Bulgarian poet and Communist leader Nikola Vaptsarov is executed by firing squad.

Bulgaria, officially the Republic of Bulgaria, is a country in Southeast Europe. It is situated on the eastern portion of the Balkans directly south of the Danube river and west of the Black Sea. Bulgaria is bordered by Greece and Turkey to the south, Serbia and North Macedonia to the west, and Romania to the north. It covers a territory of 110,994 square kilometres (42,855 sq mi) and is the tenth largest within the European Union and the sixteenth-largest country in Europe by area. Sofia is the nation's capital and largest city; other major cities include Burgas, Plovdiv, and Varna.

Nikola Yonkov Vaptsarov was a Bulgarian poet and Bulgarian Communist Party activist. Working most of his life as a machinist, he only wrote in his spare time. Despite the fact that he only ever published one poetry book, he is considered one of the most important Bulgarian poets. In the latter part of his life, as a Macedonian nationalist, he was the driving force of the Macedonian Literary Circle until World War II when it was disbanded, and its attempts to awaken Macedonian identity were abandoned. Vaptsarov joined the resistance movement and because of his subversive activities in favor of the Soviet Union and against the Bulgarian government and the German troops in Bulgaria, he was arrested, tried, sentenced and executed the same night by a firing squad.