Bulgaria's Ministry of Culture Seeks Guarantees for Panagyurishte Treasure Amid LA Wildfire (UPDATED)
A wildfire in Los Angeles has prompted concerns over the safety of Bulgarian exhibits, including the Panagyurishte Golden Treasure
The wildfire in Bulgaria's Vitosha Mountain that raged for several days outside the Sofia suburb of Bistritsa has angered Bulgarian eco-activists and volunteers with what was, in their words, an inadequate organization on part of the government institutions.
Why do I believe that?
As a student in the USA several years ago I was lucky to be able to help the relief effort in the states of Mississippi and Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina.
As a volunteer. For the first time in my life. Not because I hadn't had the good will to help prior to that but because before going to the USA I had been living all my life in Bulgaria where – even if you have the greatest desire to volunteer for relief after natural disasters, there is usually no way for that to happen.
For one simple reason. In Bulgaria, which largely owes its National Liberation to several thousand volunteers (known as "opalchentsi") today lacks completely the social infrastructure to use volunteers; it lacks the respective public attitude and culture to encourage them.
Bulgaria has no organization on part of the government structures and/or the NGO sector (with a few exceptions) that can organize, direct, train, etc. the volunteers that could potentially show up in a time of dire need.
That is precisely why I owe one of the most unforgettable experiences in my life – the weeks I spend volunteering after Hurricane Katrina – to what I call the social infrastructure in the US for those kinds of activities.
Not only that – actually, my college had so many students who desired to volunteer for Katrina relief that I had to go through an application process with several rounds. Since I was the only foreigner applying, I got asked why a Bulgarian would want to go help out the people in Mississippi. I told the interviewers that – in addition to my desire to help – I had always wanted to be a volunteer in such situations but that there was hardly any such possibilities in the country that I come from.
Which is all too bad considering that volunteering not only helps in critical times but creates a real, healthy, and civil society that actually gets to have moral values.
Unfortunately, in Bulgaria volunteers can do very little with their good will because there is no good will on part of the Bulgarian government.
If we look at history, there are not many cases in which relations between Bulgaria and Russia at the state level were as bad as they are at the moment.
The term “Iron Curtain” was not coined by Winston Churchill, but it was he who turned it into one of the symbols of the latter part of the twentieth century by using it in his famous Fulton speech of 1946.
Hardly anything could be said in defense of the new government's ideological profile, which is quite blurry; at the same time much can be disputed about its future "pro-European" stance.
Look who is lurking again behind the corner – the tandem of Advent International and Deutsche Bank, respectively the buyer of the Bulgarian Telecom Company in 2004 and the advisor of the Bulgarian government in the sweetest deal of the past decade, seem t
We have seen many times this circus which is being played out during the entire week and it only shows one thing - there is no need of a caretaker government in Bulgaria.
You have certainly noticed how many times President Rosen Plevneliev used the phrase “a broad-minded person” referring to almost every member of his caretaker government.
Bulgaria's Perperikon: A European Counterpart to Peru's Machu Picchu
Bulgarians Among EU's Least Frequent Vacationers, Struggling with Affordability