The Bulgarian News Agency (BTA) is a platform for news from “the other Bulgaria,” the agency’s Director General Kiril Valchev said in Lyon on Friday, opening the 10th festival mottoed "Expats Join Hands in Worldwide Dance" (Une ronde autour du monde). He said that since April a special news section of BTA has covered 82 of the groups participating in this festival, and asked the rest to cooperate by providing information about themselves.
More than 100 folklore groups of Bulgarians from Europe and America have joined the festival. Bulgaria’s Consul General in Lyon Nadia Zhivkova-Vaneva was at the opening ceremony.
Valchev said that a BTA service called BG World, launched in 2021, covers news about Bulgarians worldwide. In 2024, it put out more than 8,000 reports, compared with 243 in 2021. BTA has organized twenty World Meetings of Bulgarian Media, an annual forum for media around the globe which write and speak in Bulgarian. The latest of them was held in 2025 on Alphabet Day (May 24), the most important cultural holiday for the Bulgarians, and involved participants from a record 25 countries. Therefore, BTA provides a platform connecting not only Bulgarian expatriates with their home country but also Bulgarians in various foreign countries, Valchev said.
As BTA reported, the organizers of the "Expats Join Hands..." Festival describe this 10th gathering of Bulgarian folklore groups from around the world as a “return to the source” in Lyon, where a dance group named From the Source, led by Anita Ekenova, organized the first gathering in 2015.
“Actually, the source is Bulgaria,” the BTA chief said. “Bulgaria needs you back. Bulgaria needs you, because few people have remained in Bulgaria, 2.5 million fewer than 35 years ago. We know it was not easy for you to leave Bulgaria, and perhaps we who stayed behind, easily gave you reasons to leave. We know that after the trouble of settling abroad, it would be troublesome to resettle in Bulgaria. But we are changing Bulgaria. Our country is in the EU and without borders in Schengen, and will soon adopt the euro, as you have done here in France, but with Cyrillic letters on it, the letters of the third alphabet in the EU, which is one of Bulgaria’s greatest contributions to Europe over the 14 centuries of the Bulgarian state in Europe.”
Valchev urged expatriates to share in the “14 Centuries of Bulgaria” Initiative of National Television, National Radio and BTA, which commemorates events in Bulgarian history with implications for European history.
“The door to Bulgaria is always open for you,” he told the expatriates, supporting his statement with a quote from French writer Antoine de Saint-Exupery, who said that the person you love should be a door which you can open and move forward. “Bulgaria is a door that doesn’t expect anything in return for letting you in. In the same way, BTA doesn’t expect anything in return for publishing news from Bulgarians worldwide,” Valchev said.
/RY/
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