James David Bourchier

James David Bourchier (18 December 1850 at Baggotstown, near Bruff in County Limerick – 30 December 1920 in Sofia, Kingdom of Bulgaria) was an Irish journalist and political activist. He lived in Sofia from 1892 to 1915. Bourchier was an honourable member of the Sofia Journalists' Society. He acted as an intermediary between the Balkan states in the beginning and at the conclusion of the Balkan Wars of 1912–1913.

Life

Memorial plaque on the building in the centre of Sofia, where J. Bourchier lived between 1892 and 1915

Bourchier was born in County Limerick and studied at Portora Royal School, Enniskillen and Trinity College Dublin, where he was elected a scholar in classics in 1871.

Deeply engaged in the processes that were taking place on the Balkan peninsula at that time, Bourchier supported the idea that the island of Crete be annexed by Greece. He developed a personal relationship with Eleftherios Venizelos, who recalled Bourchier: When [he] was… devoting his energies and talent to… Cretan independence, I had the good fortune to come into close personal contact with him and appreciate his remarkable qualities. Chief among them was his ardent love of freedom, equal in strength to that of the great romantics of the early nineteenth century, but translated into the more sober and effective action of a great journalist of the twentieth.

He also witnessed the signing of the treaty between the Kingdom of Greece and the Kingdom of Bulgaria in May 1912 that became a part of the Balkan League. After his death in December 1920, James Bourchier was buried near the Rila Monastery in southwestern Bulgaria.

Honours

Bourchier Peak on Rila Mountain, James Bourchier Boulevard and James Bourchier Metro Station in Sofia, James Bourchier Boulevard in Blagoevgrad and Bourchier Cove on Smith Island in the South Shetland Islands, Antarctica are named after James David Bourchier.

In 1990, the recently established Bulgarian Society for British Studies devoted its first national conference to the 140th anniversary of Bourchier’s birth, in Limerick, and 70th anniversary of his death.

Today James Bourchier Boulevard is a busy street in Sofia with numerous administrative and office buildings on it. Its most notable landmark is probably the Hotel Marinela Sofia. The Faculty of Physics, the Faculty of Mathematics and Informatics, and the Faculty of Chemistry of Sofia University are also located there, as is the office of the Union of Physicists in Bulgaria and the headquarters of the Bulgarian Red Cross. There are also streets named after him in Varna and Blagoevgrad.