Issue 205

Women are increasingly making their own way into iGaming: as players, creators and developers. Katya Machuganova is one of them. The iGaming and digital media professional became producer and product owner at GAN, the US leading online gaming platform, in just a couple of years, after she decided to leave her established business and career path and explore new territories. Today, the mother of two girls is an ISTQB Certified Quality Assurance specialist, Master in Digital Media and Video Games and is studying Intellectual Property and Technology Transfer.

Three times an ambassador (in Haiti, Croatia and now in Bulgaria) Kenneth Merten has a wide-ranging career in various positions within the US State Department, including in the office of the director general of the foreign service. His postings abroad include the American Embassy in Paris, in Bonn (at the time of German Unification), at the US mission to the EU in Brussels and at the American Embassy in Paris.

Colourful and gilt-domed, looking like a toy, the St Nicholas the Miracle-Worker church in central Sofia is known to Bulgarians simply as the Russian Church. It is a hot spot for tourists vying to take a selfie with the gold-plated domes, the fairy-tale facade decorations and ornaments, and perhaps join the line of pilgrims in front of the crypt who wait patiently to be able to deliver their wish notes to the tomb of Serafim Sobolev.

Ancient Thracian tombs, lighthouses, abandoned industrial facilities, Communist-era monuments... Bulgaria is crammed with sites of interest that ordinary travellers can marvel at only... from a distance. Some of these are closed to the general public because of preservation issues. Others have been neglected for years and have become unsafe, while yet others belong to the military.

Here is a list of some of the most fascinating forbidden sites in Bulgaria.

Memorial to Anton Ivanov partisan unit 

Where: Vacha Reservoir, the Rhodope

Our homegrown Bolsheviks wanted to organise an October Revolution.

Gen Atanas Atanasov, chairman of DSB, on the unsuccessful no-confidence vote against the government

We will have to grab the devil's tail to drag this country out of the swamp.

Finance Minister Asen Vasilev

Corruption is the gravest problem in Bulgaria's power engineering. And it is a fact because the greatest part of the industry is owned by the state.

Raised hands, bodies frozen in a pathos of tragic defiance: Bulgaria, especially its northwest, is littered with monuments to an event that was once glorified but is now mostly forgotten. It took place 100 years ago, yet researchers disagree on how to label it. Some call it an uprising, a word that evokes the gravity of organised and targeted efforts to achieve a clearly set goal. For others, it was an ill-fated rebellion of a handful of peasants foolish enough to believe the sweet talking of a political power outside of Bulgaria, Moscow's Communist International.

1. Which river flows through the Rhodope?

A. The Arda

B. The Iskar

C. The Struma

2. Cars with a B on their plates are from…

A. Burgas

B. Blagoevgrad

C. Varna

3. IT makes how much of Bulgaria's GDP?

A. 10 percent

B. 4.5 percent

C. 25 percent

4. Who is considered the founder of Bulgaria?

Churches and monasteries hewn into rocks at often precipitous heights were a clever solution that Christians from the Balkans and the Middle East employed for centuries to achieve a crucial goal: the creation of abodes far from the crowds in places where conventional buildings would be hard to construct. Since the dawn of religion they have enlarged existing caves into rooms that resembled church interiors, complete with naves, altars and apses, and murals. They also lived in caves, in cells scattered around these churches, often forming large compounds.

It produced some of the brightest minds of the time. Since independence in 1878, however, it has been going downhill as its citizens sought their fortunes elsewhere and emigrated en masse. At present it is a pleasant backwater of a town tucked in the southern foothills of the Stara Planina mountain range. It is now known mainly for two things. It is the most popular gateway to hikers heading to conquer the Botev Summit (2,376 metres above sea level), the highest in the Stara Planina.

Rory Miller's book Eyeball It: Village Culinary Adventures is a funny, warm and sometimes poignant exploration of rural Bulgarian life, and its food and people in the 2020s. On the pages of this semi-travelogue, semi-memoir and semi-cookbook you will encounter semi-abandoned villages in the northwest and the southeast. You will walk dusty streets, enter old kitchens that have changed little since the 1980s, and watch how the chicken for the soup is caught, killed and plucked.

"Hey, beauty, let's go home and have sex."

" I can't do it just like that. We do not even have common acquaintances."

"Well, do you know Boyko Borisov?"

"Yes, I do."

"So, let's go!"

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They say there is no unemployment in Bulgaria. That's not true. Look at how many people are looking for jobs as mayors.

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When you see many people dressed in suits go to church and light candles or plant trees, local elections are in the offing.

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Two politicians talk to each other.

"Hey, pal, how did you get rich?"

The New Yorker is an institution; a magazine bought and read by generations for its captivating and meticulously researched, fact-checked and proofread texts, the dry witticism of its cartoons and the illustrated covers that offer a visual commentary on both local and global issues.

Aleksandrina Ivanova

Lilyashka Bara, the brook that flows near the village of Lilyache, a few kilometres from Vratsa, is a quiet and peaceful stream. It would be no different from dozens of other rivulets that flow past dozens of other villages, if it wasn't for a quirk of nature. Lilyashka Bara may look mild and gentle, but sometimes it overflows suddenly, surging in an unstoppable tide, sweeping away everything in its way – from mills to bridges.