Issue 117

What doesn't kill you makes you stronger may sound like a cliché but Vassil Christov, CEO of Fibank, Bulgaria's largest locally owned commercial bank, has seen it in real life. In 2014, there was a run on the bank. After a nightmarish week, the institution managed to recover and now is restructured and healthier than ever. It has repaid the state liquidity support, has grown and invested in new technologies. Mr. Christov has been on the Managing Board of Fibank since 2010, and in 2012 was distinguished as Banker of the Year.

Number plates usually reflect the year of the first registration, or the province where the car's owner resides, or sometimes they give out nothing at all except a unique combination of letters and numbers detectable by the traffic authorities and the police.

Theoretically, they should give out meaningful information in Bulgaria as well. But try to find out what an Y stand for on a local number plate and then think of the TX on another, and you are bound to see that not even number plates in this country are produced the way things are done elsewhere.

"In Bulgaria, there is no homophobia," reads the bold text of a poster near the Red Army monument in Central Sofia featuring two young men in an embrace against the backdrop of a Communist-era apartment block. A man in his 70s sits peacefully in the midst of the brightly-coloured youth, and holds a rainbow flag, while two teens perched on the monument kiss.

I used to think that I was Leno's main passion, then that I could be Leno's main passion, displacing the City from his heart and mind, and even from the pages he wrote. But that was "before" and it was short-lived. Rather quickly, I realized that it was the exits, these invisible, unattainable points, that inspired his desire. None of them could be found on my body or person. We both realized this early on. But Leno held on to me: he wanted me by his side, nevertheless. I did not spend much time pouring over the letter.

A beautiful princess is given by her brother, the king, as wife to the very man who is conquering their lands: The story of Bulgarian princess Tamara Maria and her marriage to Ottoman Sultan Murad I in 1371, as part of a treaty with her half-brother King Ivan Shishman, is a powerful one. It gave rise to a novel, Tamara Shishman and Murad I, written by Anna Ivanova Buxton in 2013.

With a significant career in the US State Department, spanning over 30 years and including posts in countries as varied as Honduras, Thailand, Ukraine and Russia, Eric Rubin, America's new ambassador to Bulgaria, is not a man who beats about the bush. Concise and to the point in the telltale American way, he is no newcomer to the former East bloc. In fact he remembers vividly his first visits to Bulgaria in the late 1980s and early 1990s.