Our entire civilization is built on industrial production and commerce, but few of us are aware what it takes to build a factory or a warehouse. For most of us, industrial facilities are just a fact of life, churning items that we need in our everyday lives, from our cars to food and clothing, gadgets and cosmetics.
In the 1990s and early 2000s Bulgaria, a former East bloc country, was an enthusiastic applicant to join both NATO and the EU. Twenty years later the initial enthusiasm has waned. There are now parties with sizeable, albeit still politically insignificant, support that demand a Bulgarexit, first from NATO and then from the EU. Their declared "love" for Russia is being echoed even by people who approve of NATO, the EU and the West in general.
Unlike other countries in Central and Eastern Europe, which removed, stashed away or demolished most remnants of their Communist past as early as the 1990s, Bulgaria is a curiosity. It continues to maintain at least a dozen monuments to the Red Army. Some are gargantuan and placed in various top locations in bigger cities, some are small and unobtrusive. Urbexers and lovers of quaint and bizarre trivia will be bemused to discover that none of these remnants of the Communist past in actual fact commemorate any... real-life story.
Agroup of friends meet each summer at the seaside, a small community who know one another so well that boredom becomes inevitable, and so do internal conflicts. And death. The script of The Big Night Swim, a movie that premiered in 1980, sums up what existential angst and ennui looked like in Communist Bulgaria, or at least in Communist Bulgaria's "intellectual elite." Significantly, the movie was shot at a relatively remote location the village of Varvara.
Descendants of millennia-old rites, the scary kukeri, or mummers, are the best known face of Bulgarian carnival tradition. Gabrovo's carnival is its modern face: fun, critical, and colourful.
It usually takes place in the third weekend of May and is a part of an international festival organised by the Gabrovo city council and the town's House of Humour and Satire, probably the only museum in the world dedicated to... fun.
Atanas Atanasov is a general. He was the head of the Bulgarian security service under Ivan Kostov, the Bulgarian prime minister in 1997-2001, who inimitably prompted just two reactions: love or hate. There are still people who swear by him because they think he was resolute in dismantling the Communist system, and other people who swear at him because they consider all evils to have befallen Bulgaria since 1989 to be directly or indirectly attributable to him.
He who takes wads of cash will perish by wads of cash.
Boyko Borisov on the scandal involving Boyko Rashkov, former interior minister. Rashkov's dog appeared in leaked photos along wads of cash supposedly owned by two businessmen allegedly involved in contraband
1. Bulgarians use which alphabet?
A. Cyrillic
B. Glagolitic
C. Latin
2. What salad is made with white cheese?
A. Snezhanka
B. Kyopoolu
C. Shopska
3. Which river flows north to south?
A. The Iskar
Both high-end perfumes and more run-of-the-mill cosmetics would be impossible without a humble plant that thrives in a couple of pockets around the world, the oil-bearing rose. Bulgaria is one of these places. Here, in the so-called Valley of Roses, the pink, rather unremarkable Rosa damascena blooms in May and early June, filling the early morning air with its thick, dizzying aroma.
First you see a pretty, almost fairy-tale, unmistakably Russian church. Soon you reach a larger-than-life equestrian statue representing a 19th century Russian monarch. Further up there is another church, a cathedral, bearing the name of a Russian saint. Turn left and you will hit Parensov Street, named so after a Russian general. And a tram trundles along a pedestrianised road called Count Ignatieff. It is not named after Michael, but after a distant predecessor, also unmistakably Russian.