JOKE OF THE MONTH

Both Borisov and his North Korean counterpart, Kim Jong-un, like to be seen inspecting things. In this way they want to assert their authority over the production lines and display their munificence owing to which these production lines were installed in the first place. Kim Jong-un is usually photographed surrounded by stern-looking Communist officials holding little notebook pads in their hands to jot down any wisdom that may come from the Supreme Leader's mouth. In Bulgaria, Boyko Borisov does the driving himself in his private SUV.

Boyko Borisov, Bulgaria's prime minister during the past 11 years, may have many faults, his critics say, but he is without a doubt a master of the Bulgarian language. Borisov's virtuoso use of the lingo plays on many levels. His uncouth nativism enchants some domestic audiences, especially cab drivers and horsecart repairers. At the same time his obsequious promises of police cooperation endears his Western counterparts.

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Covid-19 is like a cuckold. Some people are. Others will be. Yet others never realise they have been.

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Quarantine is a demo version of retirement. There is no money. And there is nothing to do.

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One of these traits, the Bulgarian inimitable propensity to make a hash of things because someone, somewhere did not understand what was going on, and as a result suddenly hurdled themselves in blissful yet innocent astonishment, made the rounds in the sunset days of Communism when this country was supposed to start manufacturing... personal computers. The joke went on something like that: "It has transpired that the computers we were supposed to export to Japan turned out not to be computers but compotes. And we didn't export to Japan, but Japan sent them back to us."

In the age of the Internet, verbal jokes are no longer in fashion, however. Memes rule supreme.

Here is a quick selection done during a couple of days prior to this journal going to press. The main "hero" in them is, predictably, Gen Ventsislav Mutafchiyski, an army doctor and chief of the Military Medical Academy in Sofia, who was appointed to head the state of emergency headquarters.

This is not even a case of the Czech artist, David Cerny, who infuriated the Bulgarians so much with his Entropa installation in Brussels, in 2009, that the Sofia government formally requested the section of the artwork depicting our motherland as... a Turkish squatting toilet be enshrouded in a black veil because it caused offence.

Trump commended his ally, Bulgaria, for spending as much as 3 percent of its GDP on defence (Germany should take an example of that, according to Trump) and for having recently concluded a deal to buy some US F-35 fighter jets (Bulgaria is actually about to buy F-16s). Speaking at the National Democratic Institute in DC Borisov told the Americans to "go on quarrelling at home," but assured Bulgaria would welcome both Republicans and Democrats.

The Central Elections Commission, the authority that sets the rules for elections and ensures they are being followed, imposed a fine on bTV, a major private television broadcaster, for airing a report on... the controversial renovation works in central Sofia.

As the EU announced it was lifting its monitoring for the supremacy of law in Bulgaria, the newspapers went on with one of their favourite topics: crime. Here are a few examples.

Out of sight, out of danger, he reasoned, provided the diplomatic appointees felt sufficiently content in their jobs not to stir up any trouble from wherever they had been sent to. Boyko Borisov, Zhivkov's bodyguard and now prime minister of Bulgaria, likes to tell his voters that he protects them from Communism, but apparently he has perfected the art of stashing delinquent officials away by providing them with comfortable diplomatic appointments abroad.

The National Revenue Agency people have asked the taxpayers to change their EGNs.

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A guy asks: "Are you not scared anyone now knows your EGN, your salary and your taxes?"

"I don't give a damn," his friend replies. "They will drop dead laughing."

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The National Revenue Agency has just released the names, EGNs and mobile phone numbers of all 25 people who had not had their personal data hacked.

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In the Council of Ministers:

"Once upon a time in Japan they carried old people and left them to die in the forest."

"Mr Prime Minister, do you have any other suggestions about the pension reforms?"

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The job of the prime minister is very difficult. Wherever he looks, he sees people stealing. Yet, he cannot punish anybody because they all belong to his party.

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"Why are there no Bulgarian politicians working abroad?"

"Because abroad they need people with skills and intelligence."

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Bishop Nikolay of Plovdiv (the one with the penchant for Rolex watches) even suggested Pope Francis anticipated and would welcome the Anti-Christ, at a later date. However, nothing that emerged from Bulgaria's senior clergy compares to the thoughts of ordinary Bulgarians as they resorted to Facebook to promulgate their hypotheses of the "real" reasons for Pope Francis's visit.

If Boyko knew the fire at Notre-Dame would overshadow Apartment-gate for a while, he would have set it himself a long time ago.

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Shabla (at the Black Sea coast) is ready to help Paris with 70 million. The sacks can be delivered immediately.

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Plovdiv Bishop Nikolay (who infamously covered some 19th century church murals with wallpaper) said he would donate some wallpaper to Notre-Dame.

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Half the members of the BSP, or Bulgarian Socialist Party, are nuts. The other half are corrupt. In GERB, the situation is exactly the opposite.

At the time of writing, the Inland Revenue did not appear to be particularly perturbed by the purchases of luxury flats in Sofia by senior GERB functionaries. However, it sped up its investigations of Lozan Panov, the chairman of the Supreme Court of Cassation, who has often been critical of GERB and has repeatedly warned of the oncoming autocracy in Bulgaria.

The sort of attitude Bulgarians have to their tiny stretch of seaside can be illustrated with an incident at the beginning of 2019, when excavator operators levelled a huge sand dune near Kavatsite, south of Sozopol. The men were detained, and explained they had been paid a fee of 1,000 leva by a "third party" to finish off what nature had created thousands of years ago. Nothing can be done about this, explained Angelkova, as the construction permit had been issued prior to 2008, when the Bulgarian Black Sea Coast Act was adopted.

Interestingly, it did not involve some high-profile entrepreneur who was arrested over allegations that will probably not hold water in court or some fragile woman who gets chained by the Bulgarian police. It involved… modern art.

Or, rather, the cocktail party that followed a modern art exhibition.

Forget the run-of-the-mill calls for Bulgaria to expand towards three seas (namely, the Aegean and the Adriatic, in addition to the Black), the protests against the Treaty of Neuilly, which ended the First World War for Bulgaria, and the incessant ramblings about the "Turkish Yoke." Bulgaria's new "patriotism" finds increasingly ingenuous ways to stir up fatherland-loving sentiments with social media. Facebook, which in Bulgaria is by far the most popular, leads the way.

The Office of the Special Prosecutor, which is the state attorney ordering corruption probes, took things with quite some determination as it ordered an underground probe to verify whether a water pipe recently installed under one of the town's streets was up to standard. This happened as part of an ongoing investigation against the town's mayor who the prosecutors suspected of embezzlement.

What had saved Silistar from becoming an urban jungle in the footprint of Sozopol, Primorsko and so on, had been its remoteness and proximity to the Turkish border. The city councillors of Tsarevo acted to rectify this – and approved a construction plan right in the Strandzha Nature Reserve.

Predictably, some environmentally minded citizens, including Tsarevo locals, protested against what they saw as yet another blow, perhaps the death blow, against the nature of the southern Bulgarian stretch of the Black Sea.