Issue 80

The second bridge over the Danube, between Bulgaria's Vidin and Romania's Calafat, is a project which took decades to be conceived and years to be built. Funnily enough, some kilometres downstream there is proof that spanning the Danube with a bridge was not all that difficult.

Every 2 June, at exactly noon, the civil defence systems all over Bulgaria are switched on. The sirens wail for a minute; a minute when many people stop whatever they are doing and stand still.

The sirens are the noisiest part of the commemorative events for the death of Hristo Botev (1848-1876), arguably the greatest poet Bulgaria ever produced. He died, along with many of his fellow revolutionaries, in a battle with the Ottoman forces, while trying to start an uprising in Bulgaria's north-west.

Unlike almost everything else on the coast that has centuries and in some cases millennia of history, this is originally a 19th Century settlement that rapidly expanded in the first decades of its existence to incorporate a wide variety of ethnic minorities arriving to avoid Balkan war, poverty and ethnic cleansing, and build a little Brooklyn where the chief purpose was to make money rather than chase the ghosts of the past.

Former prime minister

Every printing house can use the matrix for whatever it wants. It can print ballots and then use them as wallpaper.

GERB's Council of Ministers chief secretary on the discovery of 350,000 illegal ballots stoked a day before the 12 May snap election

If anyone prefers the prosecution to be a passive observer of violations and crimes, they have got the time, the prosecutor and everything else wrong.

Woken by the phone’s insistent ring, he rolled to the right to swing his feet to the floor, but his knee hit the hard wall making his pictures rattle. Someone had somehow contrived to move his bed 180 degrees in the night. The phone continued its urgent shriek every four seconds. Georgi A. cursed its mother and especially the mother of whoever was hanging on relentlessly at the other end. Hadn’t he installed a gentle bluesy ring tone, a soothing coaxing musical phrase? This hectoring shriek was becoming shriller.

To everyone with an interest in Bulgarian politics and society for the past 30 years, Evgeniy Daynov has been a familiar name. Educated at the Corpus Christi College in Oxford and having taught political science at both the University of Sofia and the New Bulgarian University, Evgeniy Daynov has been at the forefront of a variety of pro-democracy movements and political parties, starting from the Ekoglasnost grassroots environmentalist movement in the late 1980s and going through the SDS, or Union of Democratic Forces, through the 1990s. Evgeniy Daynov is not your "typical" Oxon.