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Despite the massive and apparently rather expensive advertising campaign, which involved TV, print, outdoor and plenty of Facebook, the Changes Continued-Democratic Bulgaria (CC-DB) alliance lost the 2 April election.
Everyone who has had some work to do with the Bulgarian police should have noticed the despicable conditions in which rank and file officers often work. Their uniforms are bad, their offices have been last repaired in the times when the Bulgarian police was called People's Militia, and they often have to pay out of their pocket for fuel to drive their rather old and rusty patrol cars.
Seemingly, some officers have found an ingenious way to drive something better. No, we are not talking about the confiscated Porsche that Sofia police used to patrol with in the 2000s.
Bulgaria has the greatest number of archaeological sites in Europe after Greece and Italy. Every tour guide worth their badge has proclaimed this at least once to Bulgarian and foreign tourists. The adage is a compelling image of the country, but it is misleading. The great majority of Bulgaria's archaeological sites are interesting to archaeologists only and/or are in a condition that is hardly inspirational or Instagram-friendly: overgrown, looted by treasure hunters, devoid of tourist infrastructure and even signage.
1. What do Bulgarians celebrate on 6 May?
A. St George's Feast
B. Liberation
C. Independence
2. Where do you go for spa delights and Roman ruins?
A. Velingrad
B. Hisarya
C. Devin
3. Where is Bulgaria's Railway Museum?
A. Sofia
B. Plovdiv
C. Ruse
4. Which is Bulgaria's longest and deepest cave?
A. Devetashka Cave
B. Kolkina Dupka
C. Devil's Throat
5. Who was the founder of Bulgaria?
Gods and mountains go together. Zeus resided on the Olympus and a Tibetan Buddhist goddess – on the Everest, while God notoriously chose Mount Sinai as the place to give Moses the Ten Commandments.
One of Bulgaria's most spectacular mountains is also connected to a god – or to the lack of him. Pirin, in the southwest, was named after the Slavic thunder god, Perun, yet one of its summits is called Bezbog, or Godless.
Today Bulgaria, reportedly, has one of the best Internet networks in the world. This may be hard to believe because the country connected to the World Wide Web rather late, in 1989, and only got its first website in 1993.
When you look back in time to see how Bulgaria adopted other means of modern communication technology, you will recognise a pattern – after a reluctant adoption, an innovation quickly becomes ubiquitous, mastered by an enthusiastic younger generation. The story of how electric telegraphy arrived in the Bulgarian lands is a case in point.
Sofia, with its numerous parks, is not short of monuments and statues referring to the country's rich history. In the Borisova Garden park for example, busts of freedom fighters, politicians and artists practically line up the alleys. On some of those, like the 19th century revolutionaries and national heroes Vasil Levski and Hristo Botev, people still lay flowers.
What happened in Bulgaria during the Second World War? The events, the major and minor political players and their decisions, the role that bad and good luck played in this country between 1939 and 1945 are often contradictory and hard to explain to outsiders – or to Bulgarians, for that matter. The country started the war being neutral. It became an ardent Nazi ally, but refused to declare war on the USSR. Instead, it declared a "symbolic" war on Britain and the United States. It kept most of the Jews under its jurisdiction from deportation to the death camps.