Issue 205

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.

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.

Our homegrown Bolsheviks wanted to organise an October Revolution.

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.

1. Which river flows through the Rhodope?

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 cr

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.

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.

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

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 v

Lilyashka Bara, the brook that flows near the village of Lilyache, a few kilometres from Vratsa, is a quiet and peaceful stream.