Issue 78

We have meant to sit down and talk for several months now, but events usually overtook us. They did it this time around, too. Just as we were preparing for the long-overdue interview with Greece's Ambassador to Bulgaria, Terry Stamatopoulos... the Boyko Borisov government collapsed, the prime minister stepped down, and Bulgaria was plunged into the most serious moral, political and possibly constitutional crisis since the middle of the 1990s.

The heat was unbearable. The swelter sucked me in and numbed me, the headstone burned my hand. A pack of dogs crouched nearby. Dulled from hunger and sloth, they were waiting for the funeral to end so they could feast on what family and friends had brought to the graves. Strange looking thanks to accidental interbreeding, these mongrels replayed the whole inexplicability of nature. With elongated snouts and short legs, with guilty eyes and shapeless ears, ugly and sunk in the general misery, they fed on human grief.