Soldier, government official, journalist, editor, author and martyr to democracy… All of these apply to a Bulgarian of whom you may not have heard, but who deserves to be more than a footnote in history.

Yosiph Herbst was born in Edirne on November 20 1875 and died in Sofia on April 16 1925. His life is interesting for much more than just the reason that he was the editor of a newspaper, one among several that he founded, called Ek (Echo, but no relation to The Sofia Echo).

Like the character in the 1983 Woody Allen film Zelig, Herbst was on stage in a small way in almost every episode of the Bulgarian history of his times, although this is a comparison that risks trivialising him.

He was born to a family that had moved from Austria-Hungary just as the Ottoman Empire was headed for major decline. His family was, by the descriptions of contemporaries and historians, wealthy, educated and highly cultured. Herbst studied at the French College, the First Sofia Masculine Lycee and the Military Academy. As a student, he attended the court hearings on the murder of Stefan Stambolov, the former prime minister who had sought to move Bulgaria out of Russia's orbit and who was assassinated in July 1895.

Philip Panayatov, who in 1995 became one of the few Bulgarian historians to publish work devoted to Herbst's life, said that the young man was close to Sofia's artistic and intellectual circles. One of the notable friendships Herbst formed as a student was with Elin Pelin, who went on to become one of Bulgaria's famed writers.

Herbst was commissioned as an army officer, serving until 1898 and rising to the rank of major (the anti-Semitism that was to fester in the early 20th century in Bulgaria was not yet a bar to such rank) after having served in the First Sofia Infantry Regiment and at the Ministry of War. He moved to journalism, and became closely identified with circles that were both democratic and liberal, in the classic senses of both those terms.

He worked on a number of publications, including the Bulgarski Turgovski Vestnik (Bulgarian Commercial Gazette) where he started in 1900, was editor of Vestnik in Rousse in 1901, was editor of Dnevnik (Journal, no relation to the current newspaper of that name) from 1902 to 1907, moved to Grazhdanin (Citizen) and Vreme (Time) in 1908 and 1909.

The Balkan Wars saw Herbst return to the colours as a Bulgarian army officer.

Apparently with the backing of king Ferdinand, who was crowned in 1887 and who abdicated in 1918, Herbst was appointed in 1917 as the first director for the press, and was the spokesperson for the Foreign Ministry.

Prior to this stint in government service, Herbst had been a member of the Democratic Party. During the years around the turn of the century, politics in Bulgaria was characterised by a rapid succession of parties being formed, splitting, producing breakaways. Just one example is the party of which Herbst was a member; it was founded in 1879 as the Liberal Party, becoming in 1896 the Democratic Party after several intervening name and personnel changes. In time, his forthright and courageous journalism brought Herbst into conflict with several powerful figures, including his one-time backer Ferdinand and with Vassil Radoslavov, who twice was prime minister, first in 1886-87 and again in 1913-18, albeit for different political parties.

The latter part of his journalistic career saw Herbst publishing the periodicals ABC and Ek. They were vehicles for democratic and liberal perspectives.

Writing of Herbst in his book Distinguished Jews in Bulgaria, Buko Pitty said that Herbst was a gallant citizen with a sharp sense of justice, human rights and freedoms. "With his writings, he strove to unite the democratically inclined leftist intelligentsia."

But 1923 saw a new regime brought to power through a military coup, which suppressed Herbst's newspapers. From June 1923 for three years, the prime minister was Alexander Tsankov, who had a history of anti-Semitic views, and certainly had no time for liberal democratic views amid the turbulence of those times in Bulgaria.

Herbst came back with Vik za Svobodni Hora (A Call to the Free People), but times were running against him. After anarchists bombed Sveta Nedelya church in Sofia in 1925, the regime used the episode as a pretext to move against opponents of all kinds.

Arditti records that Herbst was abducted and burned alive in the central heating furnace in the directorate of police building in Sofia. Tragedy followed his family; after his murder, his second wife, Violla, went insane and died, his son Curt died in an accident on Vitosha mountain, and his daughter took vows and became a nun at a Roman Catholic monastery in southern France.

A contemporary commentator, Ivan Ganchev of the newspaper Luch (Ray), wrote of Herbst: "(He) scrutinises events and developments in our public life from his very own point of view. He detects in them the specificity that escapes the attention of the common spectator and describes them with his exquisite pen in a form in which the reader will find brilliance, and humour and wit. Ingenuity, pleasantry, crispness are typical traits of his writing. By feeling and belief, Yosiph Herbst is on the side of the oppressed and the deprived, and he wishes to serve them as best as he can in the way he deems proper. He insists on being a free man and he remains such. He is non-dogmatic, he rejects orthodoxy. He is adamant against falseness, rebels against conventionality. He is unique in his outlook and follows his own path."

Pitty said of Herbst that he never shied away from his Jewish origin. On the contrary, whenever he had reason to do so, he castigated anti-Semites. In his satirical sketch, Israelite (reprinted below), Herbst describes those "friends" of the Jews, who covertly hate the latter.