Have you ever tried patting your head with one hand while rubbing your stomach in a circular motion with the other one? It’s one of those things that’s easier said than done. Being a fairly coordinated person, I have managed to master that motion, but something that I haven’t mastered are Bulgarian head gestures.
You might take for granted the universality of the action of nodding the head to communicate confirmation, and the shaking of the head to communicate negation. Charles Darwin himself pondered this topic. In The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Charles Darwin provided a famous account of the nod’s origin:
“We give a vertical nod of approval with a smile to our children, when we approve of their conduct; and shake our heads laterally with a frown, when we disapprove. With infants, the first act of denial consists in refusing food; and I repeatedly noticed with my own infants, that they did so by withdrawing their heads laterally from the breast, or from anything offered them in a spoon. In accepting food and taking it into their mouths,they incline their heads forwards.”
In Bulgaria the opposite holds true. It is a shake of the head for “yes” and a nod of the head for “no.” This was very confusing when we first arrived in Bulgaria. We had refused the services of an eager taxi driver upon disembarking at the Varna train station. We just thought that he was particularly persistent fellow as he followed us after we had shaken our heads at him! Luckily, our hostel guide showed up right then and cleared up the confusion for us.
I really tried to adopt local custom during our stay in Bulgaria but muscle memory overcame my efforts. Try shaking your head side to side while saying “yes,” or nodding your head while saying “no.” It’s not as easy as it sounds! I then tried to hold my head still and just rely on words, but I am quite accustomed to nodding my head in everyday conversation to assure the speaker that I am listening to and understanding them. I must look like one of those bobble-head dolls that you see in the rear dashboard of some cars!
According to Wikipedia:
“Rumor has it that during the Ottoman Empire rule in Bulgaria, people were trained to reverse the meaning of shaking and nodding heads in an attempt to confuse Turkish occupiers. The habit stuck and nodding means a ‘no’ in Bulgaria.”
Other countries that use the same yes-no system are: India, Pakistan and in a slightly different way, Greece, Turkey, India & Iran.
S in front of the Tsaravets Fortress in Veliko Turnovo, Bulgaria
M by the Palace of the Romanian Queen Maria in Balchik, Bulgaria
-M
