Vasil Dimov
Contents
His Appearance
Vasil is a heavily sun-burned / tanned man of medium build. He is 1.7 meters (5ft-6inches) tall and weigh a good 70 kilos (170 pounds), its all muscle save for his modest beer-belly. He has shiny straight black hair, brushed straight back and worn a couple of centimeters beyond his collar. Like most of the men of Melnik, he sports a bristly black beard and mustaches. He smokes foul smelling Russian cigarettes when he can get them, but must make do with the local brand the rest of the time. He usually wears a Levi overalls with suspenders and a long sleeve cotton shirt in a style about a hundred years out of date. He has particularly large hands, that are heavily callused from the rough labor that is his trade. He has a particularly large nose that is more of a beak and splits his face in half. Like nearly everyone in town, his teeth are crooked and particularly stained by decades of smoking.
Vasil's Personal History
Vasil was born in 1865 to a simple Bulgarian farming family of Melnik. He grew up in the town and received only a basic education before his parents took him out of school to work the family farm where they grew tobacco.
When his parents died, he became the head of the family. Eventually he married, but the marriage bed failed to produce any children and his wife ran off with a gypsy musician. Thereafter, he lived alone in the family house, until it caught fire during the summer of 1910. For a couple of years he drank heavily, felt sorry for himself and slept it off in a local flophouse.
When the First Balkan War broke out, he went to fight for his country and didn't return until the summer of 1913. Vasil returned home to Melnik, after seeing the horrors of war, something that trumped his personal suffering and made him see its insignificance. He had learned a number of useful skills during his time away at war, one of which was a fair mechanical aptitude, which he put to use as his new livelihood in his old hometown.
After his return, he had enough of war and did not respond to the call to arms during the Second Balkan War or the First World War. Instead, he built a small house next to burnt remains of his family homestead, but didn't bother to replant the field, he just let it go fallow. Vasil took to sitting on his small back porch in the evening, smoking (a habit he picked up during the war), drinking Rakiya while watching the local kids playing behind his house.
It was sometime during the summer of 1916 that he first noticed the boy called Aleksey, who was playing ball with several other children in the fallow field.
His Personality
Vasil is a stoic man with little to say beyond yes or no to any question. When his personal problems weigh on him, he drinks particularly heavily at his favorite tavern. When not working at the 'Club House' or the 'Stadium', he can be found drink in his off time at the tavern or sleeping it off in one of the 'Club House' storerooms which doubles as his personal bedroom. Like the majority of the townsfolk, he sees life from the perspective of a late nineteenth century Bulgarian. He speaks more directly to men, though never vulgar with those of a better station, he can be downright raunchy with the working class men of Melnik. With women, regardless of their station, he is polite, but distant due to residual anger with his runaway wife. The only woman that he opens up to is Eva Radkov, the town's lone prostitute, who he visits once a week to satisfy his manly needs.
Current Events in the life of Vasil Dimov
In 2009, Vasil lost his best friend, Zdravko Minkov the town's nightwatchman. Though he doesn't know for sure what happened, he thinks that Zdravko was killed and his killer is still free.
