The Famous Bulgarians: Dr. Stamen Grigorov
The secret of Bulgarian yogurt
So apparently, way back when, Bulgarians lived longer than other peoples because of a little secret they had. Who doesn’t love them some Tarator or Baba’s Snezhanka (Snow White Salad)? If you don’t know what those are, you’re not doing Bulgaria right. Get back to your hostel and do your research! Anyway, yogurt has magical powers, it seems. Okay, maybe Gandalf didn’t bless it with his staff (stop laughing), but biologically speaking, there’s some badass bacteria in there that’s really good for you! Ask his royal highness Louis XI. He’ll tell you what ultimately cured his really bad tummy ache (probably just needed to poo). Anyway, that’s when the secret was revealed to the western world, but down here in the Balkans, yogurt was like regular H2O to these people. And they’d been keeping it to themselves for thousands of years! And it was much later in 1905 that the good doc Grigorov, aged 27 at the time, who figured out the secret of “bacterium bulgaricus” after staring down a microscope long enough.
Mouldy bread for the win: hundreds of soldiers’ lives spared
The yogurt bacteria isn’t the only great discovery made by Dr. Stamen Grigorov, however. He also did medical trials using penicillin and proved the fungus can be used to cure infectious diseases and more specifically tuberculosis. His results were presented before the academic board of La Presse Médicale in Paris. This is the first time someone proved that penicillin could be used as medical treatment.During the Balkan war, there was an outburst of cholera among the soldiers and once again, to further prove his theory from 1906, Dr. Grigorov discovered that the soldiers who had eaten mouldy bread remained healthy. Once again the fungus proved its medical significance and hundreds of soldiers were spared. Go ‘shrooms!
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