Plastic surgery is no longer the exclusive territory of film stars and celebrities. As procedures improve in quality and access widens, choosing the right plastic surgeon for an aesthetic or reconstructive intervention has become a decision that matters to far more people. Dr Kaloyan Denkov represents a new generation of professionals in Bulgaria working at the forefront of this shift.
Bulgaria, led by Former President and incumbent Prime Minister Rumen Radev, became one of only four European states – the others being Malta, Slovakia and Hungary – not to endorse the foundation of an ad hoc special tribunal to indict Russia's Vladimir Putin and his lieutenants for their aggression against Ukraine.
Тhe Black Sea is a geographical curiosity. Until recently (in geological terms), it was a big lake locked between Europe and Asia, gorging on the waters of scores of rivers. About 6,500 to 7,500 years ago, it filled to the brim, broke through what would become the Dardanelles Straights and connected to the Mediterranean. As its water levels fluctuated up and down, wind blew and rain poured, the cliffs on the new shoreline were relentlessly eaten, beaten and broken. In some places, this neverending process exposed to the elements ancient rocks that had lain buried for aeons.
1. Which Bulgarian river flows southwards?
A. The Struma
B. The Iskar
C. The Kamchiya
2. Which wild animal is making a dangerous comeback in Bulgarian mountains?
A. Red fox
B. Brown bear
C. Wild boar
3. If you are driving a car on a Bulgarian motorway, you are allowed to speed up to…
A. 200 km/h
B. 120 km/h
C. 140 km/h
Small villages and clusters of old, abandoned houses define the Stara Planina mountains around Troyan. Gumoshtnik, whose name is hard to pronounce even for Bulgarians, is one of them. A quiet place, its streets are largely empty and its population is only a fraction of what it was a century ago. The churchyard looks like churchyards across Bulgaria: two monuments to fallen soldiers, an old school and a locked church.
Replete with remnants of residential buildings, a royal palace, a necropolis and some fortification walls the remains of this ancient city pose more questions than give out answers. Archaeologists suggest the Oracle of Dionysus, the notorious seer who advised Alexander of Macedon among others, had a temple here. Their claim is amplified by the overall aura of sanctity that even the most skeptical of tourists feel as soon as they have negotiated the upward path leading to the hill. Ancient accounts, however, remain at best ambiguous, enhancing the sense of millennia-old mysteries.
The path down to the grotto drops steeply through oak and hornbeam. By the time you reach the ravine floor the sky has almost disappeared. The light here is greenish and perpetual, unchanged whether it is morning or afternoon, July or October. Water drips somewhere ahead. The air smells of wet stone and something older – soil, perhaps, or time itself.
Once upon a time, there was a young man who set out to seek his fortune. One chill autumn morning, he was walking through the mountains when he came to an old and rotten beech tree that stood in the middle of a web of gnarled roots. As he walked past, he tripped over a root and fell into a deep hole.
Shapeshifting children, amorous dragons, dangerous nymphs who ride deer and wear rainbows for belts, doomed heroes who can overcome any obstacle but their own death: Bulgarian folktales weave into a rich and mesmerising universe. On the surface they are moving and strange, a combination of hair-raising adventure and sorrow for the lost lives of fair maidens and young men turned into stags.
Not all pensioners will starve to death because they receive 2 euros less a month.
Konstantin Prodanov, MP for Progressive Bulgaria
Progressive Bulgaria will fight the oligarchy by stealing from pensioners?
Asen Vasilev, Changes Continued
Progressive Bulgaria does not mean a progressive tax system.
Aleksandar Pulev, Economy Minister, on calls for abandoning flat tax rates in Bulgaria
You are in Sofia and you used to go for a stroll in the Zaimov park. Not any more. As of June 2026, you are now walking through the Oborishte park instead.
Mara was in fact a kind of pastry baked in Strasbourg. Its recipe has long been forgotten in modern Alsace, but the memory of it lives on in Bulgaria, albeit in a modified form.
In the 17th century French travellers passed through the Bulgarian lands on their way to Constantinople. They had a few portions of mara with them to present to the sultan in the hope he would grant them permission to cross the Ottoman Empire and reach India.
When the names of the churches were forgotten, the villagers gave them new ones. The Letters. God's Gully. The Buried Church. One they called simply The Church, a name so stripped of detail it somehow contains everything that had been lost. Centuries of monastic life, a scriptorium full of manuscripts, royal burials, eight hundred monks – all of it reduced, in the end, to a name that was really just a gesture toward something irreplaceable and gone.