Sirak Skitnik

He signed his work Sirak Skitnik, roughly the orphan wanderer, though he was born Panayot Todorov Hristov in the town of Sliven in 1883. The borrowed name suited a man who never settled into a single craft.

He trained as a painter in an unusual place for a Bulgarian of his generation: St Petersburg, where between 1908 and 1912 he studied at the private art school of Elizaveta Zvantseva under Léon Bakst, Mstislav Dobuzhinsky and Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin, leading figures of the Russian World of Art circle. He came home with their taste for stylised line and flat, decorative colour, and in the 1920s he became one of the voices behind the Native Art movement, which urged Bulgarian artists to build a modern style from folk and medieval sources.

Painting was only part of it. He designed for the theatre, wrote the criticism that shaped how the interwar public argued about art, and in 1935 he was made the first director of Bulgarian National Radio, running the country's new broadcaster until his death in 1943.