Over 300 000 Bulgarians are celebrating Saturday their name day when the Bulgarian Orthodox Church is honoring St John the Baptist or the Day of Ivan.

The data comes from a report of the National Statistics Institute, NSI.

According to NSI data – by December 31 2011, there were 67 000 first names of Bulgarians permanently residing in the country.

The variety of names among women is higher than for men. Male personal names are more than 29 000 while the female ones are about 38 thousand.

The most common names among men are Georgi - nearly 178 000, or 5% of all male names, and Ivan - 174 000, or 4.9%. They are followed by Dimitar - 133 000 (3.7%). The ranking of most popular male names continues with Nicholay - 95 000, Peter - 81 000, Hristo - almost 66 000, Jordan - 56 000, Alexander, Stefan, Vasil, Todor, Stoyan and others. From all men in Bulgaria, 1 532 000 have the 25 most popular names.

Of all women, 124 700 are named Maria (3.3%). Second in prevalence among women is the name Ivanka – 68 000 (1.8%), followed by Elena - almost 57 000 (1.5%) and Yordanka – 43 000 (1.1%). Among the most common in women's names are Penka, Mariyka, Rositsa, Daniela, Petya, Desislava, Nadezhda, Violeta, Margarita and others. About 858 000 women have the 25 most popular female names.

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