Bulgarian Crossword Puzzles

A Bulgarian кръстословица is the dense, numbered grid Bulgarian papers have printed for a century. Every letter belongs to both an across and a down answer, and the clues are listed under Водоравно (across) and Отвесно (down). The puzzles here have the same shape as a New York Times grid, so nothing about them will look foreign to a solver in Sofia.

Bulgarian suits a dense grid because it keeps many everyday words short: ПЪТ (road), СЪН (sleep), МЪЖ (man), ДОМ (home), ЛЪВ (lion). The vowel Ъ often does the work a second syllable would do in another language. Short answers like these recur from puzzle to puzzle, as ERA and ONE do in English papers, but no longer answer is used twice.

The grid uses the thirty letters of the Bulgarian alphabet, which is the Russian one without Ё, Ы and Э. The letter that makes Bulgarian look Bulgarian is Ъ. In Russian it is a silent hard sign, and in Bulgarian it is a full vowel, the sound in БЪЛГАРИЯ itself. It sits in some of the most common short words (ВЪВ, КЪМ, СЪМ, ПЪТ), so it crosses something in nearly every puzzle.

Ь survives only before О, where it softens the consonant in front of it: АКТЬОР, СИНЬО, ШОФЬОР. Almost all such words are loanwords. Й is a letter of its own and keeps its square.

Print sometimes puts a grave accent on a vowel to tell two words apart, as in ѝ (her) and и (and). The accent is not a letter, so the grid drops it and ѝ is entered as И.

Bulgarian puts its definite article at the end of a noun. КЪЩА is a house and КЪЩАТА the house; ГРАД is a town and ГРАДЪТ the town. Answers here are always the dictionary form, so you will be asked for КЪЩА and never for КЪЩАТА. The grammar of the clue tells you the gender and number of the answer.

Verbs appear the way a Bulgarian dictionary lists them, in the first person singular, so ЧЕТА means "I read". That is also how a Bulgarian setter clues them. The exceptions are a few three-letter third-person forms such as ПЕЕ (sings) and ПИЕ (drinks), which every Bulgarian grid leans on, and their clues say that they are third person.