NOW OBLIGATORY

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NOW OBLIGATORY

JOKE OF THE MONTH
Wed, 06/08/2016 - 13:33

Ahead of 24 May, Bulgaria's perhaps happiest holiday celebrating the invention of the Slavic alphabet by two Greek monks in particular and, in more general terms, Bulgarian culture and high-school graduation, the Education Ministry, now headed by the former EU Commissioner, Meglena Kuneva, adopted changes to the national curriculum to make obligatory... folk dances, or the Horo.

horo dance.jpg
© Anthony Georgieff

Under the new rules, Bulgarian pupils will have to have mastered as many as 20 different horo by the time they graduate. Learning to dance folk dances was heretofore optional in Bulgarian schools.

Unless they a member of a specialised folk dances group or attend a wedding, ordinary Bulgarians rarely dance the horo.

Daniel Defoe was dropped out of the school curriculum altogether because the clerks at the Education Ministry decided Bulgarian pupils do not need to know why he really wrote Robinson Crusoe.

By 2030, all young Bulgarians, regardless of their ethnicity, convictions and predilections, will be able to do it and thus, supposedly, retain their true Bulgarianness in the face of the growing multicultural threat coming from Europe. From there, the step to One Horo-One Nation-One Bulgaria (as seen on the slogan in the picture above) will be only to easy to dance.

Issue 116

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