Bulgaria has agreed to enable the European Union to sign an accord on closer ties with Montenegro by embracing a compromise in the dispute over the Bulgarian spelling of the euro currency.

After six hours of negotiations late on Friday Bulgaria agreed to sign the Stabilization and Association Agreement (SAA) with Montenegro next Monday, in whose Bulgarian text the single currency will be spelled by the use of the letters EUR.

In the previous version of the agreement the name of the single currency was spelled "euro" instead of "evro".

The problem lies with Bulgaria's Cyrillic alphabet, under which the common European currency is transcribed "evro" rather than euro. The European Central Bank insists on spelling the single currency as "euro" in the translations in all EU official languages.

Interestingly, Bulgaria's 2004 EU accession treaty included "evro" in the Bulgarian text.

Bulgaria is in the middle of a battle for keeping the Cyrillic spelling of all the words in the European legal papers. The country is the first to introduce the Cyrillic alphabet as an official one in the block.

Other countries where the euro is pronounced differently, including Slovenia, which also uses "evro", have tried to obtain a different spelling of the common currency. They all failed - except for Greece.

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