Bulgarian literature

It is down to Bulgarian burial rites that I saw a dead body for the first time. Its departed owner was one of my pupils, Petya Dubarova.

One of Bulgaria's greatest writers, Aleko Konstantinov, went to the World's Columbian Exhibition in 1893 and returned with a travel book that has been set reading in Bulgarian schools for generations. Thanks to Aleko, or Happy Man as he was referred to, there is no Bulgarian secondary school student who does not know about the Niagara Falls and the Chicago slaughterhouses.

It is impossible to go to Bulgaria and not encounter Bay Ganyo. Born as a fictional character in a series of satirical short stories by writer Aleko Konstantinov in the 1890s, he has been living a life of his own for nearly a hundred years. During this time he has become a byword for a Bulgarian and when saying “Ganyo” in fact people often mean “Bulgar”.