site.btaMonument to Bulgarian National Hero Vasil Levski Unveiled in Warsaw

A monument to Bulgaria’s national hero, the “Apostle of Freedom” Vasil Levski, was unveiled on Friday in Warsaw by Bulgaria’s Ambassador to Poland, Margarita Ganeva, and the Director General of the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA), Kiril Valchev. The monument, created by sculptor Stanislav Korchev and architect Tzeno Todorov, is located in the courtyard of the Bulgarian embassy in the Polish capital.

After the ceremony, Valchev held a three-hour meeting with representatives of the Bulgarian community in Poland, during which he presented the work of Bulgaria’s national news agency and the opportunities to expand BTA’s news coverage from Bulgarians abroad.

“BTA has begun regularly publishing news about the Bulgarian community in Poland in the newly established ‘BG World’ section. To date, it contains a total of 337 reports on Bulgarians in Poland,” the BTA Director General told the Bulgarians in Warsaw. He emphasised that, according to the official 2021 census, there are 2,373 Bulgarians in Poland, but unofficial estimates put the number at 15,000, indicating a wider scope for news coverage.

As important sources of information about the Bulgarian presence in Poland, Valchev highlighted the highly active embassy and the Bulgarian Cultural Institute in Warsaw, the five honorary consuls of Bulgaria in Poland, the Dora Gabe Bulgarian School in Warsaw with a branch in Krakow, Bulgarian associations in Warsaw and Krakow, as well as lecturers and students of the Bulgarian language at Polish universities and of Polish at Bulgarian higher education institutions.

“Part of our effort to know more about each other today is the exchange of news between the national news agencies of our two countries, PAP and BTA, which in 2022 signed a new partnership agreement building on previous agreements, the first of which dates back to 1975,” Valchev noted.

On Thursday evening, the BTA Director General attended the celebration of Bulgaria’s national holiday at the Music University in Warsaw, which featured a concert of works by Bulgarian composers.

Before the concert, Ambassador Ganeva awarded Bulgarian state orders to former Polish Ambassador to Bulgaria Maciej Szymanski and Bulgarian studies scholar Prof. Georgi Minchev from the University of Lodz.

On Friday morning, Valchev met with Tomasz Makowski, Director of the National Library in Warsaw. The BTA Director General presented the English editions of LIK magazine and a book compiling news from BTA archives spanning its history from 1898 to the present, and committed that the agency will send all issues of the magazine annually to the Polish National Library. Valchev also examined preserved parts of one of the largest and earliest Old Bulgarian manuscripts from the Preslav Literary School of the Golden Age of Bulgarian culture in the 10th century – the Codex Suprasliensis.