Mihail Kunchev

Before Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu reshaped the direction of his professional life, Mihail Kunchev built a substantial career in Bulgarian television. In a 2014 profile in Jiu-Jitsu Style (Issue 23), Kunchev described spending twelve years — as of July 2014 — producing major reality shows in Bulgaria, establishing himself as a recognized figure in the country's entertainment industry. Yet BJJ fundamentally altered his perspective, gradually pulling his priorities away from the screen and toward the mat.

The depth of that shift is captured in his own words: as of July 2014, Kunchev wore his gi more than a suit — a detail the profile framed not as a casual aside, but as a symbolic marker of personal transformation. That transformation became the motivating force behind his decision to leave producing for a full year, travel the world, and document the BJJ community from the inside. No BJJ rank or belt level for Kunchev appears in available sources; throughout the project, he is identified as a dedicated practitioner rather than a competitor or instructor.

Kunchev conceived and executed BJJ No-Mad as a documentary series and travel-film project, serving simultaneously as its creator, producer, and filmmaker. The premise centered on a single year dedicated entirely to traveling the world and capturing the untold stories of everyday BJJ practitioners — a project he framed, in the Jiu-Jitsu Style profile, as a personal legacy to the art.

The Road and Its Stories

The journey took Kunchev and his collaborator Dimitrios Tsitos across the Balkans and the UAE, using friends' dojos around the world as their base of operations and sleeping under the stars as a recurring motif of life on the road. The subject profiles that emerged from the early stretches of travel illustrated the remarkable breadth of lives BJJ had touched: a UFC devotee who described experiencing what he called God's miracles; a former Wall Street professional who abandoned finance to become a life coach on an exotic island; a Bellator fighter who survived a near-death experience before winning three consecutive cage fights; and a BJJ professor living in an Islamic state who described Arte Suave as his religion.

Vision and Legacy

As of July 2014, the pilot episode of BJJ No-Mad was available online at BJJNOMAD.NET, with the full season planned to launch in January 2015. In the Jiu-Jitsu Style profile, Kunchev offered a personal redefinition of the word 'nomad' — not as rootlessness, but as being at home everywhere through the friendships forged along the journey. He signed off the piece with 'Oss!'

Dimitrios Tsitos served as Kunchev's guide throughout the BJJ No-Mad project and stands as its most prominent named collaborator. Described in Jiu-Jitsu Style (Issue 23) as a lifeguard and former professional swimmer by background, Tsitos earned a BJJ black belt and built a life organized almost entirely around the art and global travel. In the ten years prior to July 2014, he had traveled the world teaching, competing, and visiting more than 60 countries — never remaining in any single location for more than six months.

Tsitos's lifestyle as a perpetual BJJ nomad was not simply a backdrop to the project; it directly inspired and shaped its conceptual framework. His decade of living out of dojos and crossing borders in the service of BJJ provided both the practical network and the philosophical foundation upon which Kunchev built the series. In many respects, Tsitos embodied the very story BJJ No-Mad set out to document.