Issue 25

To understand why Bulgaria has become the only EU country – and one of a handful of states in the world with dubious media records – to ban the BBC World Service on FM, one has to consider the historical background.

Since the BBC started broadcasting to the world in the 1930s, the Bulgarian governments have been either less than enthusiastic about it or openly hostile – exactly the opposite of what listeners who relied on the BBC for fast and reliable information felt like.

"Sofia Central Station disappointed me: it is small, untidy, the waiting halls are lacking any kind of standard." No, this isn't an online travel forum posting in which a Western tourist vents his exasperation that, despite Bulgaria's being part of the EU, travelling on its railways is not on a par with that in Germany. Instead, this is a diary entry by a frozen and exhausted woman about her arrival in Bulgaria for the first time in January 1924.

You must have seen them if you live or happened to visit Sofia in late September – a dozen of billboards in key spots in Sofia carrying a rather unusual message. Rather than bank deposits and high-end residential properties, they advertise… men. Not the glossy and groomed Beckham variety but the unglamourous, ordinary type.

Mountains divide people, rivers unite them — and the Danube is no exception. Any archaeologist will tell you that for thousands of years the Danube used to unite the peoples who lived along its banks. However, in the 1st Century AD the Roman legions arrived and Europe's second-largest river after the Volga became a dividing line between "civilisation" and the "barbarians."

Hristo Hristov is a quiet man with an aristocratic goatee who sits in an office, writes books and appears unharmful to anybody because he looks like an oldfashioned librarian. But in fact he is a very dangerous man. During the past decade he gained access to and meticulously studied hundreds of archive volumes belonging to the Communist-era State Security, or Darzhavna sigurnost. In them he has found some horrifying documents proving beyond any reasonable doubt what now NATO and EU Bulgaria got itself involved in when the Communist Party and the Warsaw Pact were in place.

Tierschutz Mission Phönix, the only animal refuge in the 100 km radius of Burgas, have been told to leave. The municipality wish to build a holiday park over the small piece of land by the road from Burgas to Sozopol, so the shelter faces a date with a bulldozer.

In case you wondered what Vasil Levski's gnomic witticism "Time lives inside us and we live inside time" meant, you'll be bemused to find out you weren't alone. It took Kapka Kassabova years to decipher. Along the way she found out things that you've been exposed to, but have rarely been able to understand.

There are no avider postcard fans in the world than German tourists. When they arrive in a new place, they waste no time seeing the sights, but rush to the bookstores where they wrestle with other German tourists to lay hands on the best local postcards and write greetings to all their acquaintances, aunts and distant cousins "at home." Then they quickly resume their journeys, without ever bothering to take a look at the towns they've been in. For them postcard writing is a fulltime job.

To complicate the problem, you are no longer on home ground, you are now part of the Bulgarian dating market, so now you not only have to contend with the fact that your good looks faded long ago and your confidence diminished the minute you labelled yourself "a bad mother," but you also have to search for a date in a marketplace that doesn't speak your language or understand your culture.

In the mid-1980s when I was a student in Dresden, then in the GDR, I received a strange letter. It arrived in an ordinary envelope, postmarked and addressed, but it was empty; it appeared to have been opened and then inexpertly resealed. Upon closer inspection, a folded grey sheet of paper fell out, which turned out to be a signed and stamped official form. East German customs informed me in their inimitable style that "one item of printed material cut from a capitalist media source containing content hostile to the GDR's civic order" had been removed from my postal package.

Until the early 1950s, Bulgarians and Turks on either side of the border used to go hunting together and paid one another friendly visits. But in the 1950s the Communists closed the border checkpoint as Warsaw Pact Bulgaria declared the entire Strandzha a border zone and restricted access to it. The village found itself at the very heart of a complicated system of defences and barriers, and even today guards will check your ID before you are allowed to enter.

However, whilst staying at the Srebana guesthouse last week I found myself looking for some reading material to pass the time (ahem) and reached out for the Vagabond. Suffice it to say I haven't put it down since!! Marvellous writing, honest opinions and incredibly funny to boot.

Glynn Clarke, Botevo, Varna

DEAR VAGABOND

A priest I know in one of the remotest corners of Bulgaria recently told me: "Don't think that the Bulgarian Church has anything to do with believing in God. It's all about money and power. The liturgy is a sleight-of-hand." I won't name the man for fear his local bishop might promptly excommunicate him, but I pondered over what he'd said while I was looking at the construction site of a new Orthodox chapellette, in that unique mutro-baroque style you've seen in Boyana.

Every autumn and spring for the past millennium or so, 40,000 storks, 2,000 pelicans, 1,000 honey buzzards, 3,000 buzzards and 2,000 spotted eagles, red-breasted geese and cormorants fly over Bulgaria's southern Black Sea coast. This territory lies on the Via Pontica, a migratory route for birds from northern and eastern Europe and Siberia. As they pass by, they stop and find refuge in Strandzha's thick, centuries-old forests and wetlands, which reach all the way to the seashore, broken up in some places by golden beaches.

"So many black people, unfortunately!" The source of this comment on the Olympic Games is educated, cultured and Bulgarian. Should it make the average UK listener feel smug? I'm not sure. As far as racist attitudes go, Bulgarians have a tendency to shamelessly reveal attitudes that many UK citizens have learnt to conceal.

The girl's name was Oyster.

However, Velichko Konakchiev's guest for the programme hadn't shown up. Which sucks, no matter how you look at it. So Velichko Konakchiev said to me:

"Look, why don't you come and give a short commentary on my show?"

"OK," I agreed. "But on what topic?"

"On whatever you want," Velichko Konakchiev replied with a wave of his right hand, while his left stroked his white, well-groomed beard.

There wasn't any time.

He sprang out of the bushes with his beret and peacoat, board games and dice. We had broken down on top of some mushrooms that he wanted to collect, but he welcomed us. My mom liked that Al kissed her hand. She hoped he would tell my dad not to be a dolt all the time but he didn't do that. He marched up the trailer's aluminum stairs every sundown to share my awake shift because I didn't mind playing Stalin when he wanted to play Hitler in his three-paneled board game, Eastern Front.