Four bronze figures look towards the sky as a plane flies over Sofia's City Garden. One holds his left hand above his eyes; another keeps her right hand around her ears. Aeroplanes 1943 is a strange, yet distinctive sculpture by Bulgarian artist Nikolay 'Shmirgela' Vladov (1911-1999). About 2,000 kilometres north of Sofia, in Belgium, an identical copy of this sculpture stands in the serene garden of a museum.
Dear mother, dear mother, the church is cold,
But the ale-house is healthy and pleasant and warm;
Besides I can tell where I am used well,
Such usage in Heaven will never do well.
But if at the church they would give us some ale,
And a pleasant fire our souls to regale,
We'd sing and we'd pray all the live-long day,
Nor ever once wish from the church to stray.
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.
Official events, lineups of costumed politicians, protocol smiles and orchestrated crowds of children, workers, businesspeople - being the official photographer of an institution does not seem that exciting. But sometimes the person holding the camera has the power to transform the narrative, to discover hidden truths, to capture glimpses of unfiltered life. We saw it during Barack Obama's presidency with the moving, lively photographs of Pete Souza. Now, in Sofia, we see it in the philosophical photography of Frédéric de la Mure.
Мanufacturing building bricks and art hardly ever meet. But as you pass under the red clay arches leading to an assemblage of strange red and black creatures, deformed men and children, and labyrinths of bricks and broken moulds, you will find your disbelief suspended.
The premises are inconspicuous. You are in Cherven Bryag, a quiet industrial town of about 10,000 still reeling from the closure of its old industries, including a tank parts factory and the railway to Oryahovo on the Danube.
Built in 1903 and later transformed into a house on the water, the vessel’s name carries the deep Dutch understanding that perfection is God’s privilege and that everything created by human hands is imperfect by default. The exhibition builds a conceptual bridge between two centuries marked by global transformation. The boat is no longer just an object, but a time capsule preserving signs of adaptation and individual memory.
Any expat or visitor to Sofia will no longer have an excuse they did not know the name of any Bulgarian photographer. A major exhibition at the Sofia City Art Gallery, curated by a multi-person team of academics and art historians, is poised to rectify the historical injustice.
Where: Bulgarian Culture Institute - Berlin, 114-115 Leipziger Strasse
When: 16 December 2025 – 31 January 2026
Curator: Olympia Daniel
What happens when two experienced psychoanalysts with interest in film analysis decide to speculate about what really happened in the final hours of one of the 20th century's ultimate movie stars? The answer is one of the latest plays on Bulgaria's theatre stage, Marilyn Monroe's Final Hour. Dr Vivian Pramataroff-Hamburger and Prof Dr Andreas Hamburger have applied both their professional experience, imagination and sense for the dramatic to give their idea of what happened to Marilyn Monroe on 4 August 1962, just hours before she was found dead in her bed.
When we said we might open a guest house, everyone thought it was crazy. The property oozed golden charm but Podgoritsa was in none of the guidebooks. There were no mountains or seaside resorts anywhere near, so we had to persuade the foreign tourists to make a special trip, to see for themselves. And come they did.