ABOUT BULGARIA

There’s no shortage of information on Bulgaria on the many websites of the many real estate agencies which have sprung up in the past few years. Pretty much everyone is an expert on Bulgaria these days!

So perhaps you already know that:

Bulgaria is located on the Balkan Peninsula in south-east Europe, bordering (anti-clockwise) Romania, Serbia, Macedonia, Greece, Turkey and the Black Sea.
    For a map of Bulgaria, click here.

“Balkan” is simply a Turkish word for mountains. Bulgarians call the Balkan Mountains “Stara Planina”, which means “Old Mountains”.

Bulgaria was a hardline communist country from 1944 till 1989. Today it’s a parliamentary democracy (more or less) with an elected president.
    For info on the current Bulgarian government, click here.

Bulgaria has (roughly) 7.8 million citizens – in-country that is. To which add another million or so who’ve emigrated since “demokratsiyata”. Plus ethnic Bulgarian populations in Serbia, Macedonia, Romania, Moldova, Ukraine and elsewhere.

Bulgaria is set to join the European Union (along with Romania) on 1 January 2007 – or 2008...
    For more info on Bulgaria’s EU entry, click here.

Bulgarians speak – funnily enough – Bulgarian, a Slavic language with close ties to other Slavic languages such as Russian, Serbian and Polish.

Bulgaria uses the Cyrillic alphabet. Similar but not identical to the Russian version.
    To see the Bulgarian alphabet and its Latin alphabet (that’s our one folks!) equivalents, click here.

Bulgaria was occupied by the Ottoman Empire for 500 years, but managed to retain its religion, language and culture throughout this long period of enslavement to a foreign power.

Although Bulgaria was an ally of Nazi Germany in WWII, alone amongst the Nazi-occupied or allied countries Bulgaria refused to give up its Jewish population to the Holocaust.

You can drive to Bulgaria from the UK in 2-3 days.
    For a suggested route, click here.

You can fly to Bulgaria from the UK in 2-3 hours.

The communists made a dog’s breakfast of Bulgaria – thanks very much guys.

You can still see the evidence of this ideological and economic misanthropy everywhere in the country. Abandoned, decaying factories and collective farms, really poor people, gangsters, corrupt politicians, and the like. Oh, and the ubiquitous “dupki” – the holes in the roads. Oh, and Bulgaria has a litter problem. We’re working on that.
    For some impressions of the communist legacy, click here.

Bulgaria is nevertheless a beautiful little country – away from the garbage is a world long ago past in “western” Europe, the world BalkanKiwi can show you –

• Sleepy little villages sprawling amongst magnificent mountains and rolling hills.
  
  
• cows and goats finding their own way home after a day’s grazing,
  
  
• “babas” (grannies) sitting on their stoops of a warm summer’s eve just chewing the fat and observing the passers-by,
  
  
• dirt-cheap fresh chemical-free fruit and veges,
  
  
• the mysterious call of the “gaida“ - the Bulgarian bagpipe – in the ageless Rhodopi mountains;
  
  
• and (if you’re lucky) the call of the cuckoo bird seeking a mate in Spring (be sure to have some money in your pocket!),
  
  
• tiny rusting direction signs on carless country roads,
  
  
• the long incomprehensible but friendly replies when you ask for directions,
  
  
• the mysterious mountain-touched monasteries...
  
  

For some visual impressions of BalkanKiwi’s Bulgaria, click here.

Bulgaria is becoming trendy for seaside holidays and ski trips, and the past couple of years have seen an explosion of Black Sea and ski-resort development. There are now many agencies claiming to be able to get you into a gilt-edged investment in one of these developments. BalkanKiwi isn’t one of them.

We at BalkanKiwi can show you where to look for the real Bulgaria.