site.btaWorld-Renowned Historian Bettany Hughes Visits BTA Archives for Upcoming Projects

British historian, documentary filmmaker, and author Prof. Bettany Hughes visited the Bulgarian News Agency (BTA) together with her team, where she explored the Аgency’s archives. She was welcomed by BTA Director General Kiril Valchev, who personally introduced her to the richness of BTA's archive collection. 

Prof. Hughes and her team will use BTA’s archives for upcoming projects. “The BTA archives are very impressive,” she said, adding that an entire hour in a new film would need to be devoted to them. 

Valchev stated that BTA would provide everything necessary for the realization of her projects. 

During her visit, Hughes examined the Agency’s photo archive, which contains 1.8 million negatives, systematically organized with information about content, year, number, and photographer. She was impressed by the scale and precision of the collection, noting that each image is accompanied by detailed descriptions. 

Valchev also introduced her to biographical files on Bulgarian figures, arranged alphabetically and compiled from periodicals and BTA bulletins dating back to the 1930s. She reviewed the BTA Reference Department’s card index, divided into “Bulgaria” and “International” sections, and used for quick fact-checking, a practice BTA has maintained since 1934.

He showed her the hall where the archives were digitized as part of a three-year project completed on March 31 this year. “This is the most modern archive in Bulgaria and the largest news archive in the country,” Valchev said. Hughes praised the achievement, noting that an agency with over a century of history digitizing its entire archive is truly remarkable. 

She also saw BTA’s oldest preserved publication - the Agency’s first handwritten news item from 1898, as well as its library of 90,000 books, including editions dating back to 1841. Hughes toured the renovated newsroom and the “MaxiM” Hall.

Valchev presented Hughes and her team with a BTA catalog marking the agency’s 125th anniversary, containing news from 1898 to 2023, along with issues of LIK magazine covering topics such as Bulgarian science in Antarctica, the country’s first cosmonaut Georgi Ivanov, the 155th anniversary of the Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, and Bulgaria’s pavilion at Expo 2025 in Osaka.

Cooperation between Prof. Hughes and BTA was agreed during the 47th session of the UNESCO World Heritage Committee in Paris, where Valchev committed the agency’s support for her future projects.

Prof. Bettany Hughes, born in Oxford in 1967, is a historian, writer, and documentary presenter. She studied Ancient and Medieval History at Oxford University and has taught at Oxford and Cambridge, as well as lectured at universities including Cornell, Bristol, Maastricht, Utrecht, Manchester, and Swansea.

Her first book, "Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore", has been translated into ten languages. Her book "The Hemlock Cup: Socrates, Athens, and the Search for the Good Life" is a New York Times bestseller and was nominated for the Writers’ Guild Award in 2012. "The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World" is a Sunday Times bestseller.

Hughes has written and presented over 50 documentaries for BBC, Channel 4, Netflix, Discovery, PBS, The History Channel, National Geographic, and others, reaching over 250 million viewers worldwide. In 2019, she chaired the Man Booker Prize jury and was awarded an Order of the British Empire for her contributions to history. 

She is also co-producer of a global documentary series on the shared roots of Eastern and Western cultures, premiered at UNESCO in 2013, and co-founder of SandStone Global, a production company whose work airs on major international platforms.

Her series "Treasures of the World" is broadcast in 120 countries. It includes "Treasures of Bulgaria", whose first episode, filmed in the summer of 2023 and featuring sites such as the Kazanlak Tomb, Buzludzha, the Plovdiv Basilica, Heraclea Sintica, the Rila Monastery, the Rila Lakes, the Varna Archaeological Museum, and more, aired on Viasat History on May 24, 2024, becoming the most-watched program in the UK on Channel 4 that day. 

A second episode was filmed in April 2024 in locations including Plovdiv, Veliko Tarnovo, Belogradchik, Sozopol, and the Magura Cave. It aired on March 7, 2025, under the title Bulgaria – The Land of Roses.