Issue 105

A fan of the arts, Xavier Lapeyre de Cabanes accomplished in a few months what various Communist and non-Communist functionaries, dating all the way back to Lyudmila Zhivkova in the late 1970s, had hoped for: bring a Bulgarian exhibition to the Louvre in Paris. Using his par excellence skills and contacts, M. de Cabanes was instrumental in putting together a large display of Thracian art at the Richelieu wing, through at the end of July 2015.

It is notoriously hard to evaluate historical figures while they are still alive, but the appraisals of Todor Zhivkov, the dictator who ruled Bulgaria between 1956 and 1989, are particularly contradictory.

The number of clients I had was growing, and so were my apprehensions about how I was going to manage.

"Hello," the Computer Programmer said and took off his jacket, which looked like an oversized piece of kids' clothing. His red boxers were peeking out over the belt of his jeans. "I've come to you with a specific question."

I felt a sudden urge to explain what a psychotherapist's job was, and that he was neither a fortune-teller nor a TV game show contestant, which is why he couldn't be expected to give answers that were either right or wrong.

When asked about the things which she doesn't like in Bulgaria, Athena Lao points to a flaw in local mentality. "There are a lot of inefficiencies and frustrations that are completely avoidable and fixable, but some Bulgarians' first impulse is to shrug their shoulders and say nothing can be done, 'because it's Bulgaria'," says the young American from Athens, Georgia. She arrived in Blagoevgrad, in Bulgaria's southwest, in 2012 for a one-year tenure as a Fulbright English Teaching Assistant after she graduated in Classical Languages and Literature from Harvard University.