On the way to the small Bulgarian town Smyadovo, next to a tall pylon with the national tricolor, a monument with a black pig rises. Artfully painted black pigs adorn the facade of a block of flats on the town’s main street. The black pig has been turned into the coat of arms of Smyadovo in honor of the greatest pride of its inhabitants – the legendary sausage “Smyadovska lukanka”. With the famous sausage, they gained fame far beyond the city limits, and thanks to it the local pig farmers and sausage makers experienced their golden age. It is not known exactly when this delicacy was prepared for the first time, but its written history begins with a note from 1621 by the Polish poet Samuel Twardowski, envoy of King Sigismund to the Turkish sultan. On his way to the capital of the Ottoman Empire, the poet passed through Smyadovo, tasted the delicious sausages, and wrote in his diary: “There are wonderful pigs here and they make sausages similar to ours.”
According to one of the urban legends, the Smyadovska sausage was made only from mutton. However, the Turks liked the delicacy very much and started stealing it. The locals resorted to cunning and began to add black pig meat to it. Thus, they not only stopped the invasion but also achieved an irresistible taste of the delicacy. It turned out that the meat of the old local breed of Eastern Balkan pigs is very suitable for sausages. Black piglets have been raised in this area since time immemorial. “There are reports that show that in the northeastern part of Bulgaria, along the Kamchia and its tributaries, mainly the forested branches of the eastern Balkans, local black pigs have been bred since the time of the Thracians. It is believed that the East Balkan pig breed is more than 2500 years old “, Todor Andonov writes in his book” The Black Pig in the Life of Smyadov`s citizens “.
The first written message about the Eastern Balkan pig was from Petko Germanov – Bulgarian breeder, founder of horse breeding, agricultural statistics and compulsory insurance of domestic animals in Bulgaria. A more in-depth study was made in 1919-1920 by the German graduate and academician of BAS Georgi Hlebarov, one of the founders of the Faculty of Agriculture at Sofia University. He is the man who calls this breed Eastern Balkan. “In Smyadovo pigs were raised with a large (long) bristle in the middle of the back – like wild boars… From the meat, it was made the traditional for Bulgaria sausage – “lukanka”, eng. Dimitar Mindov tells about the first decades of the XX century in his book “Smyadovo – my home village”. In those years in the village lived a rich man named Sava Hadji Iliev, an advocate of the Bulgarian population in the area. He often defended the interests of the population and went all the way to Constantinople to reduce the tax on pigs, called “serchim”.
Before the Liberation, many people in Smyadovo were engaged in pig breeding. In the forests near the village, black pigs are raised in large herds all year round. Their owners hire pig farmers to graze them in forest conditions. The pigs live in dugouts half-dug in the sloping forest terrain, covered on top with untreated beams, noise, and soil. There the animals feed on oak and beech acorns, herbs, and truffles. In late autumn and early winter, the pig farmers return the fed black piglets to the village, fatten them with corn and offer them for sale to traders.
Some do real business – in 1907, at an exhibition at the Court of Counts in London, the Djankov brothers from Smyadovo, who exported pig bristles to Britain, were awarded a metal plaque. In 1936 a total of 2600 pigs were transported through Smyadovo station to Southern Bulgaria. The main companies buying black pigs are “Moshtevi”, “Leopoldevi”, “Gabrovski”. The first two were created by Hungarian and Polish emigrants who came to Shumen in the middle of the 19th century. In 1890 they opened a butcher’s factory in Shumen for the production of sausages according to their own recipes. They also produce lard for the needs of the army. Gabrovski decided to open a meat processing plant in Smyadovo, attracted by the appropriate climate and well-developed pig breeding.
Stoyan Sevev Domuschiev and Yordan Stefanov Djankov from Smyadovo, assisted by Stefan Gabrovski, in 1924 created a sausage plant under the name “Smyadovski Gligan”. They buy pigs and cattle from all over the region and produce sausages. A few years later, Kosta Nikolov from Smyadovo started working in the new factory. He studied crafts for many years from the Czechs and Hungarians in the Shumen factory and decided to return to his native village. Using the techniques learned by the emigrants, he started making ham and other sausages. He changed his surname and became known as Kosta Gliganski. “I studied sausage making at Moshtevi and although I was young, I dreamed of making our own salami similar to the Hungarian one. For the Bulgarian taste, I know that garlic is typical and that is why I Bulgarianized the recipe, but in general the content with the same with the Hungarian salami “, Gliganski writes in his memoirs.
Thus, in 1927, on the basis of Hungarian salami, adding one gram of garlic per kilogram of minced meat, Kosta Gliganski created the delicacy “Smyadovska lukanka”. What exactly the master put in it remains a mystery to this day – he prepared the ingredients in a room without windows and did not let anyone into it. On the second day after filling in special beef intestines, smoking began and lasted for up to two days. Sawdust was used only from “sweet” wood – white oak, acacia, beech. After the smoking, they started to mature, for which the air west of Smyadovo helped a lot.
The fame of the “Smyadovska lukanka” was spread quickly and in the following years, the company opened representative offices in Sofia, Plovdiv, Varna, Ruse, Shumen. He won gold medals at the exhibition in Varna in 1928 and at the international exhibition in Bari, Italy, in 1933. This provided the Smyadovo factory with the right of a court supplier during the reign of Tsar Boris III. By 1938, the delicacy was already world-famous. A merchant from Gabrovo, who lives in Brazil and has shops in Rio de Janeiro, exports a huge amount of sausages to the port of Varna. To store them, they are placed in ventilated chests filled with wood ash.
In 1947 the Smyadovski Gligan factory was nationalized and became a workshop at the Rhodope meat processing plant in Shumen. The quality of the sausages produced drops rapidly and the craftsmen leave. Kosta Gliganski moved to work in Targovishte. In 1970 the factory in Smyadovo was closed. Meanwhile, the leaders of the socialist state understand that the restoration of the breeding of black pigs is necessary due to the valuable taste qualities of the meat and the sausage, ham, and kaiser produced by it, but also due to the need to preserve the national gene pool of this breed. Thus, “Kamchiyska Dolina” – Smyadovo received the task to create under the methodological guidance of the research and production association of pig breeding tribal herd of the breed East Balkan pig. The aim is to produce breeding material for public and private farms. Funds have been allocated for the stage construction of a new pigsty in the village of Alexandrovo for breeding 160-180 sows and pigs.
In the early 1980s, with the personal advocacy of Pencho Kubadinski, a member of the Politburo of the Bulgarian Communist Party, the Smyadovska Lukanka factory was reopened and renovated. The production has been moved to a new hall, equipped with modern Austrian Laska machines. The 80s of the XX century are the golden period of the Smyadovska sausage. In 1992, due to the difficult restitution processes, the factory ceased to operate. Today there are only ruins in its place, and the locals call them “Bai Pencho’s Factory”.