Nevsky Cathedral with a concert by Sofia schoolchildren.

Summer festivals in Bulgaria

June is the peak month for folklore and one of the best months to visit Sofia, with daytime highs around 23°C.

The Rose Festival in Kazanlak

From late May to mid-June, the Rose Valley around Kazanlak harvests its Damask roses, picked by hand early each morning, between about 5 and 10 AM, before the heat burns off the oil. The Rose Festival falls on the first weekend of June, in the middle of the harvest, with rose-picking in the villages around town, a parade through Kazanlak and the crowning of a Rose Queen.

Kazanlak also has the Thracian Tomb of Kazanlak, a UNESCO site from the 4th century BC, so the trip fills a full day.

Nestinarstvo: fire-dancing on 3 and 4 June

On 3 and 4 June, the feast of Saints Constantine and Helena, the village of Bulgari in the Strandzha mountains holds its nestinarstvo. The day starts with a procession carrying the saints' icons, wrapped in red cloth, to a holy spring, to the sound of a drum and a gaida. After dark the village gathers around a bed of glowing embers, the sacred drum starts, and the nestinari dance across the coals barefoot.

The dance is a devotional act, believed to keep the village and its crops healthy, and UNESCO listed it in 2009.

The National Folklore Festival in Koprivshtitsa

Every five years, the town of Koprivshtitsa, about 110 km east of Sofia, hosts the National Folklore Festival, the biggest gathering of Bulgarian folk music and dance. It started in 1965, the 2015 edition ran from 7 to 9 August, and the most recent was in 2025, so the next is due in 2030. Village groups from all over the country come to sing, dance and play.

Between festival years, Bulgarian folk music and dance still has the bagpipe festival in Gela every August and the mehana bands of Sofia all year.

Summer music festivals

Bulgaria's summer music festivals cover everything from classical concerts to rock and metal. Multi-day tickets for the big paid ones start at about €50, and Beglika Fest costs less.

July Morning is the odd one out: on the night before 1 July, people head to the Black Sea beaches to welcome the first sunrise of July, a habit that began in the 1980s. Plovdiv for Hills of Rock and the mountain town of Bansko for its jazz both make an easy weekend from Sofia, and Plovdiv has enough old town and Roman ruins to fill the daytime. Bansko pairs its August jazz with the Pirin trails, and the town is about two hours from Sofia by road. The beach end of the summer, from July Morning to Varna Summer, is the season on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast.

Autumn festivals and holidays

Autumn has two public holidays close together. On 6 September Bulgaria marks Unification Day, the union with Eastern Rumelia in 1885, and on 22 September Independence Day, the declaration of 1908. The Day of the National Awakeners falls on 1 November.

In Sofia, autumn is film season. Cinelibri, the festival of films made from books, runs from mid-October to early November, and Kinomania has filled the halls of the National Palace of Culture every November since 1987. September brings the KvARTal Festival to Sofia.

Festivals in Sofia

Sofia's own festival year runs from the martenitsa stalls of late February to the New Year concerts at the National Palace of Culture.

The New Year Music Festival has run at the National Palace of Culture since 1986 and ends with a concert on 1 January, the musical end of Christmas and New Year in Sofia.

Surva, Koprivshtitsa and Kazanlak each make one of the better day trips from Sofia on their festival days.

Public holidays in Bulgaria

These are the non-working days in Bulgaria: 10 fixed public holidays and 3 more for Orthodox Easter.

Other days are marked without a day off: 1 March for Baba Marta and 8 March for Mother's Day. The Easter holidays move every year, and 2027 has a crowded spring, with Good Friday, Labor Day, Easter and St George's Day all between 30 April and 6 May.