Open-air art installations from Bulgarian letters appeared in the heart of Paris at the initiative of the Bulgarian Cultural Institute in Paris! They will stay there by the end of September this year.

At one of the most visited, leisure and sports places in the French capital - the quays of the Seine, Pont des Invalides(The Invalides Bridge) on the left bank of the river, the residents and guests of the city will have the opportunity to learn more about the Cyrillic alphabet and to read Bulgarian poetry.

The Bulgarian Letters Project presents 7 letters of the Bulgarian alphabet without a graphic equivalent in the Latin and Greek alphabets - Б, Ж, З, Ц, Ч, Щ, Ъ. Made as original benches, they were first put in the summer of 2018 in Sofia from "Read Sofia" Foundation under the name "Hidden Letters". Thus they created new places for reading and literary places in the capital of Bulgaria.

To each bench are attached poems in Bulgarian and French of one of the most interesting modern Bulgarian poets.Among them are Georgi Gospodinov, Nadezhda Radulova, Silvia Choleva, Mirela Ivanova, Amelia Licheva and others. The translations of the poems are made by Marie Vrinat-Nikolov and Ralitsa Mihaylova Frison - Roche. A brief text introduces the readers to the Cyrillic alphabet - the third official alphabet in the European Union after the Latin alphabet and the Greek alphabet. It is used by more than 300 million people in over 10 countries.

The "Bulgarian letters" will be Paris guests throughout the whole summer season. More than 2.5 million people pass each year on the quay and, according to statistics from the City Hall in Paris, the peak of attendance is in May, June, July and August. It is expected that the Bulgarian letters and poetry will be seen by more than 600 000 inhabitants and tourists of one of the most visited cities in the world, which puts the initiative among the most visible and accessible for the general public Bulgarian cultural projects realized in France. Since 1991, the two Seine Quays have been listed among the UNESCO World Heritage Sites.

The article was originally published on the Bulgarian tourism website Peika.bg 

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