Issue 155-156

Bulgaria, sadly, is small enough to provide any true dark sky location like Norway, Scotland or the American Southwest. Wherever you travel in the Bulgarian mountains or along the Black Sea coast you will never be sufficiently removed from a city or town to be able to see all of the stars twinkling in a genuinely "black" sky. However, with a bit of research you will be able to at least observe the seasonal meteorite showers over the northern hemisphere. And with the right approach you will capture fantastic images that will stun friends and families back home.

Out of sight, out of danger, he reasoned, provided the diplomatic appointees felt sufficiently content in their jobs not to stir up any trouble from wherever they had been sent to. Boyko Borisov, Zhivkov's bodyguard and now prime minister of Bulgaria, likes to tell his voters that he protects them from Communism, but apparently he has perfected the art of stashing delinquent officials away by providing them with comfortable diplomatic appointments abroad.

During most of the Second World War, Bulgaria and the United States were enemies. In 1943-1944 Allied aircrafts bombed major Bulgarian cities. The Bulgarian air forces shot some of these down, and their crews were sent to a designated POW camp near Shumen, in northeastern Bulgaria. In September 1944, when it was already clear that Nazi Germany and its Bulgarians allies would lose the war, then Bulgarian government ordered the closure of the POW camp.

1. September marks the 75th anniversary of...

A. The Communist coup in Bulgaria

B. Bulgarian independence

C. The Unification of Principality of Bulgaria and Eastern Roumelia

2. Which is Bulgaria's second largest city?

A. Burgas

B. Varna

C. Plovdiv

3. How many bridges connect Bulgaria and Romania?

Bridges are both feats of engineering and important gateways, and as such they have always attracted the human imagination. Since times immemorial, legends have been told of how the construction of a particular bridge is to be attributed to the Devil, or that evil spirits lived in it.

In the Balkans, there is a different legend about some old bridges such as those at Acra in Greece and on the Drina in Višegrad, Bosnia and Herzegovina. It attributes their durability and strength to a human sacrifice that the master builder had to make.

Of course I know computers! I have certificate for basic computer literacy.

Deputy Prime Minister Mariana Nikolova on her appointment as head of the Cybersecurity Council

We want our EU commissioner to be responsible for something modern, like cybersecurity or management of IT technologies.

Prime Minister Boyko Borisov

Happy families may be alike, unhappy families may be unhappy in their own way, but in Bulgaria all these come with a twist: a plethora of hard-to-pronounce names for every maternal and paternal aunt, uncle and in-law that can possibly exist.

Ask any Bulgarian how their recent family gathering went and the answer will probably sound something like this: "A disaster. My Badzhanak got into an argument with my Tashta, my Strinka showed up with her annoying Vuyna, then my Shurey got completely tanked and my sister was really upset."

The summer of 2019 was disastrous for Bulgarian tourism, with an overall 20 percent drop in holidaymakers. However, there was one place on the Bulgarian Black Sea coast which remains packed: Nesebar, a UNESCO World Heritage Site conveniently located next to Sunny Beach, this nation's largest seaside resort and one of Europe's cheapest holiday destinations.

A tiny church is perched on a steep rock overlooking the narrow gorge of the Chepelarska River. A winding road leads up to the height, where the remains of the castle are, a brick-and-mortar confection in the Byzantine style popular across the Balkans in the 12th-14th centuries. Today, the nearby town is famous mostly for its numerous shops selling affordable wedding and prom gowns, but the tourists come solely for the fortress before venturing deeper into the Rhodope.

Where in Bulgaria are you?

Every year, come a long weekend and the start of the holiday season, the Bulgarian media focus on this nation's border crossings with Greece, and start counting the cars in the queues. Ordinary Bulgarians, for their part, start filling their Facebook and Instagram pages with photos of beaches, ice coffee and tables groaning under the weight of plates of Kalamari and Horiatiki salad, and glasses of Ouzo and Retsina.

KARIYA'S PHONE STOPS WORKING SOMEWHERE IN THE air above Hokkaido. He isn't sure what happened; at the beginning of the flight, he switched it – dutifully – to airplane mode when the captain reminded the passengers to do so, but as soon as he lands in Yuzhno-Sakhalinsk, his phone has stopped working entirely. He presses the power button, the home button, every combination of buttons he can think of, but in the end, even after being plugged into a charger for several hours, his phone is decidedly and irreversibly dead.

Education and the skill to learn and to transfer this knowledge to next generations are in the basis of human civilisation. Thanks to them every generation steps on what was already achieved and for its part adds to this construction, developing culture, economy and industry, creating goods and services. However, these are also a way for development of the individual. Good education allows them to unleash their potential and talents, to find their vocation, to realise their dreams, to be of benefit for the complex and important organism that we call society.

When good examples in Bulgarian economy pop up as conversational topic, the outsourcing sector is among the first to come to mind. And rightfully so.

What a business needs in order to develop and grow? Ideas, people and technologies are of utmost importance, but without proper spaces for goods storage and for work places for the specialists everything else would be unthinkable. In the recent years the office, industrial and logistic properties not only in Sofia, but also in Bulgaria, developed. The explanation is obvious – the Bulgarian economy is growing, largely due to manufacture, export and import, the outsourcing and IT industry.