Natalia Petrova has over 20 years of experience in asset management, capital markets, equity and fixed income trading, UCITS products and services, and is a licensed investment consultant, broker and trader with government securities. Natalia Petrova is the CEO of Concord Asset Management, the biggest non-bank asset manager in Bulgaria, but her active roles are more.
In the summer of 2023, one of the news items that preoccupied Bulgarians for weeks on end was a... banner.
The national banner, to be more precise. After a much advertised donation campaign, organised by an NGO and supported by the president, an 111-metre-tall flagpole was erected in a meadow high in the Rhodope mountains. From it, a national banner 40 by 25 metres was unfurled.
Crooked, horned and large-toothed, happily dragging sinners to Hell: demons make some of the most interesting, if slightly unrefined, characters of 19th century Bulgarian religious art. You will mostly see them in moralistic murals painted on the exterior walls of churches.
It has become a commonplace that a nation can be understood best by the sort of treatment it give its poets rather by its military victories or GDP levels. This notion may be a bit outdated in a world run by social media where electronic "devices" by far outnumber fountain pens, and where a "content creator" makes more than a teacher of literature. But it is still at least indicative. Bulgaria, whose writers and poets have been translated into English only sporadically, is a case in point. On the one hand, it is very proud of its literary heritage.
Years ago, if you'd asked me what I know about Bulgaria, I'd have said, "Not much. It's in Eastern Europe, behind the Iron Curtain, I think." Indeed, it was behind the Iron Curtain when that dark metaphor described a very real feature of the World Order. But what once was, often no longer is – especially in Bulgaria, a country which, during its long history, has seen multiple conquerors and empires come and go. Thracians, Greeks, Romans, Germanic tribes, Ottomans and, more recently, Russians are among the foreign forces that have overrun Bulgaria.
The charity exhibition Buy Art, Give Future To a Child is a chance to buy top photography from some of Bulgaria's finest authors and to help disadvantaged children to realise their talents and potential. The proceeds from the exhibition at the Sofia Press Art Gallery will go to the Plyusheno Meche, or Teddy Bear, association which organises Bulgaria's Hidden Talents mentorship programme. It helps talented young people without parents or at risk to enlist in university or get a job.